Mands: 26

An okay day for the little one, who is now upstairs sleeping. When I came in I helped get Tony’s breakfast to him and he wasn’t very interested in the waffle or the hot dogs. We sat in the living room with Morgan and watched ‘Nightmare’ for awhile. Around 9:14 he headed into his room. I grabbed turtle, cup, and his breakfast and headed in after him. First we built some structures with cardboard bricks. We built a giant chair and let one of Tony’s Blue stuffed animals sit in it. Then Tony sat in it. He spent some time sitting down and then getting back up, so I slipped in some motor imitation which he did pretty well with.

Soon Tony manded for painting, so I took the opportunity to do the ‘manding for the missing object(s)’ exercise. Asking “what else do we need?”, or “what’s missing?,” I elicited such correct responses as “shirt,” “brushes,” and “paint.” Tony had to see the paper befor he remembered it was a necessary entity. We painted for awhile, racking up mands as he asked for each color to be opened, wanted help painting the different Wiggles, and so on. While he was busy being artistic I got out the small chalk board and tried more missing mands; first I wrote O-N-Y on the board and told him it almost said Tony, but something was missing. He was uninterested in filling me in, so I clued him in and told him while writing the ‘T’. Then I tried the house. I drew the square house, a door, and two windows. I asked him to look at the house and tell me what else we needed. He answered “woof,” but only after my second attempt.

While he was painting his hands got dirty and he looked at them in a dissatisfied way. I asked him if he wanted a wipe and he said “yes.” As I delivered the wipe I asked him to wipe his hands, which he did, then I asked him to throw the wipe in the trash can, which he also did without hesitation! (These are objectives in our program.) We also tackled the easiest intraverbals during this time. He told me his name when I asked, but would not tell me his age. He manded for several different shows. We had to get Marlaina to help, because the remote control was MIA. We watched some Wiggles and then he manded for “Elmo.” I couldn’t find any Elmo DVD’s, so I decided the Big Bird one would have to suffice, and it did.

Soon Jill arrived and I sat in on Tony’s session. Unfortunately for Marlaina, she did too. She was finally able to sneak out around the halfway point. Tony kept getting distracted and trying to escape the room, and he even succeeded a few times. Jill would go retrieve him and then get him interested in an activity. By the end she was reading a Dora the Explorer book with Tony in his playhouse after building chairs for the boy and girl babies.