Mands: (approximately 18)

A new week and back to phase I. Tony had a pretty good morning. He was eating chicken and hot dogs and clapping along with Martha Stewart’s studio audience when I arrived. I changed the channel to Blue’s Clues, but before the Noggin song was over Tony manded very clearly for a ‘walk.’ (I can’t find the clicker, that’s why I recorded an approximate number of mands.) In order to get out the door for our first walk, Tony told me what we needed to put on his feet: “shoes!” and manded ‘over,’ so I would pick him up over the gate. He also echoed ‘gate.’ Then he said ‘open, open, open . . . I played dumb as Whitney reccomendede until he put two words together, like we all know he can do; “open do,” he said, and so I reinforced him by opening the door and saying “yes! Open door! Yeah Tony!” and rubbing his head.

He surprised everyone by being completely out of sorts for his friend Jill. They had a hard time today and I suspect tiredness is the culprit. Tony still wnt on one more walk and waded through some more phase one material before he completely lost it and we knew nighty-night was the answer. I tried the experimental receptives drill with a crayon and a toy VW Beetle. He got the ‘pick which one you write with’ exercise, but not the others. I’m not sure whether he understood or it was just luck and a 50/50 chance. We’ll keep working on it. We at least tried almost everything in phase I, so I’d say we can’t call it a bad day, just not great.

Get some rest, little smart one . . . tomorrow we will start again! Yeah!