Bradley In Control

October 18, 2017

My son has an IPad and he can find anything on it; whereas I can barely find anything.  We have so many learning apps on it, and I make him sit down with me to run through them quite a bit.  Lots of time he and fight over this, but once in a while he actually enjoys this time learning.  If I remind him too much of school he freaks out, so we do it in spurts and starts.  He enjoys School very much, he doesn't enjoy school with mom very much.  Summer brings sooo much joy in our house...Not.  But work we must.

I try to think of motivating things, but most of my best ideas and tools go to school to keep him on track there, so that I am stuck with next to nothing here at home.  "Here Bradley, do this work and then you can have a car!"  Yeah right, if he can't get the car in my hand there are a good forty all over the place, some in places that he knows where they are and I don't.  I swear he does this on purpose..

When he gets to run the control of his IPad, he is in seventh Heaven.  He gets control of it quite a bit. There is much more time for him to have his own control than the time I can control.  He outwaits me  by virtue of I have too many other things I have to do for him and to him that I can't really force the issue with him.  All that being said, there are times he gets very frustrated with me and to shut me up, basically he will; for example, suddenly match all nine letters on our card appropriately and correctly and then look at me like: "Fine, it's done.  Can I have my IPad now?"   Or he'll fly through one of his favorite learning apps, Starfall, and then give me the same look.  And while I sit there looking at him with a barrage of thoughts rushing through my head like: dang it, you stinker, you turkey, I am so impressed with you, I didn't know you could do that, how long have you been holding out on me, and how do I get you to do that again and again.  I hand over the IPad and watch him navigate to his favorites.

He has favorite little youtube videos, shorts with kids, pranks and this one illusionist/magician that blows us all away.  I don't know how he finds them, which concerns me a bit, but since I am always right here, I get to monitor him and make sure he doesn't go anywhere he isn't allowed to go.  I think he alone has made the Magician a millionaire and he quite possibly has financed the college education of at least three of the seven kids in this YouTube Video family that posts their visits to playgrounds, and vacations and all that kind of stuff.  I have their theme song permanently embedded in my brain never to be removed and find myself humming it at the oddest times.  Through his browsing he found Peppa Pig and has watched her constantly until at one point he discovered "Masha  and the Bear" in Russian.  So I happened to find Masha on Netflix, and sometimes he'll watch it there, but mostly, he wants to watch it on his IPad, preferably in Russian.  The only great part about finding Masha in English is that now Eric and I know what they are saying, and that Masha is pretty funny for an annoying little girl.

Here's the kicker in all this though, Bradley will ask for his movie, often while he is in the middle of watching Masha or Peppa on the big tv.  And for whatever reason, often sheer survival, he'll finally get it and then will proceed to go right to whatever he was just watching on the big tv.  Apparently, my son has control issues.

I am not sure if this is good or bad for him.  I can see where he very might need to have some areas of his life where he has control; because let's face it, there is very little he does have control over.  Most the time it's not even his parents or his school with the control either, most days he is at the whim of his own body.  Trying to temper his need to control some parts of his life with teaching him compliance to get along well with others in control of his life is proving the toughest of battles.

I am always pleased when he is willing to come with me for things I ask of him, sometimes carrying his IPad, sometimes he leaves it behind and comes back to it.  This is something he only started in the last nine months or so.  I know that seems like a long time, but things with Bradley build over time.  Behaviors change and adapt but only in small increments that may or may not build on each other. We know he's changed because he has kept most of the changes and is showing us excellent progress as he keeps moving forward in his abilities and his capabilities.  I'm not sure it will ever move as fast as we would like, but as long as progress is happening in whatever increments that Bradley will give us, we'll take.

Time to swap the IPad for Pajamas and call it a night with a few books, the old fashioned kind that mom reads, not a computer generated voice.  ;-). Have a great night all!

31 for 21...Challenging to Bring Awareness and Acceptance for Down syndrome!