Tony had a great day today! He was full of energy from the second I walked in right up until 3:oo in the afternoon! He was happy almost all of this time with only a few brief encounters with frustration or other negative emotions. We went outside for two relatively long walks, played with most of his new toys, watched Blue’s Clues, ate, and somewhere in there he managed to fit in an OT session with Lane. Big Day!

Good thing I started off the day with lots of sugar, it gave me the boost I needed to keep up with the running, jumping, throwing, stomping, singing, painting, and coloring! During our first walk I let Tony be the leader (most of the time.) He led us down the sidewalk to the left of the house to the passageway into the courtyard. In the passageway he picked up a stick and tacted ‘tik,’ then he said ‘wa-deh’ I thought he meant water, and my suspicion was confirmed later on. He started torward the pond, so I redirected him and he was fine with the new direction. We went into the courtyard and ran around for a while. He was loving it! It was a beautiful sunny day. We jumped, stomped, and shuffled our feet, then it was off to the rocks.

Within the courtyard there is a small corner full of whitish rocks which Tony loves. He likes to sit down in the rocks, pick them up, throw them, put them in the hole in the bottom of a basketball goal near the corner, feel handfulls of rocks in his hands and let them fall onto the other rocks. Actually, this is what assured me that his earlier wa-deh was in fact ‘water.’ When we first got to the corner and Tony was standing in the rocks, I asked him “What are those?” He happily and confidently responded ‘wokk!’ I reinforced his correct tact with some praise, then he picked up a rock, said ‘waaaok,’ then ‘wa-deh,’ walked directly to the hole in the bottom of the basketball goal (which happens to be full of H2O,) and promptly put the rock into it. He repeated this process numerous times before I decided it was time to move on. Another interesting thing Tony did with rocks on our walk was bang a large rock against different surfaces and revel in the different sounds he produced.

As Tony acquainted himself with his new toys he took an enthusiastic liking to the karaoke/piano book. His parents knew this toy would be one of his favorites. It is very good for our purposes, as it has the music for Old MacDonald – animal noises and sounds, The Wheels on the Bus – one of our intraverbals, the Alphabet Song, and other catchy tunes which I’m sure will be uiseful for some reason or another, even if it is just entertainment. He liked the new planes, trains and automobiles beads, the plastic animals, and the new books too. He went on a book binge. After we opened his new small velcro-closure box of books and took the books out of the box and put them back in a few times, he started the binge.

A book binge is an interesting activity Tony has added to his daily regimen. It consists of pulling the majority of his books out one at a time, flipping through them, and making a messy pile of them on the floor for someone to ‘clee clee.’ He has added a new step to his book binges: now he makes an approximation for ‘the end’ as he closes each book. It is very cute!