Not that I’m quite blaming the weather service for getting this one wrong, but when they say ‘mix turning to rain by morning’, you’d like to think they’d be right. Continue reading
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Best Laid Plans
Being Jewish, for us adults, the order of the day is Chinese food and movies. Given that the Monster’s not liable to want to sit through a movie and isn’t fond of Chinese food, there were other plans made. Continue reading
Vacation Day Two
You might all just reconcile yourselves to the fact that most of my posts over vacation are going to probably be about toilet training. 😉
Yesterday was not his best performance – we missed far more often than we hit. Continue reading
Vacation Fun?
Now that we’re into the week where I’m actually not going to work… it’s time to concentrate on toilet training.
Now, according to his general education teacher, he’s very successful in school with going to the bathroom and not having accidents – the problem is at home. We’re not having consistent success. Continue reading
Disruptions Ahead
I got home last night from my curling to hear that the Monster had decided he didn’t want to go to bed on time.
Now, usually, the Monster’s very good about going to bed – he likes his schedule, and he sticks to it well himself. I realize that all kids have these incidents, but this was a bit closer to a meltdown than the usual I-don’t-want-to-go-to-bed fits. Continue reading
Learning to Say No
So I returned home last night to find the Monster screaming his head off from his bedroom as if he’d fallen and had really hurt himself.
By the time I made it upstairs to find out what was going on, I found my wife barricading the door to keep him in his room for time-out. (We made the dreadful mistake of not putting a baby-gate on the door to his new bedroom, which I rectified within 45 seconds of arriving.) The next thirty minutes were a mess of trying to calm him down and find out what had precipitated a meltdown of epic proportions. Continue reading
Speaking of Speech
As part of the Monster’s IEP, he receives speech therapy thrice a week – two pull-outs and a push-in – at school. This was (believe it or not) an increase from what the city schools had wanted to give us, mostly because we insisted at his initial IEP meeting that the twice-a-week sessions were not showing enough progress under his IFSP.
Another part of his IEP, as I mentioned last week, requires regular communications from his teachers so that we know what we can do to reinforce. When we went to school last Friday to get some traction on our issues with communication thus far, we discussed that we wanted more information from the speech therapist, especially in light of a recent evaluation that indicated that there had been regression on the speech front. Continue reading
G’bye Mommy! G’bye, Abba!
Before the baby was born, we planned on doing a few last renovations to our house to make sure we could use some of the rooms we’d not been using. A secondary goal in this, of course, was to let the wife move her study out of the third bedroom, and down to where my study, so that we could move the Monster into his own room. The goal of this, of course, was to let the baby move into the nursery and out of the master bedroom. Continue reading
Choose Your Words Carefully
Verbal communication is one of those pesky things that we all have trouble learning at some point or another.
The Monster, as referenced frequently, handles his limited verbal communication by sticking to scripted phrases that he’s learned. These, by and large, go to the format of “Can I have <X>, please?” He’s figured out enough of English to realize that X can be just about anything. Continue reading
Big Brother Mode
There are breakthroughs and there are breakthroughs.
Yesterday, I spent a few hours alone with both kids – this is, as you can imagine, a bit of a challenge, when I’m coping with a very non-verbal child (an 11 month old infant) and a semi-non-verbal child (being the Monster at a very rambunctious 4 1/2 years). Most of the time, it works out fairly well, since the baby is still exploring his environment and the Monster’s quite content to play around/with him. Continue reading