We made it to New York in excellent shape. Nathan slept through the entire plane ride and woke up when we landed. He was ready to go when we landed so it was perfect that we had to take the train and walk around New York City. We had a wonderful weekend walking around the city, we didnt’ go anywhere in particular, just walked and walked and allowed Nathan to look at everything. He had a blast. I call him my “Endless Enjoyment”, as he is so much fun to be with. He’s just always delighting about anything and everything and will throw his head back and laugh out loud at the most random things, which make Owen and I crack up too. We’ve been really really enjoying ourselves.
Today was Nate’s first day of his neurocognitive assesment. It went really well. They did several tests. First they had him look at objects and determined how he reacted for them. They tested him for object permanence, to see if he could follow hidden objects, word and object recognition, and other things. They used eye gaze to determine if he understand what he was being asked. He did really well.
After that, he was in a room and they had auditory and visual stimuli coming at him from two sides. They then measured his response to that with a computer device.
Next, they did an EEG. They are going to use the data from the EEG to determine how quickly he responded to auditori stimuli, and they are going to use the data to try and impose the reactions on his MRI, so we will know exactly what part of his brain is lighting up for different types of stimuli.
It was a really full day but he performed like a champ. He attended to everything and was very good at focusing his attention.
We also talked a little bit with the people from the study and learned some interesting things. They talked to us about early brain development and plasticity, and encouraged us to stimulate him as much as possible in these early years, as it’s the best time to expose him to as much as possible. They said that the more we stimulate and expose him to different things, the more the brain will adapt and other parts of the brain may be able to compensate for the malformed areas. Dr. Benash was very impressed with his attention, and said that it’s a great opportunity for us to stimulate him as much as possible, if he can focus for extended periods of time, we can stimulate him and he will pay attention, so he will have the opportunity to learn many new things. She encouraged us to make sure he gets floor time, as he’s not getting much floor time and she said it’s essential for his development.
We are really happy that we had the opportunity to come.
Tommorrow they will do more testing, and I will post about that.
In the meantime, there are a ton of pictures here:
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