Today was a good day with Tony. When I arrived he was eating his
waffle and just talking away. The last few days, I have noticed that
Tony has been putting words together in combinations that actually
make sense. Usually, he gives just one or two word answers the most
common being ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Tony was even singing songs from his
favorite shows clearly!

We started out the day by playing with the loving family. When Tony
was done with them he kept saying ‘bag’. At first I thought he must
be trying to say bed, but after I tried to build one he kept looking
at me and saying ‘bag’. I looked around the room for this ‘bag’ but
couldn’t find one. He was becoming agitated that I couldn’t help him
find this bag, so we went to find Marlaina to see if she could help.
Marlaina was as dumbfounded as I was, we had no clue what bag he was
talking about. So Marlaina handed Tony one of her purses thinking
this was what he wanted, but it still wasn’t. By this point Tony was
very agitated and began to have a tantrum. I tried to distract him
but nothing was working until Marlaina found something that would,
ooze.

When she pulled out the package of ooze, I was thinking no way he is
going to like this! But he was looking at it fascinated and wanted
me to take it out. At this point he was calling the ooze ‘water’
(it’s sort of a greenish-blue color.) I took it out and put it in my
hands first and tried to get him to touch it. To my surprise, he
loved the way it felt on his hands. I told him that its different
from water and its called ooze. After telling him this a few times,
he finally started to refer to it as ooze. This kept Tony busy for at
least 30 minutes and he completely forgot about the bag!

After Tony was finished with the ooze, he said ‘clay’ and immediately
went to pull it out. I started molding the clay into different shapes
and getting tony to identify them for me. I made a ball and after
Tony identified it, he said ‘more ball’. So I decided to make this
one smaller and try to introduce the concept of ‘big’ and ‘small’. He
repeated me when I said ‘small ball’ and ‘big ball’. We also made
cookies and pizza out of the clay. Tony pulled a wooden knife and a
pair of scissors out of the drawer. I showed him how we cut the
cookie and pizza in half with both of them. He didn’t try to mimic
what I was doing so I put my hand over his to force the action. Then
as we cut it into several pieces he started counting them.

After the Clay we watched a few shows and then Tony was off to to take
a nap. Overall today it seemed like Tony was really eager to learn
especially when he was exploring with his hands.