One of my daily tasks is taking the Monster to the school bus, since it no longer just stops in front of our house.
Last year, when the Monster was on IEP transportation to get to Garrett Heights EMS, our daily procedure was that he waited inside, and I tended to either watch from my study, or go outside to stand on the curb myself to watch for the bus going up the nearby street on its way to us. This year, though, there’s a couple of centralized pick-up locations, and so I drive him around the corner to one before I zip off to work.
Because we’re the only ones at our stop, though, it gives me time sitting on the bus stop bench to talk with him and to get a little social interaction. Most of the time, it’s the usual pulling-teeth kind of conversations, working on trying to get him to be able to communicate the daily schedule. What day is today? Where are you going? What are we waiting for?
And as it’s getting deeper into the fall, it’s getting colder, so we’re back to talking about the weather. It’s not that the Monster doesn’t know what the weather is, but he has a very bad tendency to answer ‘yeah’ to just about anything, regardless of whether it’s genuinely an affirmative or not. So, much of the exercise of talking about the weather on the bench is an exercise in getting appropriate yes/no answers out of him and not ‘yeah’, or a repetition of part of the question. Is it sunny? Is it raining? Is it cold or hot?
Not that I got anywhere, really, today with him. We established that it was sunny and breezy, but getting a reference to hot versus cold was a problem. (Despite the fact that we were both bundled up on the bench, in light of it being in the upper thirties.) I don’t know if he’s confused because the coat keeps him warm, or if he’s just really not solid on the concept of hot versus cold, or if there’s another issue. But, since I know it’s an IEP goal, it’s something we have to keep hammering away on.