Operation Good-Bye Angry Birds!

To say that things have been a bit crazy and hectic around our house would be a complete understatement...things have been insane!! While I try to keep things very positive on this blog, I have to admit, things have not been going so well the last several weeks. We've been sick, we've had vehicle troubles, we've had an overworked husband whose never home and we've had sleepless nights. And on top of all of this, we've had a lot of behaviors from the little man. While we're not sure what was causing a lot of these issues, we did find one thing that seemed to trigger a lot of negative behaviors...

A few weeks back I posted this photo:



It was cute, and fun and seemingly pretty creative too, but to say Shaun is one to easily get fixated on something is once again a huge understatement. (Which you can clearly see when you walk into our home and see all of his trains!) And Angry Birds very quickly became one of those fixations. When he had the iPad, we would lose him completely to it, he'd get frustrated if the game didn't work out as he'd like and he'd constantly be trying to buy more apps and once again getting upset when he was not allowed. When he didn't have the iPad (it was being used as a potty training reward), he would scream, hit and fight to get it. While it initially served as a great potty reward, it soon became more trouble and he didn't want to use the potty at all unless he would get it immediately, rather than waiting for three smiley faces to earn it! And he would make Angry Birds out of EVERYTHING. Now obviously in the photo above, this is pretty appropriate...but he'd take legos, carrots...anything and 'play Angry Birds' with them. We have seen this same thing with Thomas, creating couplings and cranes, etc but these things would have some slight resemblance (a belt, a piece of string, tape...) whereas with the birds, as long as he could make the motions of the game, he didn't care WHAT it looked like. The other difference with his Thomas obsession and this new obsession was that Thomas was a positive for him. He learned colors, numbers, his speech grew and so on. We truly saw no benefits but rather an increase of negatives so we decided they had to go before this went any further! This is a hard thing as a mom- to take away something that your child loves, but I know in the long run this will be better for him. Eventually, he will get the iPad back, with limited use (such as during our cross country drive next week), but no more Angry Birds. He's also still allowed to play with his plush, so long as it doesn't start to consume him again. We truly hope that this, along with some other things we're doing in therapy, we can get our sweet, happy boy back full time once again. It's certainly going to be a process, but for now I just have to keep reminding myself:

"I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me."- Philippians 4:13