Coping skills.

Monkey has developed a coping skill which I find rather amusing.  I may have mentioned it before in regards to Great Grampy but his is expanding on his repetoire.

When Great Grampy addresses Monkey, or makes eye contact, Monkey will immediately point to the sky.  He used to then sign “airplane” but he can now say “plane.”  He would do this every time he saw Great Grampy whether there was an actual plane visible or not ((More often than not there is a plane visible.  Depending on the weather, planes taking off from Logan will fly over the neighborhood and planes waiting to land will be in holding patterns overhead.)) This has been going on for ages.

This morning I saw him alter his plan.  We met one of our neighbors at the bus stop as we were on our way to school.  She spoke to him a few times and he hid his head shyly behind me.  While we were waiting he decided to sit on the bench a few feet away from me.  When she addressed him again there was no Umma to hide behind so he shouted “Look!” while pointing behind her.  She turned to look but there was nothing of note there so I asked him what we were looking at and he told us “bird.”  When she turned to him again he repeated the whole process again only this time he said “Look!  Truck!”  and there was indeed a truck.  He’s getting so creative in his coping skills. 

Redirecting people’s attention away from himself is a great way to ease his anxiety and now that he’s actually finding things for them to look at it counts as increased social skills in my book 🙂