David

Today, I had to write a note to school about our Thanksgiving traditions so Sam can compare and contrast in class tomorrow.  It was actually kind of hard.  See, for many years, Sam's Thanksgiving traditions involved things like screaming because he couldn't have McDonald's, breaking into the host's jammy drawer, crawling into everybody's bed, and climbing on or breaking stuff. It has only been fairly recently that Sam's Thanksgiving activities has coincided with the rest of ours.  It caused me to stop and think about days gone by and recall my FAVORITE Thanksgiving Sam story.

It was the year Sam started to use pictures to communicate.  I was "just" a parent and following the PECS (picture exchange communication system) protocol pretty strictly.  We were to the point that Sam needed to learn to hand his communication picture to a greater variety of people.  I sent out an email to my family explaining what to do.  

I placed Sam's book in a central location.  My Uncle Billy walked in with his delicious chocolate chip cookies.  Sam spied them from across the room.  He meandered over to his book, flipped the pages and located cookies.  He pulled it out of his book.  he had barely separated the picture from its velcro strip when my brother David, who had been eager to help, swooped in snatched the picture from Sam's hand and "You want a cookie?  Sure you can have one!"  Then he grabbed Sam, who was too utterly bewildered to respond in any way, and dragged him into the kitchen.  At that point, he shoved a cookie in Sam's hand so quickly, it took Sam a minute to figure out what happened.  It wasn't PECS protocol, but it did teach Sam that he could communicate with somebody other than me.  He must have eaten a dozen cookies given to him by a dozen different people.  It was a breakthrough in his communication and started us down the road to the happy Thanksgivinings we now enjoy.

David, thank you for giving me one of my favorite Thanksgiving moments.  If you ever get tired of making tons of money as a pharmaceutical executive/chemical engineer....you have the potential to be a speech language pathologist.