Mands: 26

Tony had a good day! It was beautiful outside and we took advantage of it. We went outside after a short time in his room coloring and fingerpainting with the messless colorwonder paints. Once we went outside Tony went directly for the bus and said ‘aben.’ I opened the door and he climbed in, being sure to avoid hitting his head on the steering wheel. I climbed in and took a seat in the driver’s seat, he was in the passenger seat. I gave the wheel a few spins and made some car noises and horn noises. Tony was enjoying it and we started in on a few rounds of “Wheels on the Bus” Then we climbed in the back. We pretended to sleep and made snoring noises, until Tony said “wak aap!” Then we popped up. Tony said “all done,” so I went to the door and said “What do you want me to do?” He said “aben.” I said “open what?,” and he made an approximation for door. He’s making progress.

We went back inside to do some work. As soon as we entered his room it was clear that he had something in mind to play with. I picked him up and had him point to what he wanted. He wasn’t quite high enough to reach the play-dough, which was what he’d pointed to, so I took advantage of this and tried to get him to mand for it by asking “what do you want?” He wasn’t in the mood to say it, even when I had it in my hand. He didn’t even want to say it when I said “say play-dough.” Oh well, I didn’t press the issue. We played with the green and pink play-dough, then we got the red and blue down too. He handed me the entire glob of each color one after another, manding for me to “wooll” them. I rolled them each into somewhat uniform cylinder shapes. He was pleased with this and set them all side by side on the table. He then started using the magnets to print shapes in the dough. One of the magnets he grabbed from the door was a purple triangle. If he can say ‘triangle,’ I have yet to hear it. It seems like he just says something close to circle and leaves it at that. I repeatedly asked him to “say triangle” until I got a pretty good approximation out of him! Yeah! I think it helped that I broke it down into lllooonnnnggg syllables and overexaggerated the enunciation. He decided it was time to use some different materials for his play-dough printing. He walked over to his blocks container, grabbed a blue cylinder block, and said “bwoo cwuk-kle.” I said, “yes, it’s a blue circle! Yeah Tony!” Then he got a red triangle, and I asked him what color it was. It took a few tries to get a response, but finally, he said “wed.” We were just cleaning up the play dough when Lane arrived.