Mands: 20

Tony’s first mand of the day was ‘all done,’ which Tony said to get out of his high chair. We went into his room and he went straight for the play dough. I put the play dough container behind my back and asked “where is the play dough,? Can you say ‘where’?” Tony started to show slight signs of frustration, so I discontinued this probe and produced the play dough, saying “here it is!” and putting the tub on the table. He was no longer upset. Now he manded ‘open,’ which he is doing a better job enunciating now than his former ‘aben.’ I asked “do you want the play dough,?” and “what do you want?” Neither of these questions produced the effect I was hoping for (a mand for play dough,) so I used echoics to build a bridge as advised by Jay. I said “say play dough” and he made an approximation, then I asked again what he wanted and finally got (an approximation of) the desired result! Yeah! Of course, now I opened the container and let Tony remove each glob of play dough one by one. As he grabbed them, I asked him to tact their colors. He took a tool out of the new play dough accessories bin. It was a roller. He handed me the roller and a glob. I knew what he wanted, but I was hoping to get a ‘roll’ mand. I guess I got a little carried away and complicated/ sophisticated with my language here and I was reminded of it by Marlaina’s laughter from the living room.

After I’d rolled each color out we put away the play dough. ‘Walk,’ and ‘open,’ were his next mands, which together got him outside. On our walk we toyed around with the concept of near and far. I waited until we were safe in the large green grassy expanse of the courtyard then ran torward the middle until I was pretty far but he could still hear me without any yelling. Then I said “FAAAAARRRRR,” then I ran all the way up to him and said “NEEEEARRR.” Not only was he tickled by my actions, but next time I ran away when I turned around he said ‘far’ with me and when I returned he said ‘near’ with me. He gets it, now we just have to get hbim to tact it. While we were out there, we also went over and under things and I got him to say ‘over’ echoically. It seems that these are not in the tact data collection sheets. Maybe I’m in the wrong phase. I’ll ask Whitney.

Once we got back Tony worked on his breakfast a little. He grabbed a waffle and walked to the step stool in the kitchen. He climbed up on it and started eating his waffle. He pointed to a ‘count on 2’ nbc magnet and tacted the two. When he’d devoured the first waffle he went down the hall to retrieve the next waffle. He repeated the entire process. Before I could get him to go back into the room he noticed that Marlaina was in the front yard. He became consumed by the desire to go for a car ride, he said ‘cuah’ and we reinforced it with a car ride to BK first for some fries, then a field trip to Lowe’s for some fencing materials. What a day!