David Weekly, #52

David had a busy weekend: Friday we went to two different parks, and out to lunch with my friend James. Saturday, he went a children's festival with Jesse at USF, and then after I got home from work we went to the Gasparilla Arts Festival in downtown Tampa for a couple of hours. He is a challenge now because he wants to run away, or hide in different places, and thinks it's all so funny. This is part of why I've been teaching him his address, and making sure he knows his first and last name, and a few other details. Maybe I should get some stickers printed that I can just stick on him with my info, just in case he gets lost. I do my best to keep up with him, but I don't have a very good way of making him take this running away thing seriously, because even holding him and not letting him go has no effect really, and neither does time out. I'd like to hear from you about a good way to deal with this issue. Another thing I've started to do is to introduce him to any police I see around, so he knows what to look for in case he's ever in any kind of trouble. We're going out and doing more things lately, so this is important for him, I think. At the arts festival, he wasn't very interested in the art. It was his first time at something like that, so it's understandable. I just wanted to show him all the different things out there. He did like one or two things, I think, but not for any longer than a couple of seconds. He was mostly interested in the interior spaces for their own sakes, and for the possibility of an opening in the back, or other pathways in/out/around the little tents. He was so tired at the end of the day that he fell asleep on the couch at 7:30!

Sunday we went to the Celtic Festival in Zephyrhills. He wasn't very interested in doing a whole lot there, as it's not quite geared towards children his age. They did have a dog show, which he sat for pretty well. And he pet some dogs as they were in various places. He knows that you need tickets for the kid-oriented slide and bouncy thing. Mostly, he wanted to play at the park, where there was playground equipment. At the park, with lots of other kids around, David has a peculiar behavior: he hits other kids on the play ground as he is going by, even though they didn't do anything to him. I asked him why he does this, and he says because it makes him feel better and to tell the other kids that are older/bigger than him that he's the bigger one. I'm not sure if that's dominance he's trying to display, or a way to pretend he's as big or as good as the other kids...At one point he actually started a fight with another kid on the play ground and pushed that poor child down. He got an immediate time out for that, of course, and put on a big show of crying as he sat out for a few minutes, but he went right away back to that subtle hitting other kids as he would run by them. I asked David if there's some other way for him to feel "more equal" to the other kids, and he didn't know. So I've got to think about that. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please let me know.

David has two cars, and they're both black, but one of them lost its rear axle. He asked me to say which was broken, while holding the broken one out to me, and holding the non-broken one back. So the kid was "stacking the deck" as it were...

And speaking of cars, he's my official back seat driver. Remember when I said he's my personal trainer? Well now, he sees the green light, and he says, "GO! GO! GO!" or the red light, "STOP STOP STOP!" And he asks me why I stop at stop signs, even though he knows. And he's always asking me which way to turn, "that way, or that way?" I say, "Left or right?" Sometimes he says it. To him, going one way down the street is always to the park. He's

David is now beginning to write letters. All on his own. It must be the school...and I allowed him to make a choice: keep writing/drawing, or go to the park? He kept putting off the park in favor of the writing/drawing. So when I told him he had to go to Dot's and not to the park, he got upset! I had properly warned him he would lose the park if he wanted to continue, and he was okay w/ not going to the park, until he realized he wasn't going to go. It had just gotten too late. It's becoming an almost daily activity to go the park. He loves to interact with the kids that he meets there. Today he actually cheered when he saw other kids at the park. We had gone to the park earlier and no one was there, so he was disappointed.

And he can write! He's been writing the letter H all over paper after paper. I'm going to run out of printer paper soon. Anyone care to send me a ream or two? He's been using an orange hi-ligher to do most of the work, rather than crayons, though he will sit at the table and draw lines and fill in spaces on the paper with that marker. And he absolutely loves to do it. The letters, holding the pen, pencil, crayons, markers the right way...he'll get there fast! He writes the letters from the bottom to the top. A guy I work with told me his son was taught to write his letters from the bottom up, rather than the other way around. Reason: because of the transition to cursive. In cursive, you start from the bottom, too.

A couple of language notes: David has discovered "Nanna's Cottage" on DVD that we have. (And by the way, he doesn't like TV for some reason.) The characters on the show have a Maine/Canada accent to them, and now David says, "Nanna's Cottage" with "Nanna's" accent. I can't reproduce here how it sounds, but it is a distinct accent, and David does it perfectly. The other thing is that it seems that the last one or two things he needs to get figured out is how to say the sounds in the middle of words. Words like "letter" come out le-er, for example.

That's about it for this week. Hope you have a good one.

Rusty