Rex's Celebration?

We didn't really have a celebration for the six months family milestone today (though it has been emotional and I have shed some tears of joy and gratitude), but Rex decided he would celebrate in his own way.

As you know, Rex is basically non-verbal, but we are trying to give him options to communicate and have been focusing on ASL and (approximate) verbalizations. As part of his therapy, we are supposed to record once a day how many times in a 15 minute period Rex requests spontaneously by signing or verbalizing. Today, our wonderful helper Marie aka Ms. Rie did the counting while working with a musical toy. As you can see, Rex signed "more" and verbalized "mmm" many times. It was the largest number of requests we have ever seen him make in such a short time.

After she had left, Marie sent me this photo of her hand where she had tallied Rex's requests and said that looking at her hand made her smile. It makes me smile, too. And thank you, Marie, you are are blessing to our entire family and truly bring out the best in Rex.

Rex also spent a significant amount of time with me today working with pegs and the pegboard. For some reason, he was very motivated and interested in this fine motor task this afternoon. In the end, he was able to place one peg into another for the first time ever completely unassisted.

What a great way to celebrate, kiddo!