Because the J-man has recently gone to wearing 2-piece pajamas (I’m telling you, we tried to keep him in sleepers for as long as possible!), we have had some issues.

Some of it is good: the J-man is learning more about self-care. He is very good at putting his arms through shirt sleeves, and working hard at stepping into shorts. He definitely knows that his socks go on his feet, but will just lay them over a foot because he can’t figure out how to open the top.

Also good: J-man is learning to help take his shorts off. He can already rip his socks off - mostly through effort because he likes to be barefoot whenever possible. He doesn’t like taking his shirt off though, and will fight that.

However… Saturday morning when Tim got up with J-man, Tim walked into the nursery, and the J-man was there with a shirt on. No pants. No overnight pull-up. Lots of pee (crib, sheets, remaining part of the bumper pad). Saturday night, when I put the J-man down, he stayed awake for a while. I joked to Tim that I should check on J-man to make sure he was still wearing clothes. I JOKED! And then I walked in. Little man lying there sound asleep… wearing a soaked shirt, with soaked sheets, and the pants and pull-up on the floor. Bare ass shining brightly. Picking up a wet, sound asleep toddler, trying to get him clean and into new pajamas, stripping the bed and putting on clean sheets, all while trying not to wake him? Awesome.

“Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises.” — Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Sorry to be light on posting the last few days. We’ve all been feeling under it this week. I’m also working on a few improvements to the blog, which I’ll hopefully get done this weekend along with some posting.

In the meantime, here’s another achievement to celebrate! Even though J-Man has felt bad all week, had all sorts of weird sleep patterns, and has decided that this would be a nice time to assume the role of terrible-almost-threes-tantrum-monster, we did have a big positive. He decided to color!!

To make a long back story short, he has never enjoyed using crayons because of his sensory issues and fine motor control problems. It seems like he can’t figure out how to use the crayon, it somehow feels icky in his hand, or both. He tends to hold slender objects (like spoons, crayons, pens, etc.) at the very end with as little finger skin as he can get away with. (see first picture below) This obviously makes it very hard for him to self-feed from a spoon.

I had him ’sign’ a birthday card for my sister the other day with a crayon. Usually if we get a couple of dots and a random line, we’re happy. Even that takes a lot of effort usually. This time, he kept running the crayon back and forth and I had to take it from him so she could still read the card.

Night before last, he took one of his bathtub crayons (easy clean-up!) - very specifically the green one - and colored the edge of the tub for a good ten minutes. He has NEVER done this. He even held it some of the time in a ‘normal’ writing grasp (see second picture). Woo hoo!

After a couple of years of occupational therapy, we have coloring! On the one hand, I guess that could be depressing. But every victory is hard fought, and you gladly take every one of them regardless of cost. As you can tell in the last picture, he’s so proud of himself. That makes EVERYTHING worth it.