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.