Speech update

On the wall in Matt's room is a marker board on which we write the date every day. It's hard enough for us to stay orientated to what day it is, so it's a good reminder to everyone. Then in speech therapy, they talk about the date a lot, trying to keep Matt cognizant of the world around him. At first, Matt would only be able to repeat what we would tell him and by the end of the session he would have forgotten what the date was again. Little by little, he's gotten to the point where he can say the date with only small sound cues.

Over the past two weeks, they've been working on writing in speech therapy. We made pages for his book of the days of the week and the months of the year which he copies from and is able to write down the date with help only for the number. The first time he tried it, he wrote down 2010 first because he knows that and didn't want to forget it while he worked on the rest of the words. Today he started writing Monday before we even had the pages out and he remembered it was March 1st without any help. He was pretty happy. Plus, his left handed writing is now almost as legible as his old writing was.