While I’ve mentioned over the last few entries that the Monster’s been showing improvement in some of his verbal skills, one thing that is clearly not improving is his grasp on tense.

The Monster grasps present tense and continuing tenses quite well – he can tell you what he’s doing at any given moment and what he is in the process of doing, even to the point of ‘very near future’.  (“going to grandma and grampa’s” would be an example of this.)  Ask him where he was, or where he will be, and he gets lost.

So trying to get him excited for an event is problematic.

If you told most kids that you’re going to be going to an amusement park over the weekend, they’d count the days down to the event and be beside themselves with glee.  The Monster, however, barely has a grasp on ‘today’ – we do try to remind him what day it is on any given day, and what ‘tomorrow’ and ‘yesterday’ are relative to that, but.  Trying to convince him that “the day after tomorrow is special” becomes an issue, since a) he’s liable to discard most of it (or so it seems) as irrelevant information and b) “the day after tomorrow” is a vague, abstract concept.

For my own part, I think I’m going to work on trying to express it during the day tomorrow, with reinforcement.  (I didn’t just pull the example out of a hat – we’re going to an amusement park on Sunday, and I’d like him to be excited about it, or at least learn the ‘proper social response’ to being told such a thing.)  I think with enough repetition, he’ll at least be able to understand that there’s something that will happen on the next day, that it is not happening right this second, and maybe it’ll be something he can repeat when we get in the car on Sunday…

Of course, I’m also hoping he can hold it together while we’re there.  He did not have a problem last time, but then again, one never knows…