Pairs

Julie took James to the second Learning Program meeting Saturday morning. We've been doing it with him regularly, and we've noticed that his attention is getting better—he's giving us better and more consistent visual attention to the cards. I'll try to post a little video soon of what we do when we do this at home.

Yesterday he was really doing great. One of the people doing this pilot program is Tina, his First Steps occupational therapist whom we loved (and miss dearly). She was raving about how much better his attention is getting. Julie was really excited about two things in particular.

The kids were working with some coloring book-like cutouts of a mom, a dad, and a baby. For each cutout, there was a box with the same picture on it. When James sat down in front of the box with the picture of a dad on it, he immediately started signing "dad"—pretty amazing, since it was an abstract dad and not me.

Second, James was very consistent about matching the dad cutout to the dad box and the baby cutout to the baby box—again, something we haven't seen before. Julie came home really excited about the program.

I was talking with my old friend Andy Craig last week, and when Andy asked me how James was doing, I was getting ready to start talking about how frustratingly slow some parts of James's development have been—language in particular.

But I realized that Andy hasn't seen James since last May, and I started thinking about how far he's come since then—I was remembering how, early last summer, James would start crying every time he saw Julie from the Belle Center show up at our house because he knew she was going to work him. I remember one day in particular when Julie and I tried to get James to go to the park at the end of our street in his walker, and he dragged his feet and screamed the whole way, screamed at the park (even on the swing) until we left him alone, then screamed some more on the way home. Just a few weeks ago, James started walking up the steps at the park by himself—he uses the railing, but he doesn't need my hand.

So far in some ways, so achingly slow in others. I think this is the "Let Child Set Pace" reminder.