Working on our waving

Thomas and I went to the Halloween parade tonight in town.  I thought it would be a great opportunity to practice the waving game, and it was.  After a bit of warm up time, I did get him to wave at quite a few people in the parade.  At first, the wave was very small and close to his body, but then after a few times and some encouragement, he was waving in a way that the people could see him.  He also waved bye and gave a thumbs up to our neighbor when they were leaving our house the other day.  This is definite progress, as he usually won’t wave to people close by.

Scavenger Hunts

After our first follow up visit with Dr. E. at the SMart Center, we were given some new games to play.  One of which is a scavenger hunt.  In short, this involves printing out a picture list of a couple things we are looking for at a store, i.e. rice or crackers at the grocery store.  Then when we get to the store it involves me approaching a worker and telling them we are looking for something and then letting Thomas give a nonverbal response (pointing to the picture of what we are looking for) or a verbal response (saying the word "Rice.")

My first thoughts when I heard of this game and what we had to do was:

1)  This is going to look so weird to the workers we are approaching
2)  I have an infant and a three year old.  Shopping is extremely difficult with these two, let alone throwing in a scavenger hunt!

We made the committment going into this though that we were going to give this our all due to the time, money and quite frankly desperate hope that we were investing in the Smart Center. 
 

So the scavenger hunts began.  They were not easy.  They were awkward.  They were a huge pain to compile in addition to a grocery or other shopping list.  But they started working.  That is all it took for us to get hooked.  On our first trip to the grocery store we did a scavenger hunt with 5 items.   Thomas picked the item we would look for and we rehearsed what he would say before each encounter when I gave him two choices and told him to “tell me” as a verbal intermediary.  When we asked the first person for an item, he would only point to the item, but after that he started to tell me quietly.  By the time we got to our last item, I gave him the two choices and he turned right to the man and said “Cookies.”   This is the beginning of him realizing it's no big deal for others to hear his voice!