Seeds of stress

Another day of testing my patience. Digging deep to China. Nikko had speech this morning and he didn't do anything stellar, unfortunately. The biggest thing was that Gloria noted that his jargoning sounded more conversational than in the past. The intonation sounded like he was having a conversation instead of just making noise. His attention span was scattered today and he was really clingy to me. That's not unusual, but Gloria planted the seed of fear in me that Nikko might have a harder time when preschool starts if he's so attached to me. What am I supposed to do now? Force him to be by himself? We see each other every day in this house. When we are outside he is very curious and does love to run around, but he checks in with me or wants to at least know where I'm at. Somehow I'll have to find other opportunities for him to be with other people. I think being in the playgroups is vital to him for this. I've left the room once and when I came back he was pretty upset. I wonder if I should keep trying that. In the past I just really didn't want to disrupt the playgroup dynamic by leaving Nikko to cry. Seems distracting.

This afternoon my mom came over to watch the kids for a few hours so I could go to my chiropractor appointment. It was during Ronin and Audrey's naptime so that helped. Nikko slept a little bit, sitting up. Mom couldn't stay when I came back, then it was just me and the kids again. Nikko had swim class at night, and came back in a good mood. My patience was mainly tested with Ronin today, who was extra-whiny. Nikko also gave me some stress because although he loves watching the Hi-5 DVDs, whenever there is a pause in the show or I stop the VCR to change the disc, he started crying and getting mad. I tried to tell him to calm down and even restrained him, but he just got madder. I don't know how to curb this tantrum of his. Prolonging putting the DVD in makes him madder. When we have to go somewhere there's really no alternative so things get dicey. But if it's a quiet afternoon, the tantrum because the DVD stopped seems really unreasonable to me.

While we read nighttime stories, Denis said that Nikko seemed to be pointing at the pictures in the books more. Cognitively that's a good sign. I think the next step would be to get him to point to something that we ask, so he can identify it. Sounds easy, right? Truly, it's not.