Progress and the Boy

It's been a while, so here's what all's been going on.

The boy will have his AAC. Insurance is even paying for it. Wow. We can use our family grant money to cover the initial exam and possibly some training on how to use it with him, yay.

I don't doubt that it will be a tool to get him to talk more, not a permanent substitute for vocal speech. He may need some sort of AAC forever, we'll see, but he's definitely making more and more strides toward actual understandable speech.

He's picked up on my repeated attempts to get him to add adjectives to his noun labeling, so he'll point and say things like, "Blue fish. Green pants. Red bird." He actually seems to get some facial expressions. He's been playing Starfall.com a lot, and his favorite game is now the "All About Me" module. He's learned "boy" and "girl," though he doesn't always label correctly. He's learned happy, smiling, sad, and grumpy, and he'll make facial expressions to match. They're still exaggerated, but that's some big progress there!

I don't have to watch over him constantly to make sure he doesn't run away at events and in the store. He'll actually walk next to the cart. He told us he was ready for that step, and he was. Please, please, please let him tell us he's ready to potty train next!

AAC in Your Pocket

Remember how I was wondering why nobody made a simple software solution for AAC using modern, cheap hardware like netbooks? Well, it seems someone has. Proloquo2Go is a $150 software app for iPhone or iPod Touch w speakers.

This is awesome. It won't help my son - he's still a bit wee for something that sophisticated (and easily broken,) but it looks awesome for when he's a bit older if he still needs AAC.

Oh, and it looks like there's another one, iConverse, but it's slightly less sophisticated. It's also considerably cheaper.

AAC

So the university got back to us with their recommendations on an AAC device. 

They recommended the SpringBoard Lite.

Now we get to figure out how to pay for it. They're going to bill our insurance and take the rest of our Medicaid, and then I think we'll discuss things with the school district.  

You know, I really wish I could just buy software and laptop. Both are cheap enough that it ought to be possible.  In one of my fantasy careers, maybe that's what I'll do - make software mods for laptops. You could take old tablets and convert them to AAC devices running modified Linux.