New Successes - celebrating your kid's every achievement!

I was doing some of that deep thinking last night.  I was thinking about how much we have taken Ash's achievements for granted over the years.  Obviously we've celebrated the major milestones... graduations and honor rolls, losing teeth, birthdays and learning to ride a bike, .... but what about the every day things?  The less exciting things that we expect from him ... did we ever celebrate those things with him?  Praise him for a job well done?



Eli eating a giant cookie



I began to ponder this last night when I heard Eli whistling.  After about two years of trying, Eli has finally mastered the technique!  No more breathy spittle flies from his lips as he tries to force the whistle out... he actually makes a high pitched whistling sound and is learning to control the air flow to produce different notes and sounds.  It's still a work in progress, but how exciting after all these years of struggling to learn it! 

Eli had nearly given up on several occasions, proclaiming, "I'm never gonna learn this!" with great frustration.  We assured him that if he just kept trying, eventually he would figure it out.

Now that he has, we've been so proud of him!  "Seeeee!  You did it!  I knew you could do it!! 

At first he was driving us crazy with a single,whistled note that he would walk around repeating over and over.... "Hey, E...how about you go practice that in your room...??"  You would hear him in there for a while until his lips got tired.

Did we celebrate Ash learning to whistle?  Has it just been so long ago that I don't remember, or was it just expected he'd get it "like all kids" and we said, "Good job!" and dismissed it? 

Or how about when we told Ash that he was to start packing his own lunch.  We expected him to start taking care of this responsibility himself several years ago, and he did.  But did we celebrate it??? 

Eli now packs his lunch himself without complication.  But it's taken quite a while for us to get to this point.  We no longer have to listen to the hysterics of "I CAN'T DOOO IT!  IT'S TOOOOO HARD!!!!" or the drama and begging, "Plllllleeeeeaaaaase mom...just this one more time, pack it for me!?!" 

"Plllleeeeaaasse at least make my sandwich.... it's tooo hard!  I can't do it!  You make it better..."

We've spent months and months...perhaps a year or more...working with him to help him gain the skills and confidence to do it all himself.  And when he began to do it himself, we celebrated!  Because this was a long time coming!  Because "look what you can do"!  Because it was a major achievement for him!  No more tears!  No more meltdowns before we could get out the door in the morning.  No more struggle of wills on who would spread the peanut butter on the bread.  No, man, we don't live there anymore!  Now we have Mr. Capable checking the menu each day to decide for himself if he's going to spend $2 of his allowance on the school lunch, or take five minutes to pack up a lunch to take with him.  He's in control, he gets to decide, and he's all over it.  He doesn't involve us at all in the process anymore.  We have achieved a major step toward independence!

Parents of a child with a developmental disorder, or any other type of challenges, can truly appreciate what it means to celebrate the little things.  We know what it means to spend months and months trying to get your child to do the most benign things that everyone else on the planet pretty much does without any problem.  When your child finally achieves it, we know the overwhelming sense of relief and sense of VICTORY that both you and your child experience!  It's fantastic!  It's cause for a party, for heaven's sake!

Then I thought back to Ash...

Other than forgetting to pack his lunch more often than not, he was always ABLE to do it all on his own.  As a parent, shouldn't I have celebrated that??  I most certainly should have!  Maybe even moreso because he was capable of doing it EASILY!  I should have danced him around the island counter in the kitchen and allowed him to see my utter joy in his great success!  But I didn't do it.

I think with our typically-developing children, we parents need to start being more grateful, don't you?!  Look at all the magnificent things they can do without any problems at all!  We should tell them how proud we are, and impressed we are, with the things they do every single day.  We should never take for granted the stuff that comes easy to them.  We need to celebrate all they have accomplished and build them up to recognize how special they are!

I commented last night to Eli that I was really impressed with how good of a whistler he was becoming!  I said, "Maybe by the end of the summer, you'll be able to learn to blow a bubble with your gum!"  (a task he still has not been able to master, but continues to work at)

Eli said, "Yeah, maybe NOW I'll be able to learn to swim!" 

(swimming lessons to-date have been a bust ... that's a whole other topic)

I said, excitedly, "Really!?  Do you think you're going to want to do swimming lessons this summer and finally learn to swim?"  Big smile on my face!

A look of panic crossed his face.  "NOOO!  I hate to swim!"  

Okay, so maybe not...