So we’re at the end of another year, and the Monster’s seventh birthday was yesterday.
Like the last two years, we’ve celebrated with cupcakes and the like, with no real decision when/if we’re going to throw a party for him. It’s hard to decide to do the party thing when he really doesn’t have any friends – he’s not invited to any of the other children’s birthday parties from his class at school, and we don’t really know any of the other parents in the class, despite my wife being the class parent. We’ll probably do some family thing over Memorial Day weekend again, since that’s a convenient time for my family to come down.
(To be fair, it’s hard when the Monster’s birthday is Mother’s Day weekend, followed by Preakness – we live relatively close to Pimlico Racetrack – so Memorial Day is the next weekend that’s available.)
And while this year’s been up and down, I’ve been writing enough about all the ‘down’ of late, so let’s concentrate on the up.
Thanks to the feeding therapy the wife’s been taking the Monster to, he’s now more often than not eating the same thing as us for meals. Yes, he’s still eating the same things for lunch and breakfast each day, which is more a function of habit than a requirement by him, but he’s also eating “normal” food. We had lunch at Red Robin yesterday and he had a cheeseburger without a fight – he picked it himself. He had shrimp scampi and green beans for dinner last night. And we do still have pizza in the fridge, but that’s more a convenience now than a requirement for every meal.
He’s actually fully daytime toilet trained – as in, we don’t necessarily have to keep monitoring him. I can’t remember the last time we had him in a pull-up during the day, and he more often than not takes himself to the bathroom. He’s not quite doing a good enough job wiping… but that’s something that can be worked on. We’re starting on trying to work on the nighttime thing as well, in hopes of maybe having him out of pull-ups at night by his eighth birthday.
While his communication skills are certainly not progressing as much as we’d like, and he’s hardly as social as other children his age… he’s doing lovely for him. He’s expressing his wants and needs in a concrete (and usually understandable to us) fashion, and throwing in other things that are socially appropriate. He asks for his little brother to come play with him. He can express a want to pet the cats, and some slight aspects of imaginary play if given a prior example to imitate.
And by and large, he’s a happy, healthy seven year old.
There are still miles to go, clearly, but not everything is stormy and gloomy. And those things, we can work on fixing in the year ahead.
Happy Birthday, Monster. We love you.
As a parent and grandparent. I am thrilled with the progress he has made. As an educator, both principal and teacher, and as a human being, your sentence that he has no friends breaks my heart. Shame on his teacher for not giving him personal connections in the class. Having had many special ch9ldren in the classroom, one of our first priorities should be to make every child feel part of the whole. I hope that next year’s teacher does a better job.
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