Change, & Funny Words

I am coping better with E's distress when I leave him now or can't do something for him. I have started to think about it like this: E is a kid that does not like change. It upsets him a lot when things don't go the way they usually do, and when people do things they don't usually do. This is why he flips out when I go out on my own, or do anything on my own, because he is used to having me around. I am not abandoning him or ignoring his needs. It is just hard for him because it is different. The more I do it, the less different it will be become, and he will gradually be less and less distressed by it. It is not my fault.

So I just keep telling myself that when I am feeling close to caving, and it helps so much. I need to feel like it is not my fault, which gives me the strength I need to just do it.

And it is working for him. I spent yesterday afternoon pampering myself and christmas shopping while the kids stayed home with husband face. He was so upset that I was leaving, but he had a great afternoon with his Dad and I came home to a happy house. Then, he was mucking around in the big bed at bed time, so we said, if you do it again, you have to go in your own bed. No negotiations. So he starts doing somersaults and husband face takes him to his own bed. He was screaming and crying, kicking the walls and his Dad. But he fell asleep. And for the first time in his 4.5 years of life, when he woke up (as he does many times during the night) he called for his Dad and not for me. I am so excited and happy about this that I am awake at 6am and nobody else is!

Moving on to something else..
E has a wonderful vocabulary and great expressive language, but he says some words wrong. He can't seem to help it and doesn't seem to recognize that he is using the wrong word in place of another, even after we have corrected him.
For example, he says
"lion" instead of "line"
"wizard teeth" instead of "wisdom teeth"
"crutz" instead of "crotch"
"eject shop" instead of "reject shop"
He also says "gravy yard" instead of "graveyard." We passed a graveyard in the car the other day, and he was asking what the tombstones were. I was trying to explain without freaking him out, and M pipes up "Don't want gravy on chips! Want sauce! Tomato sauce!" and E was like... 'Wtf? Why is she talking about sauce and gravy when I am talking about a graveyard?' So I was trying to explain that he says "gravy" instead of "grave" and he just had no idea what I was talking about. And she is yelling "want chips now! No gravy!" Fark it was flipping hilarious, but maybe you just had to be there ;)