Since Jenny and Amy were away this week for more Sarah-Rise training, I got to have some quality Sarah & Dad time earlier this week and then my sister Sonia arrived Tuesday to help out. When I mentioned that it was just me and my daughter to another engineer at the company we're working with right now, he said, "So, ice cream for breakfast and legos all day, huh?" It was pretty funny to very truthfully answer yes since it was literally what we had done the day before.
So, here is another Sarah-Rise Update from a little different perspective than usual.
Hanging out with Sarah is really fun these days. We can have real conversations, make jokes, laugh about things, and she often genuinely impresses me with something new. At the same time, a full day with Sarah is long and my patience with certain requests definitely decreases as the day goes on (as does her tolerance of my saying no to those requests). As with most endeavors, living a day in another's shoes gives new respect and understanding.
As a parent, I think there are many tensions that play out in our interactions with our children, and one that I thought about this week is impatience vs laziness. I'm sure there are other words with more positive connotations that could work just as well, but these are the ones I was thinking about so I'll keep them. There are a number of things that need to get done every single day with Sarah (often multiple times): getting dressed, brushing teeth, etc. Many times I am impatient during these events, especially if we have a time deadline, and then I can give up quickly and do many parts of these tasks for her if she is not responding to my requests. But I am also lazy and would really rather not put her pants on for her. This week I decided to really embrace the lazy side and just reject the impatient side. I wanted Sarah to do everything and I was prepared to wait.
So Sarah got dressed almost all by herself every day this past week. I still guided and encouraged (sometimes a lot) each step, but I didn't _do_ anything for her. This made a really big difference and I feel like she responded to it really well. A common management problem is to delegate responsibility without delegating authority, and I realized that I was doing something similar with Sarah. I was requesting that she do these things but then I wasn't letting her do them the way she wanted or on her timeline.
This was an area where it was really helpful to have Jenny at the training because she would tell me about what she was learning when we chatted each evening and then I could apply it right away. As Jenny mentioned in her update, one of the things they worked on was being creative and persistent with requests, and working on expanding the time that it feels OK to continue making the same request (it is amazing how small this is by default - 20 seconds feels very long when I feel like I am being ignored). So the next morning I was much more creative in how I asked Sarah to put her pants on. The result was that we both had more fun, I had no need for being impatient, and I got to enjoy my laziness.
Another place that switched for me this week was a re-realization that Sarah is extremely capable of learning many things but she often needs more practice. Jenny and I had been talking recently that it would be really improve our quality of life and open up new family activity options if Sarah could stay next to us when we went places instead of running off. So this week I decided to practice this. Sarah and I went to a few stores (without having anything that absolutely needed to get done at those places) and beforehand we talked a lot about how important it was that she stay next to me and not run away. Then at the store, I tried to continually talk about this and praise her when she was doing it and talk with her right there when she started straying away. And the whole experience felt really different and hopeful for me. At some point she still ran away so then we left the store and I talked about why we left, but she stayed with me much more during that trip than I had realized she could without me physically holding her hand, pulling her back, etc. Practice is important for everything and these skills are no different. Sarah will get there - she just needs practice.
When we got back from a family walk, a couple of the kids from our block were playing behind the bushes next to our house looking for bugs and generally having a good adventure for a beautiful fall afternoon. Jenny and Amy went inside and Sarah and I stayed out since she really wanted to play in the alley. After I said no to this, she said "Play kids" and looked towards the two kids from our block. So I helped her push through the bushes and after a couple times going back and forth through the bushes in the same way that she loves going through doors, she sat down next to the other kids and started playing in the dirt. The older of the two kids tried to include Sarah and show her some of the bugs that she had found, which didn't get much interest, and then they just sat together down in the dirt for a while. When the other kids wanted to go do the next thing, they asked Sarah if she wanted to come, and Sarah simply said "no" and kept playing in the dirt for a while. Especially in the Sarah-Rise room, but elsewhere as well, Sarah's ability to make eye contact with people, tell stories and jokes, and genuinely connect with people has grown so much. So far this hasn't translated over to her interactions with other kids much. So it was really great to see even this very small interaction take place, knowing that Sarah initiated it herself, and I could start seeing that with practice, Sarah will learn this too and her world will keep getting richer and richer, as will all of ours.
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