Letters, Numbers and Horses - OH MY!

So here's a little catch up since I've gotten behind on his progress.

1. We've stopped with the gluten free diet. It just wasn't worth it and super difficult to maintain. We didn't see big enough results to justify it. We have started to reduce his sugar intake. We think we just might be seeing results with this. Along with less sugar we are trying to not give him any preservatives or dyes or anything like that. His temperament seems to be a little better since starting this.

2. Oliver is fascinated with letters and numbers. He can put together an alphabet puzzle we have for him with ease. He can also say about 20 letters. The other letters he says something but it is a made up sound. The cool thing is that he uses the same made up sound for the same letter. So it seems like he recognizes it, he just can't say it. He can say the alphabet all the way through too. He does something similar with numbers. He can say 1, 2, 6 -10, then he makes up a sound for 3-5 but it's always the same sound for the right number. We can ask him 'what's this?' pointing to a letter or number and he will often tell us.

3. We are trying a new therapy. It's where he goes horseback riding. It's a certain kind of horse and they walk in a circle for an hour. I still have to ride with him since he's still not too keen about it. In fact, he cries every time we pull up to the barn. He usually cries for a few minutes and then relaxes and does really well. He loves playing outside the barn with the rocks when he's done. He seems to be more calm the rest of the day. The therapy is supposed to help regulate his brain (that's the simplified way of explaining it). We go to a place by Spanish Fork called Hoofbeats to Healing.

4. Last, Oliver has been struggling with hitting. He is hitting Ciara and me any time he doesn't get his way. He'll run over to you and start whacking your legs. If you're holding him he will try to hit your face. He definitely tries our patience, but we are doing our best to teach him it's not good. I've stopped doing any sort of hitting when we rough house too in case that had anything to do with it. We don't hit much in our home so we don't know what really caused it. He also has been hitting Liam without any reason. Sometimes he even goes out of his way to hit him on the head. We tried saying 'ow' when he'd hit us to show him that it hurts and we explain that it's not nice. Unfortunately, he then kept hitting us, but HE says 'ow'! It's actually really cute, but he either didn't get the message or he just outsmarted us.

Overall we see improvement. Just today on our way to the car after church I said 'there's the car' and he repeated the word 'car'. He is trying to repeat more and will sing along to some of his favorite shows. We love our little boxer.