Happy Happy Birthday!!

We celebrated Lucas' 3rd birthday on Saturday!! Wow, where has the time gone? So hard to believe he's three!! We celebrated it in Orlando this past weekend and just returned home. I have lots of pictures from this weekend that I'll post later this week.

Prior to leaving for our weekend in Florida, we had a special morning on Friday with Lucas in a training class. I mentioned a few weeks ago that we started a new method (Musgatova Method) for reflex integration, which is a complement to the Anat Baniel Method. This past weekend, Svetlana Musgatova herself was in Bethesda teaching a 4-day training course to therapists. Our Musgatova practitioner, Mary, asked Lucas to be the "demo" child, for her to work on and demonstrate at the training. We jumped at the opportunity to meet her, and also to have her hands on Lucas, we delayed our trip to FL to take advantage of this opportunity. She is typically $400 for a 30 minute session! Getting this expertise at no charge was also a nice bonus! Our ABM therapist was there and Marcy traveled in from New York, and I was surprised when we walked in to find our holistic pediatrician/nutritionist there, Dr. Razi. The minute we walked in, Dr. Razi jumped from her seat and ran over to greet us, gave me a hug and Lucas a kiss. She's so sweet!

We were so honored to have Lucas be part of this, and he did awesome being center stage in front of about 35 therapists. He was very tolerant of her hands on him and was charming and smiley, as usual. He had the therapists in the room smiling, and many times we heard "awwww" and people whispering "he's so cute!" to each other. Mary turned to me several times and said, "He is the PERFECT child for this!" We beamed with pride the whole time!

The most fascinating part was listening to what she had to say as she assessed his body and the reflexes he is holding onto that are holding him back, and the lack of symmetry between the left and right sides of the body (no surprise there). Her goal is to help him integrate the two sides. It was amazing to see changes in him in the short time she worked with him. She said she would relay her thoughts to our practitioner to continue working on things. Bran and I are also considering enrolling him/us in the Musgatova 8-day boot camp workshop for child and parents, which we've heard gives tremendous results (as she works with your child for 6 hours a day on integrating these reflexes). These workshops are extremely expensive though, so we will see if we'll be able to do it later this summer, not sure at this point.

Our session ended with her talking to Lucas about how he "will walk one day" and told us to give him a year and a half (but that she expects with all the potential she sees in him, that he will start really progressing in about 6 months, as we work on all of these things). Then he told her, "Happy Birthday," which prompted the entire room to sing to him. So moving... I couldn't think of a better birthday present for him.

I've included a few updates from this past month, sorry for the dump of information again! I actually wrote them last week but didn't get the chance to insert the pictures and post until now. I'll post pics of our weekend soon!

Birthday dinner at the Disney Hotel
Make a wish... you can probably guess what I wished for!