Joe completed his six months of Brain Balance 3 weeks ago. Even in the last few weeks of the program we continued to see huge improvements in him. And since finishing, he has started going #2 on the potty (sorry if TMI, but we are REALLY excited about that!) and he is finally buckling himself in, in the car. Two things that make our lives a bit easier each day!
When Joe was first evaluated last July, it was noted that he still had five infant reflexes that should have been integrated by the time he was one(Moro Reflex, ATNR, Tonic Labyrinthe, Landau, and Spinal Gallant). This is NOT good, and definitely got in the way of his functioning, processing, communicating and learning.
This article article does a good job of going over some of the primitive reflexes and why they are important and what can happen whey they are not integrated.
When he was re-evaluated in March, it was found that he had now integrated four of those five that had been retained (this is a huge deal!), and he is close to integrating the fifth one(ATNR). We are doing "lizards"(the exercise used to help integrate that reflex) at home each day so this hopefully happens soon!
When Joe started the program, he had much less energy. In fact when I was asked to name one goal I wanted to see accomplished with the program, it was to see my little boy have more energy. Ha! I got what I asked for. :)
Some other notable things achieved in the last six months include major improvement in Joe's listening comprehension and oral language(based on the WIAT-III). His listening comprehension(the student listens to vocabulary words and points to a picture that illustrates each word, and then listens to passages and answers questions about each one) is probably the most remarkable, because he went up about 3 years in this area in 6 months time! He tested at 6 years 10 months. Considering he is not yet 5, and a couple of years ago, had a difficult time answering yes or no questions, we are pretty happy with that!
Also, we had Joe evaluated for Speech Therapy just last week, now that Brain Balance is done. I opted to wait until it was done so I didn't have too many balls in the air, and wanted to see how much of his speech-language issues were resolved with the program. The speech therapist said Joe was "impressive" and didn't hit ceiling (which means he never got enough wrong for them to stop the evaluation and say he was at a certain level). I seriously almost cried. He will need oral-motor speech therapy due to his weak jaw(we expected this). And we are excited to see improvements in that too.
We are just happy that it doesn't take so much effort for him to process the world around him anymore, and he can communicate with us much better.
We are still working on stuff, of course, but we couldn't be more proud of all Joe has accomplished, and the work God has done in his life! Go Joe go!
