Nathan is sleeping and pooping better! I guess a lot has to do with time and energy spent on our son-rise program.

Nathan now enjoys standing on everything, chairs, tables, even the swivel chair. Since his balance is constantly being challenged, he has to put his whole body weight equally distributed on both feet for better stability. This is something his Physical Therapists (since he was 2 years old) have been asking him to do, or for me to help him keep his body weight on both legs to strengthen his muscles. He’s doing this on his own and correcting his body posture making his abdominal muscles to work just as hard. The stronger abdominal muscles must be the main reason why he has better bowel movements.

I believe this is the main reason why he poops almost every day now compared to every 3 or 4 days. His pooping schedule has been good for the past week or two. I hope this is a permanent change. The only other contributing factor I can think about is that I moved his prune juice from after breakfast to after dinner.

Nathan is also sleeping much better. Probably because son-rise takes up a lot of energy and he will get tired at the end of the day and sleep well through the night.

When Nathan was a baby we thought “colic” was the explanation of his sleepless, crying nights. It stopped for a brief period. When he was 3 years old, I remember logging his crying nights. In a month he would average 15 nights of crying, sometimes more. That’s 50% of the time. No wonder I would get just as cranky.

When we went to China for stem cell injections, I remember thinking, “If this will at least improve Nathan’s sleeping pattern, it will be a big improvement.” Crying, sleepless nights was reduced to about 25%.

At age 4 1/2, we opted for anti-epilepsy medication due to his abnormal EEG, also in the hopes of alleviating his autism symptoms. His crying sleepless nights stopped. There were only occasional crying nights. Note: there were no other long-term improvements in terms of autism symptoms. Its been more than a year since medication started and I’ve been feeling maybe his medication dose does not match his body weight anymore. He hasn’t started crying (well, not frequently) but he was getting up in the middle of the night and staying up, singing, for hours and falling asleep when it would be time to get up already. Sometimes he’d be really groggy at school or I would just keep him home. In the end, we decided against increasing medication. When I get brave enough, we’ll work on tapering his medication.

That’s his sleep history. But since this month, Nathan has been sleeping on time, no crying episodes, sleeping all through the night, and waking up in a good mood in the morning. I do hope, this trend continues.