Hooray for Josh!

[Guest guest]

I'm forwarding this to all of you, but especially for those just starting out

who are wondering if there is hope.

When Josh was diagnosed at 3, this social experience I never thought would

happen. Yes it is wonderful how smart Josh is and that he has a great spelling

ability, but to see the social/behavioral progress was just incredible.

For those wondering, we started an aggressive attempt at the GFCF diet about a

year ago. Prior to that we didn't want to believe it would help, and were very

relaxed in our efforts. We sort of were doing CF. We did start noticing more

speech and better social/behavior skills little by little. I do believe his

progress is a combination of multiple things, but thought I would share that I

believe the gfcf part is allowing the other areas to help us.

The story below was written by 's dad. I am excited to see the joy he

communicated to his friends. Our excitement started over being proud of Josh's

academic ability, but as the social/behavioral skills unfolded during the 45

minutes of time, we were in awe! We have it on video and Josh watched it the

other night. That in itself is progress. Before he would run out of the room in

horror to see any activity we had video taped. He sat and watched the video and

at one point laughed so hard (because he made his peers laugh by running to the

mic and saying " I did it " ), he fell off the sofa.

Enjoy!! Joyce

Very cool happenings- Yesterday afternoon was in the school

wide third grade spelling bee. He had won his class spelling bee, so

he and the second place winner represented their class. There were 2

kids from each of the 9 class rooms competing. When Joyce and I

arrived the kids in one of the other classes were all saying they

wanted Josh to win, even though they had two kids from their own

class in the contest. Everyone was a little nervous because Josh had to

sit on the stage without his aide. His special needs teacher sat in the

front row with little cards to help Josh remember what he needed to

do socially. It was a wonderful sight to see the other kids around him

helping him to sit still. Josh was about the seventh kid to go.

First couple words got spelled correctly, and the audience gave a nice

little clap for each kid. The third kid got the word " greediness " ,

but he missed it. #4 missed it, #5 missed it. Josh was jumping out of

his skin because he knew the answer but had to wait his turn. #6 missed

it. Josh jumped up, said the word, spelled the word with his foot

tapping as he said each letter, and then repeated the word, just as

the rules called for. When the judge said " that is correct " the

entire hall let out a cheer like Jordan just walked into the room.

Little while later, another hard word took out half the group,

spelled it correct and the place erupted. I'm still choked up

thinking about it. They actually had to ask the kids not to scream so loud

when Josh got it right because it was freaking out the other contestants.

In the end Josh took second place for the whole 3rd grade, he

misspelled " muscle " , he insisted on spelling " mussel " even after

they put it in a sentence for him. Josh started to cry a little because

he lost, and a few other kids started crying for him too. It was a

great pleasure to see how far had come in overcoming his learning

disability, and to see how much support has from his peers.

To see his classmates accept him was priceless.