Anna is hilarious! I’m seeing her unique personality coming out! Her speech therapist has been working on “hypothetical questions”. For example, what would you do if you got hurt? And Anna would answer, “get a band-aid”. As long the answer is “appropriate” then it gets counted as correct. Her answers have at times been so unique and I wanted to share. One of the questions was, “What do you do if you’re hot?” Her answers were quite unique. These were her responses: 1) Go in the refrigerator and 2) get an ice cream and eat it. I thought this was so interesting to see her thought patterns in action.
Frequently, especially lately, when she deems a particular assignment as too hard, she would say, “I can’t do it” rather early on and so as my attempt to help in her perseverance – I explained that I truly thought she can do it and so, instead of saying I can’t, to have a “can do” attitude and say instead, “I can and I will.” Now, looking back, I can see how this might be fraught with problems, but I did not think of that at the time. I perhaps should have said, “I will try it” or some other wording. In any case, every time she would say it, I had taught her to raise her fist in the air in a motion of conviction. At this, she picked up quickly and was going around saying, “I can and I will” for many tasks and even to her speech therapist and thankfully, when she would say it, she actually did end up accomplishing whatever task was set before her with that positive change in attitude. Well, one day, we came back from the grocery store with sushi. The sushi was a large adult portion that was to be shared with her grandma, but Anna liked it very much. Pretty soon, I saw her little hands reach over slowly and grab the entire plate and put it on the other side of her away from grandma, indicating that this was hers for the taking. I returned from the kitchen, saw what had happened and exclaimed, “Anna! You can’t eat that whole thing.” Anna quickly turned to me and said, “I can and I will!” with fist raised. Oh, Anna, I do need to be careful what I say around her, it sure can end up backfiring! But, that is the uniqueness of Anna that I treasure and the moments I hold dear to my heart.
We love to share videos of Anna too – what her talk about about her Sunflower she planted. Always brings a smile to our faces!