Conor's Preschool Years

Conor's evaluations showed the following:

Gross Motor Skills - 18 months delayed (or those of an 18 month old)
Fine Motor Skills - 14 months delayed (or those of a 22 month old)
Speech - Age appropriate with poor oro-motor skills such as weak bite, poor lingual movement, poor lip closure that hinder proper eating.
Cognitive Skills - Average for his age with problems in the areas of sequencing and processing of information.
Adaptive Skills - Below average with particular problems in self-help skills.
Behavioral - Significant problems in focusing, high energy and highly distractible.

The evaluation showed he was eligible for a special education preschool program. So as of January 1999, Conor has been attending preschool at the Developmental Disabilities Institute for 5 days a week for 2-1/2 hours per day. While in preschool Conor receives his physical, occupational and speech therapies in addition to special education.

Some of the gross motor skills he has been focusing on are jumping, walking up and down stairs and using playground equipment. This summer we hope to work on pedalling a bike or tricycle. The fine motor skills he has been working on are feeding himself with a spoon and fork, drawing lines and circles, cutting with scissors, and unscrewing caps.

During the last few months, the school has noticed deficits in Conor's ability to listen, attend to tasks and process information. Mom & Dad were already well aware of, and concerned about, these issues. Conor will probably undergo some testing to determine the extent of his troubles.

Some of the teachers at Conor's school call him "The Mayor" as he is quite friendly -- always saying hello, willing to give a hug or a kiss. The first few months were hard for him, and the stress of school was showing at home. He became very aggressive and combative. He has settled in now, and is back to being his loveable, chaming self. Conor has also developed quite a crush on his morning school bus driver.

He will continue in school throughout the summer and then in the Fall he will go to an extended 4 hour program 5 days a week. For the summer he will start hippotherapy - physical therapy on horseback. Hippotherapy promotes motor planning abilities, improves posture, balance and mobility.

Medical Updates
Conor had surgery for his urinary reflux condition -- urine was refluxing from his bladder back up his ureters towards his kidneys. He'd been on antibiotics for 3 years to prevent urinary tract infections.

Conor has a Y-shaped ureter and diverticula (or pockets) where the ureters implant into the bladder. The diverticula stop his bladder from closing off when he urinates and therefore causes the urine to reflux back towards his kidneys. It is rare for a child to "grow out of" reflux when diverticula like this is present. Therefore, the urologist reimplanted both his ureters into new areas of his bladder. He'll have a VCUG (xray procedure) in the Fall to see if the surgery was successful. During surgery they found a problem with his previous hypospadius repair, so that was corrected as well. The recovery from the hypospadius fix seemed to be harder than the bladder repair. The surgery required a 4 day hospital stay and Conor handled it like a trooper.

This past winter, Conor also had a very bad bout of what we think was the flu. He was running a fever of 102-104 for 8 days. He was vomitting bile and got dehydrated. We were back and forth to the doctor and the hospital a few times. They did x-rays of his stomach and chest to rule out an intestinal infection or pneumonia and sonogramed his kidneys to make sure there wasn't an infection there either. All of his blood and urine tests showed no other signs of serious infection, so we decided it was the flu. He got IV fluids at the hospital to help with the dehydration. Unfortunately he lost almost a pound during this time.

Then about a month before the surgery, Conor had what the doctors suspect was a mild case of Epstein Barr virus (Mono).