The Listening Game

As many of you know, Austin loves to be in control. There is a game he plays at school during Speech Therapy that he loves ... It's called The Listening Game. His amazing and patient Speech Language Pathologist, Sara, incorperates different ways of playing this game, but today they were playing it with shapes. She goes first and covers her mouth with her speech hoop and says a word and he uses a 'coin' to cover up the word on his 'Bingo' board that she has said. Afterwards, it is his turn to be the teacher and boy does he love this!

Well, tonight after putting his older brothers to bed (because they require more sleep than our Energizer bunny, Austin), he went and got his shape puzzle. While I was cleaning up the playroom, he came over and signed to me "Mom, play with Austin. Puzzle." So, of course I had to stop cleaning and play. We took turns being the teacher and being the listener. I just LOVE moments like this ... When we are communicating and he is just absorbing it all! In a house of three boys with various activities, we don't get a lot of opportunities like this. Anyway, as I sat there, I realized that I am still in awe of how much this teeny-tiny person takes in. I was asking him to find shapes like trapezoid, octagon and pentagon and he found them all! With his severe CAS, he doesn't have a lot of clearly reconizable word, but his newest word, oval, was by far his favorite to say. We practiced fingerspelling trapezoid, octagon and pentagon since there are no signs for them. He signed triangle, diamond, square, circle and rectangle. Then, we took turns doing the number puzzle. He is a wizard at counting and it is one of his favorite things to do. In fact, his newest 'faze' (he has many of them) is to tell me how many I don't have of something ... "Not 3 Mommy, not 2 Mommy, 1 Mommy."

So, while many days I feel like I don't do enough and could be doing so much more, in essence feeling like I am failing all three of my kids, it's the moments like this that we need to hold on to and remember. Not our failures ... We need to remember them, but only to learn from and to move on. Mmmm ... Now if only I could take my own advice.