As I reflect back on father’s day there seemed to be very little need for our intervention between the kids, they were playing together exceptionally well and K was in very good form with a lot of very good speech and interacting with us, his sister, his grandparents, and people at the beach. I have noticed lately his initiating social contact with other people, quite often complete strangers. He engaged a distant neighbor of ours one evening while she was out walking her dog and they had quite a reasonable conversation while we were petting her dog at the bottom of our driveway.

He was also less aggressive. Though this sounds potentially disturbing it just means that he has been striking out at Tracy and I when he has not been getting his way, and I am not totally convinced that this is very different from many 4 year old boys that aren’t getting their way. However, this is definitely not something we want to continue and have been working different strategies to help minimize, and hopefully eliminate, this unwanted behaviour. We are hopeful too that as his language complexity seems to be on an increase of late this will lead to less frustration and more positive re-enforcement during these types of scenarios and the physical response can be diminished.

As K’s language complexity has been increasing and so has his level of social/personal engagement and it has made interacting with him much easier and more productive for everyone, including him. His level of play with his sister has definitely increased and has become more interactive than merely copying or the past one-sided play that we have seen. I hope this will create a positive feedback loop that will fuel on further advances in language and social behaviour.

It would be nice if I could attribute some of his recent flurry of advances to something we had been doing lately. Of course it goes without saying that he is going to be developing no matter what we do, even if we do nothing regarding intervention. However, we like to think we have been fairly successful in helping him on his developmental path and it would be nice to know what we have done so we could do more of the same.

It is good to see this continued development despite his continued sleep issues. Though by many accounts they are not severe they have been going on since early in the year. I have started keeping a sleep journal to see if I can tease out any patterns, but I think I have come to the conclusion that it has a lot to do with habituation. To further fuel my theory, not long ago Tracy and I went away for an evening and the kids slept over at Gramma and Grampa’s house. In true fashion K slept all night long without a peep or a midnight visit and got up slightly later than usual. Very frustrating since I can count on one hand the number of full nights of sleep I have had since February, but does add some legitimacy to my theory. Hopefully this will end soon and we can all go back to getting a decent nights sleep.

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