Pilates Anyone?

One morning I set Ryan up in front of Sesame Street at 6:00 am (yes, he wakes up far too early for me) while I went to take a shower. I came back to Ryan doing his Winsor Pilates exercises. It was too funny for words. What got me is that he got out the exercise mat and was diligently following the instructions. He could do the 100 better than me! I quick took a couple of pictures before he saw me. A week or so later, he did it again... so this time I got the video out! Click on the link below to see the videos. The second video is actually Kurtis getting in the action too. It also shows Ryan's slowly developing speech! For those of you who don't know Ryan, his speech has been his biggest challenge. He is diagnosed with apraxia - this is unrelated to Down syndrome, although many children with DS do have apraxia. Apraxia basically means that his brain knows what it wants to say, but he has extreme difficulty in making his mouth form the correct shape to say the words. It also means he can say a sound in one context but not another. For example, he can say "no" perfectly clearly, but cannot make the /n/ sound on command. Anyways, we are slowly seeing some progress and it is so exciting. Here is Ryan saying "I love you"... and the neat thing is that the pronounciation has improved a great deal since this video was taken.



































http://dropshots.com/annettel