Or rather, Big Boy Steps.
(All the kids painting)
Progress. Good stuff. It seems as if Thomas makes progress slowly but steadily, but will occasionally have a little regression right before making a big jump. Does that make sense?
That happened recently. A hard time, followed by another speech explosion and some big behavior improvements.
For one, he is now sleeping with his door open. That might not sound like much, but he's always had to have it closed or he just runs out. Repeatedly. Over and over. Or he gets so distracted he can't sleep. Monkey started asking for his door to be open, so Thomas did, too. It's actually quite a big thing for him to be able to do that.
(Note the delicate way Thomas handles his brush - he's not smashing it down at all! Ha!)
Also, and I was reminded of this again today and how great it is: he's been walking next to the cart in a store instead of having to sit in it. Seriously HUGE step for him. Since Monkey was born and had to take up the front baby seat in the cart, Thomas has had to ride in the back part. (One of those things I swore I'd never do with my kids - but he just ran away or would lay on the ground and refuse to move if I tried him out of the cart).
Even in the cart, he'd freak out in Target and turn around and start smacking Monkey. Or grabbing stuff off shelves, or throw things out of the cart, or ... the list goes on. Needless to say, shopping has been very hard for us for the past two years. And if it's a place without carts - forget it. Now and then I've tried letting him walk - usually when he insisted - but even a couple of months ago that would only last a minute before he ran off. Grr.
(Then his painting got folded up to become a spaceship)
All of a sudden he demanded to not be put in the cart. I told him he had to hang on to the side of the cart if he wanted to walk, otherwise he'd have to go in. Shopping the past couple of weeks has been amazing! Seriously, I had a wonderful morning today, and we went to two stores! And Thomas walked the whole time! We even detoured and checked out the toys and books in both stores - just because he was having such a good time there! Not to mention that I can fit a lot more in the cart now.
And, while he's made huge potty-training progress over the past... six months, he still has accidents quite often, but even that has been getting better!
Happy! This post is in part to remind myself the next time he seems to be having problems - more progress is coming! Baby steps to the finish line!
(And then he painted his forehead - and his brother.)