My Thanks To My Brother Niall

Hats off to this guy today.
He was going to paint his house and took the time to chat with us on webcam.
Not enough, well wait till you hear what happened.

I bit the bullet and made the twenty dollar investment for a webcam on Thursday but had to wait until today to try it.
It has a built in microphone and so Niall can hear us when we talk.
The girls were having a blast.
They could see their relatives and talk to them at the same time.
Yay for modern technology!
John came by and said hello to his Uncle Niall and cousins and then went off.
The big achievement came when I called Nathan over to say hello.

I had been tossing around for a while the possibility of videotaping the children at play and then playing it back to them.
I got this idea because of their overwhelming positive response to a video that I had made of the boys pre-autism.
Even Kathleen had found it fascinating.

I wondered if it was possible that by staging different play settings like throwing a ball and running and different things that they would learn by watching themselves as they seem to be extremely visual children.

Anyway, back to the webcam.
Nathan came over and noticed that his picture showed up on the screen. He repeated "hello, uncle Niall" after I said it.
Then he positioned himself correctly so that he could see himself in the camera.
Niall waved at him and Nathan waved back.
Niall gave him the thumbs up and Nathan gave him the thumbs up back.
Niall gave him the okay sign and Nathan just about turned himself inside out because of the position he was in to place his ok sign in front of the camera.
Nathan then recited his alphabet.
Niall said that it was a lot clearer than he had heard him previously.

Then Niall and Nathan proceeded to spend the next five minutes poking tongues at each other and pulling faces.
At first, Nathan was copying Niall then he started to branch out on his own creating his own expressions, never once for a second taking his eyes off the computer screen and his Uncle Niall's face.
After a while he left, a smile on his face.

That was not the end of it.
Nathan returned to the loungeroom and proceeded to talk.
He was in there by himself throwing out 4 or 5 word sentences.
He repeated the same ones a bit. It almost seemed like he was trying to work on his pronunciation as he got clearer as he went on.
Then he also started throwing out one or two words.
He went into the bedroom and this continued.
He kept this up for over an hour.

Nathan has mutism in addition to autism. He has very little spontaneous speech but he seems to experiment with it at intervals.

Later he came out to the kitchen holding his ear and I was afraid that he had an ear infection. He is prone to them. It kept him out of the pool last summer as he was constantly on antibiotics trying to clear this up.
I asked him if I could look at it and he let me have a wee peek.
Then I noticed that he had a scratch on his ear and asked him what happened.
He replied, "cat".
Then he walked off and as he did so said, "ouch".

I intend to see if we can do more webcam sessions and see if indeed this does help his speech a little.
If this does indeed show improvement in his speech then I will go ahead with the video.
Maybe it can be used for social skills too.
It could have all kinds of possibilities.
Later