Mands: 16

Another good day for Tony. He had both of his girls with him, as his Mom informed him of early this morning. She said he was excited and said “yeah, girls, girls, girls!” Last night he didn’t get much sleep – there’s a throw-up bug going around. Whitney took him into his room and got down to business with phase II. When I joined them they were playing with play-dough. The next thing Tony wanted when Whitney lifted him ‘up,’ just as he manded, was the watercolor paint. We took down the paint and some construction paper and Tony very successfully tacted two of his new colors; purple and orange. Of course they are just approximations now, but soon. . . oh yes, soon he will be very good at them! Yellow seems to be his least favorite color to say. Whitney had a bright idea of how to introduce ‘who.’ She snuck out into the living room and made arrangements with Marlaina and Anton for one of them to wait a few minutes and then come knock on the door. When someone came a-knocking, we prompted him to ask “WHO is it?” This great idea worked well, and we were able to get a pretty good ‘who’ out of the boy.

Then we all went outside for a walk, Tony had each of us by one hand, practcally dragging us behind him caveman style. Once outside, he went straight for the bus and manded “open do.” He went in the driver’s side door and climbed over to the passenger’s side. This is the side where he likes to roll the window down. He started rolling it down and said ‘woll’ while he was doing it. I snuck away and hid and Whitney prompted him to say ‘where’s Parker?’ echoically. We also had Whitney hide and he is doing surprisingly well with both ‘where’ and our names! Whitney sounds like Whunuh, and Parker sounds like Paco. Last week we were all in his room with Jill and we had him say the name of the person to whom he wanted the ball to be rolled, so obviously he’s worked on the names before in speech therapy.

We returned from the walk and Tony went upstairs to retrieve his turtle. In the room we had some success with phase II motor imitation: throwing a ball and shaking his head we got with “do this.” After a few tries, he did do a ton of great kicking, but we were asking him to ‘kick the ball to _________.” Whitney tried introducing the dolls a few times, but Tony was just not interested. After we tackled some receptives with Potatohead, Tony accidentaly turned on the CD player by bumping something into it. Interestingly, it went straight to “If You’re Happy and You Know It,” which is one of our new intraverbals. He did a great job doing the appropriate actions as his Mom watched proudly through the window!

The next thing he did was such a complicated mind process that it kind of blew our minds. Tony said ‘car’ a couple of times. We weren’t sure if a car ride was on Marlaina’s agenda, and when we didn’t respond immediately, Tony manded very clearly ‘walk.’ We could tell he’d just put together the fact that getting himself outside would be half of getting his beloved car ride! He’s such a smart little guy! His tiredness finally hit him and he fell aleep in the drive-through line at Chick-Fil-A.

Mands: 26

The weather is wonderful today and Tony is (thankfully) over his weekend long fight with diarrhea. (sp?) He was in a great mood for most of the day, so we took advantage of the good mood and the good weather and went on two long walks over the course of the day. It is funny how he willingly and readily does some things outside that he refuses to even try in the room. I think tomorrow I will bring phase II motor imitation and maybe some other learning activities outside and try to accomplish them. In his room today, I got a purple piece of paper, a purple foam square, and a purple lego block out, held these items in his line of vision and asked for a color tact. I must have asked him five different times with no response, not even an echoic! He told me what shape the purple piece of foam was, but he just didn’t want to say ‘purple.’ On the contrary, when we were out for our second walk, after the unsuccessful purple episode in his room, we walked up to a fragrant blooming wisteria. I asked him what they were and he made an approximation for ‘flower,’ (I will ask Jill how to improve it) then I asked him what color the flowers were and he happily spurted out “puhple” without hesitation!

We waded our way through some of phase II and hopefully we will get through the rest tomorrow. After speech he manded for a car ride. I tried to distract him with a pretend version in the bus, but he wouldn’t have it. Marlaina could see the situation could go downhill quickly without the reinforcer of an actual car ride, so she got the keys and we went. Upon our return, Tony ate some of his newly acquired french fries and watched an episode of Blue’s Clues. After his show was when our second walk took place. After he manded for ‘walk,’ we walked over to the gate at the entry of the hallway and stopped. I said “what do you want?” I was hoping for a two word mand; ‘jump over,’ which incorporates one of our phase II preposition tacts, I got a ‘jump,’ but I had to resort to echoics to get ‘over.’

It is easy to rack up the mands when you are playing with Tony in the bus. There’s ‘open door,’ ‘up,’ ‘down,’ ‘roll’ (window), and ‘shut’ or ‘close door.’ All of these are used repeatedly as he wants their effects accomplished. He can actually roll down the window himself now! While we were in the bus I sang a little bit of “Wheels on the Bus” and “If You’re Happy and You Know It” Tony performed the actions that went with the words but didn’t join in vocally. When we got out and shut the door I said “this way,” and held his hand, leading him to the left of the house torward the root-laden entrance to the courtyard. The whole time we walked, he said ‘this way’ again and again. So when we finally got into it, I said ‘that way,’ and started off in another direction. We covered alot of ground with our new ‘this way/ that way’ game, and he was tickled he could direct me so successfully. We stopped by an orange traffic cone and Tony put some sticks and leaves into it. As he dropped the objects into the hole in the top of the cone, I would say “you’re [or Tony’s] putting the STICK IN the CONE.” Then when he’d finished putting a few leaves and sticks in, I’d pick up the cone and move it about a foot to the side and say “now the leaves and styicks are OUT of the cone!” I knew he was getting tired because he was disturbed to the point of crankiness when he threw his turtle into some leaves and leaves stuck to the turtle. Luckily his tiredness was anticipated back at the ranch, where he had a new cup and transportation to his bed waiting on him!