Playtime!

well, like we spoke about on the phone, i spent most of the weekend and today seeking out and testing some fun play activities to do with henry so that the majority of our RDI work doesn't involve housework - poor kid, he was working harder than any five year old i know doing laundry, dishes, cooking and watering plants. ha! however, it has been difficult to find play activities as you know that he likes and that i can involve myself in...especially since the majority of his favorite pastimes, like reading and playing on the computer, are such solo activities. As i mentioned on the phone, i've tried to insert myself into a few of his favorite computer games and that seems to be working well....except that they can be very distracting so it's hard to get him to reference me. we also did some hanging out in the bean bag room, but my creativity was pretty low during that time so we ended up just hanging.

tonight, i scored bigtime by starting up a quick game of hide and seek (really i was trying to get hank and rosie to hold off on wanting dinner til 5, so i had 1/2 hr to kill). The game was basic in that i would go hide while they counted to ten, then i would periodically say "where's mommy?" until they started to determine which room i was in and where i was. I really couldn't believe that henry played along like he did - i think i hid like 6-7 different times and there was a lot of great "anticipation" and emotion-sharing in the game - and of course big tickles when they found me. hen was even able to wait and count to ten to give me a chance to hide - i hate to say but i think he and rosie are about on the same level with this game. interestingly enough, the game ended when rosie found me before he did....he didn't like that one bit!

as i mentioned, i did a bit of taping this weekend working on objectives 5 and 6. tonight, after rosie went to bed (and b/c my throat is sore) i decided to do the mommy's lost her voice game. we didn't have a lot of activities that we HAD to do - just to brush teeth, put on pjs, click off the light, etc...but i was able to get a lot of non-verbal back and forth with henry to do them. he also read ME a story before bed...and would check in with me as the story progressed to occasionally see my response to something or an indication that he was on the right track....it's amazing when you shut up what happens! one interesting note on that though is how henry would be able to say some of the story verbatim and then other parts he would just fill in with blahblahblah...i wonder if that's what he's unable to process when i read the story to him??? weird.

we got the RCR stuff and i'll probably read through it tonight. yesterday i finally applied for that scholarship you gave us the info on, so we'll see where that goes. i'll let you know.