Forgot to mention yesterday that J-Man gave us a great gift this weekend. This goes under the heading of ‘doesn’t sound like much to most of the world, but the rest of us understand how cool this is’.
For the first time in pretty much ever, J-Man actually participated in unwrapping his gifts at our recent family Christmas gathering. He wasn’t much into it at first – about the same as every other gift-unwrapping event in his life – but he warmed up to it and start pulling and ripping!
We go in age order and he’s the youngest of the five kids on Mary’s side, so he goes first. It seemed like he got the idea once the older kids started unwrapping theirs. He got right in there with them and had a blast watching them. Then he’d sneak in and start helping some! Yay!
It’s hard to tell whether he has any idea what occasion caused presents to appear in front of us, but he certainly seemed to enjoy himself. He also showed positive reactions to some of his gifts, which is quite unusual. It takes everything a while to get incorporated into his routine, so even his current adored toys are ones that sat in the ‘whatever’ pile for a long time before he accepted them.
Of course, it helped that one of the gifts was three Signing Time DVDs with pictures of Our Lady of the Beloved Rachel Coleman on the covers. I swear if we put her on a flash card, he’d carry her all over the house.
We also got a pretty good reaction out of his new Ming-Ming doll (Wonder Pets, baby!), which was a bit of a surprise to me. Usually dolls don’t register with him, at least not for a long time, though we’re working diligently on this. This morning, I asked him, “Who’s this?” and he said “Meh-Muh!” Good enough for me!
We’ll work on incorporating the other toys, which included a cool Weebles play set. Play sets like that take a while since imaginary play isn’t exactly his thing, but at least Daddy can have fun trying! Eventually we’ll hit on the right combination of things that will bring out some of those play skills, and it’ll probably be from stuff we currently have.
As always, he’s our favorite gift, and little – and not so little – things like this are what make life wonderful. And to think we have another on the way makes these gifts doubly good.
Posts that hopefully are similar:
- Interrupting the Loop
- Guy and Dolls
- Building Blocks, Sequences, Memory, and Thoughts on Thinking
- And a new OT too!
- Happy Birthday, J-Man!
- Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses?
- Bathtub Artist
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You guys are my favorite! I am sending you some Signing Time flash cards. Email me and I will get them out to you.