A really, really good day!

So I don't normally post back to back days, but I really needed to log today, because it was fabulous! We had ZERO tantrums. Now, granted, today was an "off" day--no therapies, no set agenda--but still.

Here's what we did:

{Backstory: For the last month or so, Bug keeps asking to "go dressed". Or if you say "Let's get dressed" he'll get his shoes on. We've tried explaining that getting dressed means putting on clothes, but it hasn't clicked. Sometimes when we're on the highway, he'll ask to "go dressed" and then get really upset when we exit for home or wherever. Our best guess is that on the day we took him to see all the tractors at a John Deere Store, we told him we had to go get dressed first and he assigned the store the name "dressed"...I know it's a little crazy, but we've been everywhere else and it keeps coming up and it makes at least some sense to me. He's been on it for a month and it's been a month since we were there. Coincidentally, we've been having behavioral problems for a month.}

This morning, I asked Bug if he wanted to get dressed, he ran to get his shoes and I said that we had to put new clothes on and then I would take him where I thought "dressed" was. So I drove him out to the tractor store. He was calm pretty much the whole way, so I *think* (and really freakin' hope) I was right. We didn't get out, but I explained that we couldn't climb on the tractors today because that was just a special thing (Like when we saw goats at the mall). He seemed ok with the explanation (quiet, no crying) and when I asked if he wanted to go to the park, he said please and we left without issue. We played at the park with no issues.

Adam and I had talked last night about how we could break the routine of fighting getting out of the car. We figured that the PRT method would probably be having a motivating reward ready for him that he can take once he's out of the car. Since Bug almost always brings a book or a toy with him to hold, I decided that I'd take it once he was buckled and explain that he could have it once we got out of the car. He wasn't happy at first, but seemed ok with it and both times got out of the car without a fuss when I said he could have the reward. We'll try it again tomorrow at speech, I'm hoping that it's a strong enough motivator that we can at least get him into the building without a fight.

This afternoon was wild, but a heap of fun. Yesterday I had tried filling a tub with soapy water for Bug to play with and it flopped. He "took a bath". Today I made bubble solution and we went out and played with that and the remnants from yesterday. It made a gigantic mess:

He had so much fun. And what I thought was really interesting was that he was giving me a lot of spontaneous verbalizations. He told me "taking a bath" "getting all wet" and "spill" when he dumped out the tub. He also came inside and helped me fill a bucket with more water to play with, asked me to blow bubbles and popped them with his nose. While it wasn't a lot of back and forth, he was a lot more engaged than I've seen him lately. Afterwards I had to rinse him off in our shower because he was a sticky, soapy mess (the solution had sugar in it). He thought that was absolutely hysterical and was just laughing like crazy. :D

Then a bit later he asked for the red paint and took the initiative to get all the paint out. I asked him if he wanted paper and he said please so I put out paper. Then he tried to put paint on the paper himself! With help we got three globs down, he put his fingers in it. I brought him a paint brush and quicker than quicker he did this:

So wonderful! I love that he's willing to use a brush (I'm totally ok with him not liking it on his hands, that's reasonable) AND that this was entirely self-directed. It only lasted a few minutes (during which I was distracted with something else so I wasn't able to work with him at all) but wow, I was so impressed!

The rest of the day went smoothly too. We tried undies (unsuccessfully but at least we tried) and he sat for a good amount of time at dinner too.

Hopefully we can start building momentum and reinforcing good habits and routines instead of bad ones. I'm really hoping that seeing the tractor store will calm him down a bit about going places, but I do think that I'm going to try to substitute "get dressed" for "change clothes" or something of that nature to try to avoid confusion.