LITH Family Tries Raising Funds for Son’s Companion Dog

A Lake in the Hills family is holding an online fundraiser to purchase a service dog for their four-year-old autistic son, the Northwest Herald reports.

Joe and Julia Fesso are trying to raise funds online through 4 Paws for Abililty and indiegogo.com, Autism Service Dog for Mason, according to the story. The family needs to raise $13,000.

On indiegogo.com, Joe Fesso writes about the family's efforts:

My wife and I are always trying to improve our son's life. He is currently 4 years old and has been diagnosed with Autism since he was 1.

Mason is still non verbal, but we hope and research every day for a way to help him tell us his wants and needs.  He goes to school for 20 hours a week and gets at-home ABA therapy 14 hours a week.

He has also gone to see DAN Dr. Usman, who prescribed several vitamins and supplements to hopefully help with his physical and biological issues. While we tirelessly work at helping him, he is still banging his head when upset and trying to escape any chance he gets (he's fast for a little guy), but with no verbal cues, we have a hard time providing him with what he's trying to tell us in his own way.

While we continue our efforts to help our guy, we have been looking into getting him an Autism assistance dog, who would be able to keep him from getting out of the house, stop him from hurting himself when he's upset, give him a leash to hold for direction as he gets older (rather than his embarrassing parents'....what young boy wants to be seen tied to his parents everywhere he goes) and be an overall comfort to him during our countless nights awake when Mason will not go to sleep.

We have researched many Austism assistance dog programs and look forward to getting our son the extra help these dogs can provide.

4 Paws For Ability has a great reptuation for producing service dogs for a variety of disabilitlies. Their Autism Assistance Dog web page can be seen here: http://4pawsforability.org/autism-assistance-dog/

The average cost for these animals is around $13,000 so we are tring to get as close to that as possible. 

As of Monday, April 29, the family had raised $1,940.