In an effort to lighten things up, a conversation with J the other night begs to be shared. He was sitting watch a cartoon where one of the characters had just gotten a new puppy. The conversation went like this:

me: You’re going to get a dog too!

J: Dog!

me: What will you call your dog?

J: Chicken!

I was stunned at the answer but left it alone, carrying on with dinner making and such. A little while later I did ask him again what he’ll call his dog and got the answer of “chicken” again but have had no answers to the question since. We’ll revisit that in a few months but, future dog, if you end up named Chicken I am half sorry and half amused.

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There’s a lot of routine and even some could say ritual involving days with my little bear. We have our routines surrounding various things including getting ready for school, going out somewhere, what we do when we come home from school and so on. One of our little rituals of late reminds me of an awful episode he had long before he was I think even in early intervention. He was under 2 and just walking at this point at least and he had just lost his mind at the idea of getting immediately back into the car when we were at a store in Northborough. We needed to cross the parking lot, the long way, to get to the grocery store after picking up some little boy necessities at Babies R Us. He could not find calm at all so across the parking lot the long way we trekked.

Now, like most modern fancy parking lots there were landscaped areas that segregated out streets and what parking areas served what store or cluster of store. They have shrubs and trees and mulch and all that fun stuff. We had to walk across all of them in our path, this day. We also had to say hello to every tree and bush.

This brings me to today.

Every day, J stops to say hi to the tree in front of our house. He says hi to the trees at school sometimes, but he always says hi to the light pole and the flag pole. Now, this isn’t a case of him ignoring the people he passes, for he acknowledges them too even if not verbally, but it is a strict part of our routine to say “hi pole!” or “hi tree!” whenever we’re on our way to school.

You would think it would get old after the 750th time doing it but it never does. It’s his “thing”. It gives him peace. It doesn’t hurt a soul and it takes three seconds to do. As long as he doesn’t want to go greet every tree in White Mountain National Forest anytime soon I think we’re all good.

We’ll just be careful of Christmas tree sales for a while.

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Yesterday afer therapy we were driving home and pulling up to the last set of lights before we get home. All of a sudden from the back seat I hear “Oh no!”… which I think I have heard out of him maybe twice. I’m looking around, baffled because I could not immediately see what he was reacting to. Then I looked ahead, about a block up, and saw the 18 wheeler attempting a turn on residential streets no 18 wheeler should be attempting. He noticed it jumping the curb long before I did. We were safely quite far away and no one was hurt in this driver’s act of whatever he thought he was doing there but wow… I have to say I am pretty impressed little man caught that. I wasn’t even sure if that’s what he’d been reacting to but when I said “oh wow, the truck!” he said “oh no!” again.

He gets it. Even when we don’t.

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And that’s a little bit of our random daily life of late. Nothing too spectacular. He had a tummy bug last week, which stunk but hopefully we’ve seen the last of that. Still having a lot of bedtime struggles, namely keeping him asleep without him destroying my sleep, but there’s a bigger weighted blanket on the way that I hope will help. If not, it’s back to the drawing board.

I still have some small fundraising stuff to update about and I’m getting there, slowly but surely. Emphasis on slowly. I am, it seems, part snail these days.