Cute boys, cute stories

Time for a round-up of random cute stories courtesy of my sweet little boys, along with random cute pictures of them lately.

But first, a shout-out to my beloved Savers, for these cute matching plaid shorts. I bought the first pair a year ago and then found the second pair a couple of weeks ago. I really love Savers.


* First story is from Will. More and more we're noticing Will's dependency on routine; it was a question that came up a lot during his various evaluations last year, and now we know why. He gets verrry agitated if things aren't how he thinks they should be - and since he isn't able to communicate the exact problem, I end up doing a lot of guessing until he calms down (i.e. one time I was feeding him his cereal with my left hand, and he freaked out until I switched to my normally-used right hand).

Anyways, one morning I was feeding him his oatmeal and we got two or three bites in when suddenly he refused to eat any more. I was prepared for another round of trial and error to figure out what the problem was, but instead he calmly took the bowl from my hands and set it down on the table. He then took my hands and placed them together, palms touching, and then folded his arms and bowed his little head. Yep, I had forgotten to say a prayer before he started eating! I quickly rectified the situation and then Will happily continued eating :).


* Now a Clyde story. Clyde is very aware that Will's brain works differently and that he can't often tell us what he wants or is thinking, and Clyde does an excellent job of protecting and helping Will (i.e. if we take something away from Will, Clyde protests as well, that 'Will wanted that! He wanted that!')

So the other day, Clyde wandered in eating the crackers that I had just recently given to Will. I raised my eyebrows a bit, prompting Clyde to explain, "Will just said he wants to share his animal crackers with me . . . in his head!"

Soooo glad my children have this telepathic connection, should make life easier in the future :). Oh, and I let Clyde continue eating them since Will's not a huge cracker fan in the first place, and Clyde definitely is.


* Which leads us to our next story, which actually lends some credence to Clyde's claims of Will wanting to share the crackers.
(I think Will has seen Toy Story too many times - doesn't this remind you of the toys hiding under the traffic cones to navigate their way across the street?)

Last Tuesday afternoon Clyde was taking a nap while Will had speech therapy. In an effort to prompt Will to say 'open', Cheryl put two Cheez-it crackers in a closed container. After Will (finally) said "Open, please!" and was granted access to the crackers, he carefully picked them both up and took them to his and Clyde's bedroom, where he carefully laid them next to Clyde's sleeping head. The two speech therapists and I almost melted, it was sooo sweet :). Of course, then Cheryl switched to fruit snacks, which Will definitely ate himself!



* For the next Clyde story, we'll return to the subject of prayer. First of all, Clyde's prayers are mostly focused on 'thank yous', which is great . . . except that instead of asking for things, he just expresses gratitude for them, thereby assuming he'll get them. He also has a pretty standard prayer, so lately I've been encouraging him to really think beforehand and include new things, so one night he added, "Thank you that we can visit the Smithses every week . . . well, every three weeks" and then the next night it was "Thank you that we can visit Elko every three weeks." Luckily, his concept of time is still a little fuzzy, so for all he knows only three weeks will have elapsed between our road trip last month and our upcoming one!


* Finally, Will absolutely floored both me and his occupational therapist, Gretchen, last week when as we were working on horizontal and vertical lines, he selected a black crayon and did the following at the bottom of the page:

It's a little hard to decipher, but luckily for us he narrated what he was doing . . .

"W . . . I . . . L . . L . . Will!" I was in shock - he has never attempted to write a letter before, let alone his name! He was so deliberate, and has now recreated it a couple of times, always making the 'W' by drawing three lines next to each other with a funny half circle either underneath or to the side :). It's obviously pretty difficult to have an almost three-year-old child who is fairly non-verbal, so we love seeing these insights into his mind and knowing that these amazing abilities exist inside him.

And that's how my boys have been entertaining/amazing me for the last month or so while we suffered through a cold February, hooray for March!

P.S. Later that day I realized something crazy: Will did this four and a half weeks before his third birthday. Clyde did the same thing two and a half weeks before his third birthday. Let's hear it for consistency! (Also, let's pity any possible future children for the expectations
they will have to attempt to live up to . . . )