Left or Right?

My son had his first occupational therapy session on Monday.   It’s been a long wait to get to this first working session but we’re glad we’re able to start over the summer before school begins in the fall.    At the start of the session my son happily went with Bethany and forty-five minutes later, she came out with some paperwork and a few questions for me.    Typically with the play therapy sessions, we don’t discuss what happened in the session in front of the child, but the nature of these sessions is different.

It didn’t matter in any case because my son paid no attention to us as, “hey, television in the corner playing Scooby Doo!"  (Or so that’s how I translated my son’s thoughts as he was ensnared by the video on the screen.)

Bethany asked if we were wedded to my son being left-handed.   I told her we had no preference and that what worked best for him we would support.   My son (and daughter) have always preferred their left hand for things like eating and drawing, but Bethany saw some behaviors which indicated right-hand dominance.   We’ve never suggested or corrected him in any way, so we’ve just gone with the left-handed preference so far.

We’ve been given a list of activities to do with my son with over the next two weeks to get some data to take back to her.   He won’t know we’re testing him as we’re just observing and documenting what he does.   Here are some examples of what we’ll have him doing:

• Screwing lids on and off jars
• Assembling nuts and bolts
• Using tongs and tweezers
• Using a hammer and screwdriver
• Scooping beans into a container
• Playing ball
• Putting stickers onto a page
• Tearing paper

What we’ll be watching in each of the above for which hand is being used in a more skilled manner.   For instance, with tearing paper, one hand typically holds the paper while the other hand does the tearing.   For screwing a nut onto a bolt, one hand screws while the other hand holds.   When Bethany had my son do the nut and bolt activity she noticed he used his right hand to screw the nut onto the bolt.   She had him switch the bolt to his right hand and instead of now screwing with the left hand, he rotated the bolt with his right hand.   

I’ll know more in a week or two and let you know what we discover.   I’m interested to see how I do some of the above activities myself too.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is very, very sad our family friends from Jakarta have left.   He has friends and he likes other children, but this has hit him harder than we expected.  Not once, but three times today he’s told me, “I’m not going to be happy until I forget about Ryuichi and Yukina.”   The first time he said it he also said, “and I’m not going to forget about them tomorrow.”   He wants them to come back, wants to go to New York (where they are today) and wants to go to Jakarta to visit them immediately.    I think he made some true friends.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter wanted to play a game today.   “A blocks game” she told me.    We pulled out the alphabet blocks Aunt A sent for Christmas several years ago and discovered another “era” of play with them.   My daughter now wants to find all the letter sounds and categorize the blocks into stacks.   We not only made letter towers, we practiced our letter sounds at the same time.   We also found out there were more “R” letters on the faces than any other letter.