I can't wait to tell Tasha about this

Michael did not want to go to bed tonight. He and Laurel had each gotten a new toy at Costco today and he wanted to stay up and play with them. I tried to be accommodating and gave him an extra fifteen minutes, but in the end he had to go to bed.

Tears. LOTS of tears.

So I offered to have the new toys "spend the night" on the floor by his bed. He couldn't play with them, but he could look at them while he fell asleep. He seemed to like this compromise and ran to get one of the toys (a Tonka street sweeper) and put it in his room.

I went searching for the other toy (a Tonka helicopter). I figured it was in the vicinity of the street sweeper, but couldn't find it. So I asked Michael, "Michael, where is the helicopter?"

"Behind fire truck," he answered.

I'd never heard him speak this way before. For months his therapists have been working with him on concepts like under/on/next to and he's been doing really well with it lately, but I'd never heard him actually say the word "behind" before. I was actually so doubtful he was using it correctly, when he said it was behind the fire truck, I responded with, "It's near the fire truck? OK."

I went looking through the house and found them in the playroom. There was the fire truck, and RIGHT BEHIND IT was the helicopter. In fact, Michael had used the helicopter's pulley to attach the two toys together as if the fire truck was towing the helicopter. As in BEHIND it.

Moments like this are better than anything. You want to scream into the air and do somersaults down the hall. Instead I gave Michael the biggest and longest hug he'd allow me to, and then jumped on the computer to brag blog about it.