All of us, I’m sure, have had the “how to boil a frog” experience at some point.  Gradual changes are easily ignored until they’re past where we’d normally notice.

It’s hard to miss how the Monster’s verbal ability’s gotten better over the last year.  He’s more often using longer constructions – admittedly, still canned sentences, but at least they’re longer and more “English-sounding” – but that’s also been dependent on his mood at a given moment. But that’s also just from what we can see when we’re around him – and that’s perhaps three to four hours a day.

Since I pick him up on Thursdays to take him to Gymnastics, I also sometimes get more feedback.

His teacher held me up for a few minutes yesterday to talk to me about how he’s being more social in class.  Just as we’ve seen, there’s also the negative side of it (he’s saying “No” a lot and being far more oppositional), but she was commenting as well that he’s participating more.  He’s not just content to go where he’s led and stay there, but he’s interacting more and doing more to participate in the environment around him.  Our issue going forward is to encourage his positive verbal progression while doing something to rein in the negative side of it…

Likewise, at gymnastics, the coach who was with him took a few minutes to speak with me about how he’s doing – that he has his moments where he wants to run around like a crazy person, but by and large he’s well behaved and wants to do what she wants him to do.  He’s also being more verbal there – he’s reciting the names of the equipment when prompted – but she’s also noticed his little volume-drop-off thing that he does.  And, she went the step further to comment on what a change it is since she started seeing him a while back.

All well and good, of course, but we still have a long way to go…