Often Imitated

David’s development has really taken off lately – nearly every day he’s doing something new and different. Several of his therapists told me this would happen once he began walking, that major progress in one area is usually associated/correlated with big progress in other areas. The thing we are enjoying most is all the ways in which he’s imitating us, showing us he has been paying plenty of attention to the way we do things in our family.

David’s main chore is helping with laundry. This usually consists of me taking the wet clothes out of the washer, shaking them out, and then resting them on the open dryer door for David to push them the rest of the way in. He is diligent in this duty, if something doesn’t go in right away he keeps giving little pushes until it does. Occasionally he punks out before the load is done, but as you can imagine we have plenty of laundry at our house and sometimes I wish I could quit before it’s done. He also helps me get the dry clothes out of the dryer into the basket for folding. Lately he has begun taking small items like washcloths and disappearing around the corner with them, coming back empty-handed. Follow-up reveals he has gone to the living room and put them on the arm of the couch or the chair, and smoothed them out, because that’s exactly what Daddy does when he’s folding. He also helps quite a bit with unloading groceries, sitting on the floor and handing me boxes of cereal or pasta, or cans of veggies, for me to put on the higher pantry shelves. He’s not easily daunted, either: he can pick up one of those 48 oz bottles of apple juice and carry it a short way, and even a gallon of milk he can drag for a little while.

He’s a great little problem-solver; yesterday he began trying to climb up on his little Elmo stepstool. He has previously used it to sit on and has not offered to try to stand, but yesterday it was pushed against a wall, and he used that to brace and balance himself while he took all these steps up and down – his own little step aerobics class. It was so great to see him experimenting with different places to put his hands.

These things may seem little, but David continues to provide regular reminders of how much work goes into everything, for him. You notice lots of stuff you never had to before.