Category: Sol’s Progress

Milestone Alert: Hands and Knees!

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On Friday, I was sitting at Solly’s final occupational therapy appointment of the week and I witnessed something amazing and entirely unexpected. Roughly two minutes after I hit publish on my last blog post, I looked up from my computer to see Solly, who was laying on his tummy, push his booty back over his knees and rise up into a quadruped position. This is a milestone that he’d never, ever achieved before, and here he was, exactly 8 weeks after an incredibly invasive surgery, placing a check mark next to a brand new milestone. I grabbed my camera and caught him in action for his next round, and here’s what I saw:

What a warrior!

It’s my hope that this milestone will help move Solly forward to more independence – more independent play, the ability to better interact with his environment, and perhaps even more gross motor milestones. Whether or not this is the case, we will continue to advocate to make all environments as accessible and inclusive as possible for Solly and his peers. In the meantime, we’re gonna celebrate the heck out of this major milestone!

Here are some other photos of Solly working so hard this past week:

I’ll continue to post progress updates on his rehabilitation here and on Instagram. Thank you to all for your kind words, thoughts, and prayers as Solly went through this surgery and for continuing to follow our journey.

Checking In: Solly and Medical Cannabis

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The other day, a video popped up on my Facebook memories. It was from a year ago, capturing the first time Solly said, “no!” It may not seem like much, but we were so thrilled that, at age 5, he was finally (finally!!!!!) saying “no” appropriately and unprompted.

This video was taken roughly a month and a half before we began our trial with medical cannabis. Since then, Solly has been communicating – both speaking and using augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) – so much that it seems hard for us to remember the time when we ached for him to be able to tell us what he was thinking or what he wants, so when these memories pop up on social media, it helps us to recognize how far he has come in such a short time. While he had a handful of words before medical cannabis, we still struggled to really understand his preferences, what he wanted to do, and what he wanted to eat.

In mid-March of 2020, we had our first appointment with Dr. Bonni Goldstein, which kickstarted our trial with cannabis. I wrote a bit about our experience with CBD and THCa a few months later, when we first saw an unbelievable explosion of expressive speech. Shortly after writing the blog post, keeping up with our experimentation flew off my plate as I became hyper-focused on Solly trying to get an IEP before the start of school, deciding to pull him from public school, feeling like I was thrown in the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim as I navigated putting together and teaching a homeschooling curriculum while being the primary caregiver, home therapist, medical coordinator, Mom to both Solly and Bea, and so much more.

Once I got my feet back under me and got into the groove of homeschooling and more organized with our day-to-day, we jumped back into our trial-and-error adventure with medical cannabis.

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On Being Preverbal and Learning Our ABC’s

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Young children with apraxia of speech who don’t talk yet are considered preverbal, not nonverbal.

Cari Ebert Seminars

The other day, I saw the above quote on a post on Instagram and my first reaction was “That’s Solly!” If you’ve followed us for awhile, you might know that, until this point, I’ve referred to Solly as nonverbal even though he has a growing vocabulary of words. This is because his speech is very delayed and in most social settings, he does not use many words other than “hi” or “bye”. Moving forward, because we are seeing his expressive speech develop more and more each day, I will only refer to his speech development as preverbal, or as the post went on to describe someone similar to Solly, “minimally verbal.” This is a very appropriate description of Solly’s developmental stage right now!

Speaking of being “preverbal”, we started to focus on the alphabet in our homeschooling curriculum last week. (Long story short: even though Solly is in “kindergarten”, I started him on a pre-Kindergarten curriculum to make sure he gets a good foundation. We’ll work our way towards a kindergarten curriculum, with a goal of starting that in the Spring.) Even though Solly’s words are really flowing right now and he tries to mimic so many other words that don’t easily come to him, I was shocked when our first go at reading the alphabet was this:

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Always Celebrate the Inchstones

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img_1608I’ve been working on a few new posts about our life in Los Angeles, but Solly just hit a new inchstone and progress is always a good reason for a quick update.

Last night, Solly started holding and drinking from a handle-free cup completely independently! It’s not perfect: he’s still making a mess with it, spilling water from the cup about 80% of the time and sometimes forgetting to bring the cup upright after taking a drink, but we can now proudly say that Solly can pick up a cup off of the table, bring it to his mouth, take a drink, and place it back on the table.

This is a huge accomplishment, especially for a kiddo who the NICU doctors once said would never eat or drink by mouth. We’ll continue chipping away towards all of Solly’s milestones, but today, we’re celebrating this inchstone and Solly’s progress.

Roanoke: One Week In

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Hello from Roanoke!

One week ago, we packed up a U-Haul and drove 6.5 hours (well, 8 hours, really, thanks to Bea’s insistence that we stop every hour to get out of the car and run around) to scenic Roanoke, Virginia. No, we didn’t move here – at least, not permanently. We’re continuing our nomad lifestyle and have uprooted our family – dogs included – for 4 weeks so Solly can participate in a constraint intensive therapy at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute (VTCRI).  Continue reading →