Family Photos and a Trip to Brisbane

A couple of weeks after Liana was born, we had planned to get a photo taken. It was a little too quick to be great for the baby but take a look. I think the older boys did a really good job.

Last weekend, Shar and I went to Brisbane for a conference about 22Q.11 deletion. The speaker was a researcher from America and he had some great insights into what to expect from Zemiel in the future. What we got out of it most was: 22Q kids score lower on IQ tests not because they are 'dumber' but rather because most things are delayed. One father at the conference had an 18 year old daughter who (he said) was acting like a 12 year old.
Another interesting aspect was a discussion on anxiety. Zemiel is beginning to show quite a high level of anxiety in some situations. Generally, these children avoid stressors, but need some sort of stress in order to learn. We, as parents, have to try and strike a balance between under stimulation and over stressing. There were reports of children being scared of all sorts of crazy things. One child was scared of hills!
Further information involved the concept that these children do not learn by observation. They must be explicitly taught everything. They do really well with ROTE learning, but generally their working mathematically skill, comprehension and time and space skill will be severely inhibited. Because movement through space and time causes difficulty, some of these people may not learn to drive a car - or it may take much more practice to learn.
Anyway, on that day, Brizzy got a hailstorm at 2pm. But it wasn't a patch on the storms that encircled the city on the Saturday night. It was amazing to see the lightning strikes and constant flashes in the sky. I took some video with a little camera. I'll put it below when I've finished editing it.