Experimenting

So, Lil Man is a 3rd shifter. I place the blame for this squarely on the shoulders of the nurses in the PICU at OSF. He was there for six months the first time, and when we left he had decided that nighttime was the right time for everything! I have tried everything I can think of, including drugs to get him on a "normal" schedule. Why be normal?

So now Lil Man goes to night school. Right now we are still working on colors. He is getting his colors correct when I can get him to pay attention. I made some nifty flashcards by combining templates from a couple of other places (www.kinderprintables.com , and Tot School). I laminated them with a machine that Sr. bought me for Christmas a couple of years back. One set, has three other smaller flashcards that can be attached with Velcro. He was having fun pulling off the little pictures and putting them back on. He hadn't really noticed the little pictures before, but this is good for fine motor skills.

He has been able to correctly pick, from a set of two cards, the colors he is being asked for. I have several sets of these that I like to switch out because you never know if he is just memorizing the correct answer for that particular card, or if he REALLY gets the concept. When he identifies them correctly a total of five times, I will move on to different objects (i.e. red ball, green car, etc.). Then I will do picking from a set of three.

He had a sucker last night. He had tried earlier with Senior. Lil Man would stick his tongue out and pull Sr.'s hand over to him. He would lick the sucker exactly. He made Sr. rub it on his tongue. Later, I tried another with him when I hooked him up to his feeding. He seemed to like it and "licked" about half of it. The suckers we were using are organic, gluten free, casein free, vegan, etc. They come in yummy flavors like wet-face watermelon, too berry blueberry, googly grape, pomegranate pucker, and mango tango. They are made by a company called Yummy Earth, and we bought them at a health food store (Strawberry Fields for the locals). Thanks Gamma! Here is the website for the company : www.yummyearth.com

Lil Man also put together a new puzzle. It was just an el-cheapo foam puzzle that I found in the grocery store dollar bin. It had different colored crayons that popped out of the puzzle. He liked putting those back in, and was having fun with the feeling of the foam.

So that is about it for last night. We are going to attempt to go take a nap. Sesame Street is over. Have a great day!