J-Man has rarely been one to get fixated on an object and carry it everywhere. Glo-Worm and the music-playing caterpillar used to go with us in the car and to some degree around the house. The music calmed him down and made life better for everyone. Even then, they weren’t with him all day.
Yesterday during speech therapy, he was impressing the therapist with his ability to point to a particular letter on a block even when presented with several blocks to choose from. For good measure, he often said the letter. It’s hard to describe what a quantum leap forward this is for him. If you present him objects (ball, cow, book, for example) and ask him to point to the cow, it’s rare for him to do it. Give him a pile of letter flash cards and say, “point to the ‘A’,” he’ll point and get it right about 90+% of the time. I’ve got no idea either. The speech therapist was floored.
He particularly likes ‘K’ since it’s the one sound he’s been able to make consistently. Oddly enough, it’s one of the hardest sounds to make. One of the hardest for him is that B/P type sound – he almost never can – which is apparently about the easiest sound to make. It comes out this curious, guttural, glottal, whatever sound. In any case, he found the ‘K’ block and held on to it the whole session. He also decided he liked the ‘C’ block and held it in the other hand. So, with a block in each hand, he would ‘point’ his fist at whatever she was asking him to.
He held on to them throughout the therapy, which started about 9:00AM. He then kept carrying them… and carrying them… We went to Target about 10:30, and he carried them to the car. He carried them into the store, and in the shopping cart, and back out to the car, and back home, and climbing up and down the steps. He held on to them through lunch (both in one hand), eating with the other hand. We managed to pry them from his hands (to much unhappiness) while he ‘napped’ (ha!). When he got up, he grabbed the blocks again and carried them around through the whole afternoon and dinner and up to the bathtub, where we had to pry them out again (to much more unhappiness).
Finally I just hid them. Today, he hasn’t looked for them.
I have no idea why, but yesterday was Block Day. I’ve never seen him carry something around for the better part of 10 hours. Go figure.
Who said all this wasn’t interesting?
Posts that hopefully are similar:
- What’s Your Autistic Toddler Like Now? (Part 1)
- Building Blocks, Sequences, Memory, and Thoughts on Thinking
- And colors too?!
- What’s Your Autistic Toddler Like Now? (Part 2)
- Our First Experience with Therapeutic Listening
- He can type?!?
- Shining More and More! Quarterly IEP Report
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
E has loved to carry things around with him since he could walk. It was spoons for a while, then cans of Playdough. Now it’s little plastic bears, one in each hand. Gets in the way when he’s doing OT, but he’s committed!
J-Man just really hasn’t been much of a ‘carry-er’. He will drag stuff around for a while (the other day it was the ‘E’ flash card for a half-hour or so), but never like this.
Usually in OT, we can’t get him to hold anything. It’s like we lit a puzzle on fire and expected him to solve it. Even with that, our OT can get him to do all sorts of interesting stuff.
There’s probably some profound sensorial analysis to be done here, but I’m a little too brain dead at the moment to parse it out. We were up way late last night dumping stuff into his IEP notebook in prep for our first, rather informal meeting with the case manager today. It went well. It was the first time we’d met our case manager and she seemed very nice, professional, and helpful – all things we like.
It looks like they’re going to take some of his fairly recent evals and count them without having to repeat them. Woot! That’ll save a few hours in a small, barely-air-conditioned room. The jury is still out on whether he’ll need another OT eval, which are the dreaded ones. I guess I could confound the test by handing him two letter blocks before the eval.