The Road Begins

After Haiden recovered from his meningitis and encephalitis, I found a new DAN doctor. Mary Lou Hulseman is a family physician who has a daughter she helped recover from autism. The only down side was I found her in August and are appointment was made for June 2009. Since her wait list is so long, she has monthly seminars to help parents get started. We removed gluten and egg from his diet. We had already removed caesin from his diet and this took us awhile to get comfortable with. It is amazing how quickly I became an expert at reading labels. So now he was Gluten/Caesin/Egg free. We had to provide all of his snacks and lunches for Goddard School and Developmental Preschool. I have to give Brian all the credit because he spent many nights cooking Haiden's lunches for the next day. (Since we've been doing this for so long now we have learned how to plan ahead better.) Whole Foods in Nora became my favorite grocery store. They have all kinds of wonderful GFCF foods. I also found a lot of resources and grocers on-line. We also took out processed foods, foods with artifical sugar, flavors, and coloring. I started making homemade chicken nuggets and fish sticks. Brian has become a pro at making GFCF pancakes that Haiden loves! It took about three months on the diet but Haiden's bowel issues continued to improve and he began to sleep better. He stopped complaining about his stomach hurting and his random fevers went away. I also started to notice Haiden's attention improve which seemed to help his speech. Before the diet, Haiden would get so distracted while telling me something that it could take a long time for him to get it out. The best improvement had to be his social interactions. He started to initate play on his own. I believe that Developmental Preschool also helped with these improvements. He has a wonderful teacher and great therapists. During this time, Ella was diagnosed with low muscle tone. This is why she had such poor gross motor skills and couldn't eat anything but purees. She also had several sensory issues that made the smallest tasks very difficult. Even though tubes were put in at 7 months of age, she continued to have ear infections and a constant runny nose. By this time I had stopped vaccinations and Ella continued to receive Physical and Occupational therapy. We were blessed to get Haiden's O.T, Tara Danielson, for Ella. In October Tara recommend we look into craniosacrial therapy. It sounded pretty crazy to me but I had no idea what a blessing it would become.

For more info on GFCF diet and Craniosacrial Therapy visit http://www.gfcfdiet.com/, http://www.autismweb.com/diet.htm, http://gfcf-diet.talkaboutcuringautism.org/, http://www.upledger.com/