The School Video

According to the school report, this week's topic was bugs. I am thankful that I haven't received any really graphic projects of insects. Yet. :/

At the bottom of the report, Ms. Winters wrote: I sent you a Flip Video of today's session. He did great! I received it via email. It was 20 minutes long and I was surprised that she spent that long on Nikko, when he's only at school for 2.5 hours and there are 14 kids in the class. Then again, if only 7 are special needs kids, they might not all need speech therapy. I watched the first half with Nikko next to me. Kathy was sitting on the floor in the OT room with Nikko sitting cross-legged next to her. He was categorizing pictures into three groups: Animals, Vehicles, and Food. Kathy would get his attention, hold up a picture and wait for him to identify it. If he didn't, she would say what it is and he'd repeat it, then place it on the right category. For some reason, Nikko was lifting his right pant leg to scratch his leg, but mostly he was fidgeting with the round neck collar of his shirt. No idea why. After categories, Nikko went through a book and named colors. This all took over ten minutes. I stopped the video to clean up lunch stuff and revisited it in a few hours.

During the second half of the video, Kathy told Nikko to do an action and he did it. She told him to stand up, turn around, put your hands in the air, where's your socks & shoes, touch your nose/head/hair/eyes/ears/toes. While he was doing all this, it suddenly dawned on me that he was following directions, and repeating them as well. He was not able to do ANY of these things one year ago. His cognitive abilities have grown a lot over the past school year, and even though he is highly distracted, he can DO things. He can SPEAK. It choked me up to see his progress in school. The last two things he did in the video were to identify his teachers' pictures on flash cards, and then it ended with him identifying his own family members. He doesn't quite say Mommy, yet. Instead, he pronounces it Bommy or Boppy.

This morning my in-laws came over to watch Ronin and Audrey while I ran to the dentist to have my crown put in permanently and to fill a cavity. The kids did great with their grandparents. As for the afternoon, we didn't go anywhere. Instead, I put Disney's Cars in the DVD player and the kids enjoyed it because they haven't seen it in a long time. After Audrey's bath the boys were having a big fight that I had to break up so I put her in the crib and tended to them. When I came back, I was shocked because Audrey had dug a hole in the middle of my container of Aquaphor and smeared it in her hair, as well as the bed sheets. I had to throw her in the tub again and bedtime ran late by 15 minutes. Nikko was pretty sleepy by the time I got to tucking him in, but he still attempted to sing with me. Before I left, I told Nikko to say I Love You, Mommy. His eyes were closed, he sighed sleepily, then said quietly, I love you, Mommy. I held back my tears and gave him kisses and hugs before leaving him to sleep peacefully, without me badgering him anymore. :)