A lovely, snowy day

Well, as you can see from my absence since Sunday, I am not doing well making this a daily log. But, I do what I can!

As you may have guessed from the title, it's snowing today. The first snow of the season here in Woodinville, and it's coming down in pretty, fluffy flakes and sticking to the trees and ground. The boys were both so excited by the snow, and when we got home this morning from Hutton's (yes, I'm going to call everyone by their real names, now, as I don't think anyone who ventures onto this blog will use them against me in any way!) speech therapy session, he rushed inside to get the snowflake magnet from his magnetic calendar. He showed it to me so proudly and said, "Snowflake!" and then we put it on the calendar to mark the first snow.

Hutton's therapy is going so well! I don't know if it's his biomedical stuff - he's done 6 rounds of chelation, which is a metal removal technique that helps the body detox, and the last round seemed especially helpful. The first 5 rounds were this spring, and then over the summer I took a long break for his body to try out different things, like a regular diet. Prior to the "regular" diet, he was on a gluten and casein free diet for about 9 months, and though we saw improvements at first, when we added gluten and casein back, his behavior seemed similar, and his speech continued to progress. He still doesn't drink regular milk, though he eats cheese and yogurt. On that front, I am planning to take him to another doctor to try NAET, an allergy elimination technique a few of my friends with autistic kids say has helped their kids.

Anyway, after his last round of chelation, he had some bad behaviors for about a week, which I think could have been from yeast overgrowth, which is a side effect of chelation sometimes. I treated him with an antifungal, and then a few weeks ago we went to his homeopath, and he was given his "remedy" again. So these things, in addition to his speech therapy, ABA therapy, supplements, and school are all playing a part in his progress, I'm just not sure which is the most helpful! But the past week in particular has been especially good -- he is now saying, "Look, Daddy/Mommy! I see a _____" instead of his old, "What's that?" which he would use to draw our attention to something, even when he knew what it was.

I my various readings, I saw there was yet another new yahoo group devoted to a new method of treatment for autism, using Valtrex and MB12. So, of course I signed up for that group, too, to add to the hours of reading I already do on all the autism boards. I find it quite funny (I won't use the term ironic, because I know what it really means!) that I am the parent who spends so much time reading up on autism and its possible causes and treatments, and half of my readings are very complicated medical and scientific reports I don't really understand. Reports that discuss ethyl versus methyl mercury, methyl sulfation in the brain, viruses, bacteria, vitamin supplements and what they do, etc., etc. Jay is the parent who spends 90% of his time watching the stock market, which is his new job, working from home day trading.

Now, I'm getting to my point. In college, Jay double-majored in computer science and...
CHEMISTRY! So, why I am the one making my head hurt trying to figure out if MB12 is better than regular old B12 at improving the methylation (I don't even really know what that means, and how it differs from sulfation) in the brain, if ALA alone or ALA + DMSA are better at chelating mercury, if using antivirals will help? Hmm, I don't know, but I guess it's like everything else in the life of the hausfrau -- if I don't do it, chances are it won't get done!