Stars

For 3 1/2 years, Korben has been fine sleeping in the dark with the door shut. However, in the past few weeks, he has been adamant that we leave the light on for him when we put him to bed. I don't really know why he needs the light on - it may be a control thing, a scared thing, or just a 3 year old thing, but either way the light is on
till he falls asleep and I turn it off.

When we were at the OMSI the other day, we saw the glow-in-the-dark plastic stars for the ceiling, and hoped they would be the cure to the light needing to be on. Unfortunately, they didn't work as we had hoped and the light is still left on every night.

However, what did happen, was far more important than him letting us turn the light off -

First, you need to know that Korben says the same prayer for everything. It is a simple prayer where he says "thank you for the day" and "please bless us to have good dreams", and then he ends it. This is the prayer he uses for food, nighttime, and family prayers - with no deviations.

On this particular night, we let him help us put the stars on his ceiling and then asked him to say the prayer. To our astonishment, rather than saying his normal prayer he changed it to "thank you for.... (insert pause here) the stars" and "please bless us to have good dreams... (insert another pause) and the stars", in the name....etc.. It was so cute and funny that Mike and I couldn't help but laugh. Then we realized that for the first time, Korben looked at something and was able to apply it, in words, to his situation. He changed his prayer all by himself. It wasn't a memorized phrase that he repeated, but one that he came up with all on his own. Since this is one of the hardest things for autistic kids to learn, we were elated at his progress.

Hopefully this is just the start to many conversations that I am dying to have with Korben - conversations in which he thinks of what he really wants to say, rather than only using what is logged in his mind as something he can say. Wish us luck!