Mini Vacation

I love Flash Forward Fridays because I get to share with you how all the hard work we do with our young ones pays dividends as they get older.  Mikey’s Spring Break from school was earlier in April.  We have had a very busy month, and we weren’t sure we’d be able to get away.

But our sweet buddy has been working diligently in school on his life skills and vocational skills and he asked to go away on vacation. Luckily, we were able to squeeze in a night of fun.

Jumpy on The Bed

This is the phrase our pal Mikey uses to ask to go stay in a hotel. He does not in fact jump on the beds, it’s just one of those phrases that is easy for him to say.  When he was younger and we stayed in hotels, he did jump on the beds. I was totally fine with because I love anything that gets kids’ energy out and helps with sleep.  Now that he’s adult size, we have a trampoline for jumping, but the phrase has stuck.

When he says, ‘Jumpy on the bed’ we know he’s asking for a vacation, but we obviously can’t just drop everything and whirl away on a trip. Like so many things, though, Mikey has it right and every once and a while, you just need a quick trip away from home to shake up the routine. 

Scripted Phrases

These scripted phrases are tricky because you need to know Mikey to know what he means by it.  I keep a list of them in our Babysitter Binder (more on that tomorrow) so that other people who are with him will know what he means.  In addition, we try to work with Mikey to remind him to say the exact words he means.  If ‘jumpy on the bed’ comes out quickly, we might prompt him to say, “I want a hotel.” It’s still not the perfect, ‘I’d like to go on vacation and stay in a hotel’ but people would understand what he was asking.  We might practice a few different phrases with ‘hotel.’

“I like hotels.”

“I swim at the hotel.”

“I like the hotel bed.”

“Can we go to a hotel.”

You get the idea.  Practicing the word hotel in varied phrases and sentences allows Mikey to learn it and over time, he’ll be more able to use it on his own.

Mystic

Mystic is a small fishing town here in Connecticut that has a great aquarium.  We went up on Saturday, mid-day. We saw the aquarium, caught some of a hockey game at our hotel, had a nice dinner out at a restaurant and went home the next day. Eating out at a restaurant is one of those skills that has come a long way over the years, and we were impressed with how polite and independent Mikey was.  For more on how we taught him to eat out at a restaurant, I’ve linked a post below. *

Sometimes his progress brings tears to my eyes as I think about how hard we worked to help him learn these skills.  But mostly, I’m so proud of how he has faced his challenges and shown the world what a great kid he is! I’m glad we got to reward him with this fun trip.

It was a fun mini-vacation and like so many of Mikey’s scripted phrases, jumpy on the bed is humorously accurate in one way…we didn’t do much sleeping in the hotel! Mikey loves these vacations which means he is pretty amped-up and too excited to get much sleep.  Although I was not happy about this in the moment, it was totally worth one night of little sleep to allow him to explore the world on his terms.

*Here’s the link on tips for teaching restauranting skills (I think I just made up that word, but now I’m going with it).