I know that I said via Twitter (you can follow me at @dadenoughblog) that I likely wouldn’t post today.  I felt I had to – even though we just piled out of the car.

First – one huge damn success: The Monster was dry the entire trip back from visiting my family.  We’re talking 5 hours in the car including two stops – one to get me coffee, and one to get dinner.  And then, upon getting home, agreed that he needed to use the bathroom before bed and peed in the potty.  (We had two accidents today, one on waking up and one en-route – that’s it.)

We see the Monster every day – anything that changes slowly over time kind of gets lost because it’s too gradual for us to really see how it goes.  His grandmother, who sees him every so often but not every day, comments on when she notices some of the changes, but still, it’s frequent enough that she doesn’t see ‘leaps’.  It’s when we go to visit my family – nearly four hours away – that it becomes apparent how far he’s come.

The last time we drove up to visit them, it was nothing short of a minor disaster, though that had to do more with meltdowns at the hotel and bad nights of sleep.  This time, due to other things going on in our lives back here at home, we did something that we once swore we’d never do – we drove up for a family thing and back in the same day.  So, we fully expected there to be some snafus when we got up there.

Instead, when we got there, the Monster immediately said hello to cousins, an aunt, uncles and his grandparents and then… dashed off to play with his cousins.  As in, off to go appropriately play with his cousins (his three-year-old twin cousins, whose birthday party it was) to do ring-around-the-rosie for a few minutes.  When it was time to sit down and eat, he did so nicely, well-behaved, and was very good about asking for things when he wanted them.  (We only had two incidents of his going over to play with the presents while they were wrapped, and we stopped him each time.)  And in the end, while he did end up playing parallel with the other children, it was appropriate parallel play.

And everyone made sure to tell us how much of a massive difference they see since our last trip up over the summer.  This was one of those rare times where we could see it too.  He’s not, perhaps, up to what might be considered ‘normal’, but he’s head, neck, shoulders and perhaps half of his torso above where he was only a few months ago, in terms of appropriate social interactions.

Now, if we could just do something about his wanting to play with hair (or insisting that “hair goes meow”)…