Random Acts of Awesome

To keep this locomotive of positivity a-movin’…

• Alex hasn’t fought me once on homework the last two weeks. When I pick him up he gets in the truck and starts talking about doing his work so he can get the reward of some computer time. We start as soon as we get home, and we’re usually finished before 6:30. It makes the evenings so much smoother than last year, when we would battle for his attention, take sensory breaks and spend an hour or more doing the work.

• We went to an indoor playground over the weekend. He decided to lie down in the corner of one of the bounce houses where he couldn’t be seen, and that gave me a 15-minute panic attack while I searched all over the place. But before that, he came over to the basketball court with Conner and me and started dribbling a ball all on his own. And he was good at it. I had no idea he could do that. So of course I skitzed out and started “coaching” him, at which point he completely lost interest and found something else to do.

• Last week, when I was putting the kids in bed, Alex gave me an actual hug (he usually just leans into you and allows himself to be hugged without reciprocating) and told me he loved me, without my having said it first. No further explanation needed.

• Art projects are actually coming home from school in Alex’s backpack. He used to refuse to participate or only do the bare minimum. But last week when I picked him up from after-school care he was sitting quietly at a table on his own, drawing a picture of a fish. And it actually looked like a fish.

• And, speaking of art: He came home last week with a project related to the morning recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. The sample project had a traced and cut-out silhouette of a hand with a heart drawn on it, I presume to reinforce where the hand is to be placed during the Pledge. Alex’s hand had the heart drawn on it, and it was pasted in the proper place on the project. But he had cut off the middle two fingers, so the hand looked something like this:

He’s been REALLY into Spiderman lately. I doubt that his teacher fully appreciated the inspiration behind his fine-tuning of the project, but I added points for creativity and style.

• And, last but certainly not least, Alex took his first spelling test today. Not a modified test with assistance. He took the same test all the other kids took. It was a review of 10 sight words from kindergarten last year. We worked on it all week, and I knew he could do it. I just wasn’t sure how he would perform in the classroom setting. I shouldn’t have worried:

 

That’s a circled “E” in purple ink at the top, in case you can’t read it. Ten-for-ten. Great way to start the weekend.

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• art
• autism
• happy
• love
• progress
• school
• spider man