Friday, April 17, 2009

Outdoor planning underway

Bethanne called at 8:50am to cancel playgroup today because her son had a 103 fever. This was disappointing because it was our last playgroup with Bethanne before she goes on maternity leave. Now our playgroup will switch to Mondays with Shirley. She hasn't answered my email yet regarding bringing Audrey to her playgroup. I called the daycare and put Ronin in it for Monday, but will confirm this tomorrow. I'll just have to bring Audrey along and see if she can hack being in playgroup. I don't know if she'll be ok in the daycare, because she's now a crier at 5.5 months. After breakfast I segued into the living room and we all just chilled out in front of Sesame Street. Audrey was due for a nap, too. Before I knew it, noon rolled around. Chinny came to help out, Bo came for DT. Nikko was not very cooperative during his session. He tried to get out of our circle many times, not even wanting to sit in my lap. He did engage in whatever activity Bo put in front of him. Honestly, the time flew so fast that I'm not sure what he did. Nikko worked on the farm animal puzzle, later the magnetic fish puzzle, sorted empty cups, stacked a rainbow toy, didn't care for the peg toy, did bubbles, looked at a picture book... not really sure what else! It wasn't the best session, really. He was also distracted because I had given him some French fries prior to DT, so he was probably mad that I didn't give him more. We finished lunch after DT, and then after diaper changes I put the kids in the Pilot and headed toward the clinic, with the hopes that the kids would take a partial nap.

OT was a little more successful for Nikko. He was big on running Shelly's revamped obstacle course, but he didn't engage in the fine motor stuff enough. He didn't have the attention span to work with the foam soap and paintbrush, and didn't seem satisfied to sit in my lap. All the while I talked to Shelly about the Bus Driver newsstory as well as my concerns for Nikko overall. We talked about going over his goals again, to see what we can do to make progress before preschool. I can hardly believe that it's been over a year of therapies; at one point all the therapists were telling me we've got plenty of time to work on Nikko, and now we're three months away and we're SO running out of time. Nikko is not verbal, even though he's got the imaginary conversations going. All his progress is "emerging" but it's not there yet. Imitating is slowly developing but needs to come around, and I have to light a fire under my butt to get the PECs and other systems going again. Tomorrow I'm going to hunt for the pictures I already developed and will put some of them into play. I also think that talking with Cyndi tomorrow will help give me some direction. Finally, talking with Anna sometime soon will help because she's got a background in special needs, I believe.

After OT we went home and Chinny helped me put together the Little Tikes Cube Climber. Success! Nikko enjoyed it and repeatedly climbed into it and went down the slide. Ronin liked it, too, but felt crowded out by Nikko and whined a lot to get it all to himself. The boys enjoyed the weather and tested out the octagonal gate. Neither one noticed the gaping space between our house and the neighbor's fence. So, I still have to solve that problem. The baby gate may work temporarily, but I'd have to run to the garage and haul it out and then unfold it to string across the driveway. Pretty bulky. I'd like to possibly leave it on the side of the house instead, but it would get all dirty from the rain. Unless that's what I should just do anyway and chalk it up to being an outdoor gate? I'll give it a thought. After playing, we went inside and they snacked, probably too close to dinnertime. I dug out some farm animal lacing cutouts and Nikko immediately took to it. He wasn't working really hard to lace through the holes, although I did see different incarnations of his lacing at varying times. Bedtime came later, and so tomorrow is another day. I think it will be very sunny and possibly nicer than today, so I really hope I can take the kids outside. Denis is calling in sick, but maybe he'll want to play outside too if he gets enough rest.

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