Good Days and Bad Days

With any child, there are good days and bad days. Everything on Monday seemed to lead to what I am now calling a bad day. It started with John's refusal to eat his eggs. Katie came with us to Early Start Pre-School on Monday morning. All John wanted to do was "check his schedule" and skip all the activities that the schedule told him to do.

I think John is getting bored with all of the "un"scheduled activities in this class. Mom sure is getting bored with it! Sometimes it feels like we are trying to "pass the time" until John gets his one-on-one work time with the teacher. Some of the other activities, which include Imaginary Play, Outside Time, and Gross Motor skills are led by the parent or caretaker of each child.

Imaginary Play involves a play kitchen, which doesn't always have the food, pots, pans, and plates. There are only so many things you can do---open the microwave, put the corn in the refrigerator, wash the dishes, etc. The girls play the kitchen well. John will attend for a few minutes, but usually is ready to move on to other things. I don't blame him. He did really well last week, washing dishes in the sink, putting them in a bin that he called the dishwasher, putting them away, putting food on the plates, and starting the process over. But, this Monday, he didn't want to play with the Kitchen. SO, I let him go outside.

Outside time includes riding bikes, wagon rides, playground equipment, a play house, etc. John usually will fit everything in to his scheduled 20 minutes. About 2 weeks ago, John discovered the swing. Well, on Monday, the swing wasn't set up. So, he busied himself with running back and forth between the playground side and the bike side. Katie couldn't keep up. She just wanted to sit and play. At first, I kept making her join us. Finally, I gave up and let her have fun on the playground equipment without my immediate supervision. She's old enough now for me to just check back and forth. It's hard having them both at class. John doesn't like it when I give Katie any attention at "Ja's Skool".

Circle Time, Fine Motor skills, and Table Time are led by the therapists. Circle time went fine and Katie got to participate, which made her happy. Fine Motor Skills was an activity where the kids got to put their hands in the glue to stick fish, crabs, and sharks in the sea (a big poster hanging on the wall) and then finger painting their sea creatures. Although John wanted his hands in the glue and the paint, he was more interested in going to the "ba-oom to wah ans" (bathroom to wash hands).

Washing his hands has become a big thing these days because John is close to being completely potty trained!!!! He decided that Katie wore underwear and so should he, so he refused to wear pullups and diapers. Two potty accidents taught him to tell us he needed to use the bathroom and from there, we've progressed quite nicely. Even now if he starts to have an accident, he can stop it and tell me he's going to have an "acdent", while grabbing his crouch! He has 4 stickers this week for pooping on the potty seat. Now, this is very rare for a child with John's issues to be potty trained. It was something I wasn't ready for, but John made sure this was something he learned. Again, an example of his 'scattered level of skills'.

I digress, back to Monday and the "bad day". Work time was especially hard. He didn't want to look at the teacher and she was having to constantly remind him to "check his eyes". With his eye contact issues, they have him make sure that he tells the person what he wants by looking at them. So, if he wants the school bus to "go", he has to say "go" by looking at the person that will push it to him. Some days this is easy and some days this is hard. Monday was hard.

After school, we went home for lunch and a nap so we could go to speech class. Our next door neighbor came over to babysit Katie and she brought movies. John didn't want to go to speech class anymore. Leaving was a battle. Once we got to class with Tonyia, we started the eye contact battle again. He did everything he could not to look at her ---turned around, closed his eyes, put his head down, yawned a lot, kept pointing out the clock, etc. She worked him hard for the first 25 minutes, but she told me we were going to stop because she thought he needed to move around. We went into the START gym and he played in the ball pit and swung on the swing. He didn't want to do much in the gym either. He kept pointing out the clock.

After speech, we went to the second session of Neurofeedback. Well, John didn't want them to hook up the EEG monitor. He cried, squirmed, kicked, and got very upset. I told them that I was taking him home. It was a bad day and forcing him to do it would have been torture for him and me. So, we went in the elevator to go down to the first floor.

We got stuck in the elevator for 25 minutes! We were going from the second to the first floor. It got stuck between floors. Before we got in the elevator John was crying. Getting stuck was the best thing that happened to him all day. I had apple juice with us and he drank that, danced around, pushed buttons, and kept squealing in delight, "elvater!" The best part was when the firemen let us out and showed him the fire truck.

The family then went to get dinner at Rubio's, where Katie vomited in the trash can outside before we ate. She continued with the flu all night long.

Monday was a bad day.