So much for my hopes that the Monster would be cooperative in a culinary sense.   He really had no interest in the turkey even though it looked like chicken, which he does eat, and veggies were verboten.  However, at least he had a muffin, so he didn’t go to bed hungry, and ate like a demon this morning when he got up.

Thanksgiving, like a lot of family events, is a little bit hard for us in some respects because it does emphasize a little how far behind the Monster is, compared to his younger cousins. My nephew, two years his junior, was far more verbal and self-sufficient than the Monster, and that ended up with another episode of minor frustrations from the wife’s part (I’m more of the mode still to be happy at how well our nephew’s doing, and to use him as a measuring stick to see how the Monster’s progressing.)

On a positive, just as when we went to visit my family, the Monster was good about playing at least for a little bit with his cousin.  Our nephew is much bigger on running around and being active with a couple of balls that were in the living room, and that’s a game that the Monster understands at least in part.  However, being an unstructured activity with rules that were being made up on the fly, this was not something conducive to his staying involved, and he did finally wander off to play by himself.

I think the biggest mistake that we made with regards to Thanksgiving was not really coming up with a good social story to get him understanding what he’s supposed to be doing.  (Granted, Thanksgiving doesn’t have a heck of a lot of ceremony associated with it.)  We’re going to start working on putting something together before we get to Hanukah so that it’s not so unfamiliar to him.