Mands: 18

Alright, first thing’s first: I have an amendment for yesterday’s blog. . . I forgot to tell everyone that Tony is now comfortable using his new toy that Whitney and Marlaina found at K-Mart. A battery powered Blue’s Clues game. When this game was first brought into the house Tony was more than apprehensive about it. Actually, it seemed as if he was scared of it, or at least the noises it makes. He would walk over that to it, but if it was on and started singing “red, orange, green and blue . . .” he would put his head down on a chair or on the floor like he sometimes does with the vaccuum cleaner and the weed whackers/ mowers. Yesterday he took it out and I turned it on. It didn’t start making the scary noises right away, so I was able to show him that there was a useable micriphone. He liked the microphone. He touched the screen and the wretched (to him) song commenced. He put his head down. I said into the microphone “it’s okay, you don’t have to listen to that part, we can make our own noises.” Then I started singing the alphabet song so he didn’t have to hear the disturbing noise. I also showed him that he could control it and make it make other noises.

Today, tony made approximations for two new words: ‘higher’ and ‘left.’ He said higher when I picked him up to retrieve something from the giraffe; but not high enough to get to the top compartment. I said “what do you want, do you want up higher?” He said “up,” so I said “up higher, can you say highr?” and he then made an approximation for higher. He made the approximation for ‘left’ while we were putting his shoes on for the first walk of the day. I was simply telling him which foot/ shoe was which, and he echoed it!

On his walk he met two dogs. He very clearly said ‘dog’ without me asking him to say it. He even got to pet one of the dogs (I was careful to make sure it was okay with the dog and owner, and helped Tony be very gentle.) That was fun!