Minding Thursday

I was thankful for the sleep last night. Owen didn’t wake up until it was time to go to school. The same light switch to bed journey was on the agenda. He waited patiently for me to get my coffee and then off to the races we ran. He did pretty well in the morning for us to get ready and get out the door. We stood there waiting for the bus and he asked Siri tons of questions. He wanted to know how to say “gorilla, gorilla gorilla in Arabic.” He laughed as soon as she said the words. His vocabulary is truly increasing. It is amazing to watch how this is changing for him. When his bus came around the corner, he was so excited to go to school. I went to pick him up for therapy and he was talking so much about his school and what he wanted to do. He told me before we even left the building that he wanted to go back to the library. He kept mentioning the books and what he wanted. When we walked outside, he told me that he wanted to go into the cafeteria and sing in front of the crowd. I love his connection to books and music. He wanted me to once again go in with his therapy. It went well, but he was distracted by a few people not wearing blue pants. His new phrases is to say “elephants eat peanuts with Goofy” when he gets distracted by people's non-blue pants and this is also his phrase for anything that he doesn’t want to answer or that he has answered wrong. When we left there, he told me he wanted to go to “the little Donald’s” and then “the big Donald’s,” and then finally decided on the McDonald’s that we went to. We were going to the McDonald’s that was closest to us, but he had to go through all of the choices of where we could go. He knew exactly what he wanted but I tried to convince him that he wanted to try the fish sandwich but he did not and I didn’t push it. Once we got up to the window he gets very upset because he doesn’t want them to have their window open and he doesn’t want the window of the car open but he wants his food through the windows, but I don’t know how to convince him that he has to get the food through the window, the exact same window he wants closed. He watches a video that says a mother’s love, and he always comes up to me and tells me that “he’s mother’s love.” He was talking to me about different things he was doing and I said, “I don’t care” meaning it was fine if he did it. That became his phrase for the night and he ran through the house yelling “I don’t care.” It was funny to hear him yelling “I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care.” It was more of a sarcastic tone than I hadn’t heard him use before. The words that I use are always extremely important because they are words that I will most likely hear, over and over and over again and he doesn’t always understand what they mean and that tone and when you say the words will matter. I wasn’t saying the phrase in a mean way, but it’s easily interpreted in many different ways and this can become confusing for Owen. Thankfully, he thought it was funny and kept saying it. I’m not sure how he will interpret it from that point on. “More milk please,” he said as I poured milk in his cup, that I knew he wouldn’t drink. He wanted it in his cup before he went to bed. He never wants to have an empty cup. Forward we march. I feel like today was filled with lots of progress. There were moments we stumbled, but the progress was amazing. I loved hearing him say that he wanted to go to the library and sing at school. These were two things that made my day. Hold onto the moments that make your heart sing. Find your joy and share it with the world. Smiles to all and donut daze!