The end to yet another short school week thanks to a holiday of some kind. But it wasn’t a bad thing! We’ve had some adventures in bowling and breakthroughs!
Our adventure in bowling went relatively well. Mr. J had never been before, and we wanted to get out of the house. And being in Henderson, there’s a nearby casino within reach with a HUGE bowling alley. There’s 70+ lanes. Huge, loud, and just full of input! If you’ve seen the 80’s film “Short Circuit”, Mr. J was #5, taking in all the input and was pulling me in every direction to go check things out. We decided on a game to see how he’d do.
It was just too cute! He knew which ball was his, pick it up, take it to the line, sit down on the ground and let the ball go. This meant that t took 20 years for the ball to reach the end and knock anything over, so I tried to help out where I could. Mommy’s help was not wanted, thank you very much. Justin DO! Awesome. He was LOVING it! So excited!—but I knew that it was excitement that was too much excitement, because once the game was over and we were done, he didn’t want to stop. So we very calmly packed it up and picked up a squirmy, screaming Mr. J and simply walked out to the car. Oh sure, we got the usual looks of “Aren’t you going to do something about your kid?” but we were leaving, so what did I care? Once we had gotten to the car, everything was right with the world again as he was in his seat, the familiarity of the car and landscape he was more familiar with. On the overall, I called it a successful outing. However, when we do try bowling again, we will look for a much smaller alley.
And then for yesterday, I finally got a breakthrough in Mr. J’s communication. He has been extremely vocal lately. He’s mimicking a lot, trying to talk along with the TV, read the stories out loud and just go with his own narrative—and at the moment, hardly any of it is very clear, so it’s a lot of gibberish and babble. I take that as a good sign. In school they have been working with Mr. J to do things for himself, and at home Mr. J still tries to get me to do it all (and I don’t). I was sitting on the couch watching the games when he comes up to me, starts pulling on my hand and being fussy, wanting me to get up and get him something. I told him “No, no. You have to ask nicely. Say ‘Mama’ can you come with me? ‘Mama’ I’m hungry. What is it you need?” And then he stood there, looked me in the eye (that’s huge!) and said:
“Mama, sauce.” (Meaning, “Mama, I want applesauce”)
I couldn’t get up off that couch fast enough. “YES!! You can have sauce! You can sauce all you want! You can have sauce by the bucket load!”
It didn’t really hit me until I started telling everyone else I could get a hold of.
Hey, WORLD! Guess what Mr. J did?!?!?!?
I told his teacher this morning. So everyone was ecstatic. He’s doing so awesomely in school right now—the teacher wants to keep him, the aides want to adopt him because he’s doing so well and acting all cute.
So yes, Mr. J you can all the sauce you want!!!
Where'd My Hair Go?! 