My favorite quote for today: "Please protect me from my own feebleness." (You can read the whole post here.) I too was floundering with my child's logic first thing this morning.

Henry woke up early with a stuffy/runny nose that was all over his face and pillow. A new phrase he uses lately is "I was scared. I didn't know where you were." As usual, I don't know whether to take this statement at face value. Was he really scared? Or has he just picked up that this is something children say when they wake in the night? I hunkered down in bed with him and once he warmed up he fell back asleep for awhile longer.

When it was time to wake up for real, he was grumpy. As he often does, he first thought about what day it is. "It's March 9th. Peter Pan the special edition comes out today."

Now, last weekend, when he sat so still for me to cut his hair, and helped clean up his room, and shared with his brother, I had mused out loud: "you are doing a lot of good stuff lately. We should get a sticker chart and you could get a sticker each time you help me or are a good listener. And when you have it all filled up, you could earn a reward."

I added "sticker chart for H" to my shopping/to-do list. (I really did- I'll take a picture if you don't believe me.) But never bought or made the chart. So this morning I said (I really need to stop doing all this thinking out loud) "oh, I never made a sticker chart, did I?"

Henry started getting really agitated about the DVD. "I want to get it. I earned enough stickers. I earned enough stickers. I earned enough stickers. I did earn enough stickers."

So I feebly responded: "if you have a good day at school today and are a good listener, we'll go tomorrow and get the DVD." I'm angry with myself about this response because it puts a lot of pressure on him to be good today, and he doesn't usually respond well to that. I'd much rather be able to reward him for cumulative good behavior throughout a week than give him an unrealistic and unclear expectation of "be good today". And what do I do if he doesn't have a good day? Then I'm really screwed because he will talk about the DVD all weekend and I'll have to come up with another way to earn it. I mean, sometimes I buy him something just because. But now I have set up this expectation...

We continue to live and learn. I will just try to be better prepared next time. Please protect me from my own feebleness.

Thanks for your comments about the IEP. For the most part I feel that his teachers have come up with thoughtful and useful goals to work on. Kristin is right about the zipping/buttoning goal: I'm sure the purpose of this one is to make the teachers' lives easier. That's the same reason Tommy's caregiver is working on zipping his coat- because she needs those 5 kids to get themselves ready to go outside. (And so it is that my 7 and 3-year-olds are working on the same skill.)

Now the eating goal-this is a sticky issue (literally- ha ha). It really goes to the heart of one of the many autism debates, doesn't it? This is one thing that Henry has been able to verbalize: “I like to eat my food with my hands, I like to break it into bites.” I just hate forcing him to take bites. One side of me feels that it serves a sensory need and it’s cruel to force him to change…

But then there’s the other side- I don’t want the other kids to make fun of him, or for him to never be able to go to a restaurant when he gets older…

So they’ll probably work on it at school and I’ll undermine them by letting him continue to use his hands at home!

I wonder how much luck the teachers will have, though. Wednesday Henry bought lunch (he just bought lunch for the first time last week) and it was pizza day. I wrote to the teachers that this might be a good time to try working on bites, because Henry, like Kristin, eats the toppings off first, with his hands.

The notebook that night said "Henry refused to eat his pizza. So we were unable to work on taking bites." So that's how this is going to go. Stubborn Henry will just refuse to eat.

I did catch him taking bites of a chips ahoy cookie last night (unprompted). Those are too hard to pick apart. So maybe that's the secret. Tough food and tough love.