Wednesday, October 9, 2019

Stack, Line, Collapse, Repeat

Bradley is a stacker and loves to stack and to line things up.  At one point, when he was just barely walking, he sat in my dad’s garage and he pulled all the water bottles out of the flat and lined every single one of the up in a nice long row.  Like a really long row, much like dominoes as they all toppled in a slow-motion viewing of catastrophe.  I could quickly pick them up and place them back where they belong, or even within his reach…but the amount of noise coming from the garage was not something we could hide.  Whoops!  

His desire to stack and line up pretty much all things is not something that he has ever outgrown.  In fact, it is more important to him now than ever.  Bradley wants to have his iPad, but he wants to have his blocks at the same time.  He isn’t really a builder, but he loves his Lego blocks.  Sitting with his iPad in his lap, he likes to cover the whole screen with the same size Lego blocks – fours or eights, depending on the day will depend on which ones he covers his screen.  When he gets bored with his screen covered, he’ll decide to stack the blocks on their sides and build them up like a wall…sadly, he doesn’t choose to connect the Lego’s, so the slightest move and they call come tumbling down.  He takes this pretty well.  If he is still happy with those blocks, they just get stacked right back.  If he has determined that he is bored with them, they do get stacked again but only so he can toss them unceremoniously all over the floor in front of him.   When this happens, he is then required to get down and pick them all up and put them in their bucket.  Sometimes this makes him all the more interested in them again…but sometimes he sets them aside and goes for another stackable. 
Lately, he has discovered Dominoes.  They are the perfect three row high cover to his screen.  He doesn’t look at the dots, he turns them over and leaves the blanks face up.  So much for teaching him numbers while he plays.  Hat we ran into this week was the simple fact that he didn’t have the perfect number of tiles to cover his screen and we were struggling to understand what it was that had him so agitated.  Maybe we would have blown it off in a regular week, but this week he was feeling so bad for so long, we really had to figure out what he needed to make him happy again.  Once we figured it out, Dad put a picture of a Domino Tile picture on his speech Pad.  Now he tells us when we have moved from one type a block to another.  Hey, it’s the little things. 

Bradley likes to line up his pins for bowling too.  We have a lovely space outside now and so I took him outside, lined up his bowling pins and started to play bowling with him.  Sadly, his method of play is actually pretty exhausting for Mom.  He will throw the plastic bowling ball but won’t go get it.  The last time we were outside, we set up his pins and he threw the ball, then refused to go get it.  So, I walked over; like the well-trained mom I am, and I rolled it back towards him, making sure I missed the pins.  The first few times he would get it if it was close to him.  But a few times more and he realized how hot it was outside and how much he didn’t care for that.  So, when I turned back around from getting the ball, he was sitting on the ground, over in the shade.  When I gave him the ball, he stayed on his bum and tossed the ball at the pins and then remained seated while it went away from both of us.  I tried a few more times and only acquired a sunburn for my trouble, so he and I chose to return inside soon after.  
Tonight, Bradley was eating some mac n’ cheese at the table.  Eric brought home some Pediasure with Fiber six packs because when Bradley gets sick, he needs the extra Fiber to protect his intestines.  With two six packs sitting in front of him, Bradley keeps moving them around each other, lining them up and then moving them to line them up another way.  Finally, he gets tired of holding his iPad, but doesn’t want it to lay flat, so he pulls a six pack of the Pediasure to him, sets it up perfectly in front of him then puts his movie in the middle divider of the six.  The three bottles in the back hold then iPad up while the three bottles in the front keep it from falling forward.  Then he gives me the biggest grin and a slight eyebrow twitch up and I can’t help but laugh at him and applaud his ingenuity at the same time.  Crazy little guy.  Thank God he is feeling better and I am seeing those mischievous little grins returning to his face.  
The last of the hives are slowly fading away, we’re almost free of them.  The temperature is hovering at 99 still so we still have that to contend with, but my hope is that when the last of the spots fade, then his temp will drop back down to his more typical 97s.  When that happens then I am hoping that the rest of his problem systems will also line up and get all back to their usual working order.  He’s much more vocal tonight and he has been stacking and lining up all evening, so for me those all point to a slow return back to his usual.  We cannot wait!  
Any way you stack it, or Bradley does…all lined up is another day in the 31 For 21 Blog Challenge.  We don’t know why he stacks and lines things up, but we accept that part of him and keep finding other things that he can enjoy lining up and stacking.  
Have a great night all, thank you for stopping by! 


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