Hello Blog, sorry I have been spending a lot of time on Wrong Planet.
Anyway James is now saying phrases using 'I' and 'It'.
'I stuck'. 'I break it'.

Usually this in response to an unexpected situation where he is suprised. Thats very encouraging, the use of language in that way. Language still comes out sporadically and rarely but it's there, it's contextual and becoming more advanced.

He really has made some progress recently. His answering to his name. His whizzing around on his little push bike. And now this use of Pronouns.

It's like he doesn't see the need or motivation to use langauge.
Certainly he will do everything he can to avoid communication to people. E.g. yesterday Vanessa was trying to get him to make choices or ask for help and he wouldn't.
He wants to do it all himself. She gave him a muesli bar and he couldn't get into it, eventually he just left it rather than take it to her.

Had a good meeting with Kaye and Caroline. We had some concern about SCERTS vagueness and have been looking at ABA. Heres what I posted on wrong planet:

"We met with the facilitators of the SCERTS programme for James. We mentioned our concerns with SCERTS (i.e. seems non specific, a bit vague, might be better things out there) and that we had considered ABA.

The way they explained the SCERTS programme to us is that it is holistic, and looks at all aspects of the child's development. It looks to understand the child's interests and responsiveness and uses this as an aide to facilitate learning. It brings in learning methods and techniques at points and times where required. E.g. they are coming to us in a few weeks to teach us on and initiate James with the techniques for using PECS. They record the child's development in all his and our goals and feed that back into the programme using a marking system to reassess where to/what to do next.

The said that in their experience ABA delivers skills that often can't be generalised by the child, or used in different contexts. They also talked about their experience where it didn't seem to even make progress, e.g. someone spending a lot of money on a child over six months for no result.
Where as they had/have seen strong progress with the SCERTS model with some of the children they had been working with.

I take all that with a grain of salt, however I do have faith in these people and our paediatrician's judgement and experience. So we are going to go with it and do the best job of working with them that we can and see what happens."