Long over due

In real life we often tell people we meet or long distance friends not to worry if they don't hear from us, we're just low maintenance kind of people.  When we meet again, we'll just pick up where we left off!  So here we are picking up where we left off- January 2012!

The above video is Andrew doing school. It was halfway through the school year and shows a sampling of his progress in speech and learning.  As we mentioned in the previous post, we had decided to post pone school for him, but he insisted.

About this same time we had some guest speakers come to our church. We had them over to lunch on Saturday. They were great. As soon as they entered our home, they jumped right in with the kids playing on the Wii and really took time to make them feel important.  At this point we felt Andrew had attached very well and were not at all concerned about him interacting with strangers.  As Aaron left to bring our guests home Andrew asked to go with him. No big deal.  One of the speakers sat in the back with Andrew and let him play with his cell phone.  Andrew showed no signs of past behavior that would alert us. 

The next morning after our service ended, we saw Andrew sitting in the same speakers lap, playing with his phone! Aaron discreetly called Andrew to him and held his hand until we headed home.  We felt we had averted a relapse.  However that afternoon we decided to watch a movie together as a family for some down time. All the kids piled on us on the couch except Andrew. We said,"Andrew, come cuddle with your family."  Shockingly, he responded,"You're not my family. I want to go back to Bulgaria."

We had never heard anything remotely close to this.  Having no idea how to respond, Aaron replied, "Well go ahead, go back to Bulgaria."  Andrew shook his head no and immediately climbed up on the couch with us all.  We have never dealt with anything like that since. 

We have found it helpful before coming into new situations that might trigger similar responses to ask Andrew who his family is.  We specifically ask ,"Who is your mommy?,Who is your daddy?", etc. and have him answer us. We're not sure if this is the key to anything, but again we haven't seen this behavior since.