Brendan woke up at 5am again. But this time, he did go back to sleep until 7am. Then we took him to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk because he's been wanting to ride the carousel. We got there before the crowd. He waited patiently for his Dad to buy tickets. He was very excited to go in the ride. Then just when we we approaced the line, we bumped into his speech therapist from 5 years ago. She let Brendan and his Dad go ahead and her and I caught up on her family and mine. Apparently, her son was diagnosed with mild autism.
While I was talking to her I noticed Brendan wasn't smiling while on the ride. I wasn't sure what was up with that. When he got off, he didn't want to get back on again so we said goodbye to his speech therapist and went for a walk. We approached the bumper cars. I thought he might like to go on this since he thought it was so funny when I backed up into a concrete pole the other day. But then he headbutted me lightly twice. So, I asked if he wanted to go back onto the carousel and he did. This time I went on with him. He was mad the whole time. When we got off we sat on the bench and then he started to cry. I asked him several questions, 'did you want to go on again?', no answer. 'do you want to ride something else?', no answer. Then it hit me, "Are you upset because I was talking to your speech therapist?". He said, "yeah". I explained to him that we weren't talking about him the whole time. I told him that she commented on how tall he was and I also told her how well he was doing. But that was it. The rest of the time we were talking about her kids, our jobs, etc... After I explained thisto him, then he was fine. He is such a sensitive kiddo. Then he wanted to go. Within an hour the place was so crowded, so I don't blame him.
As we were leaving, we saw a game that he played before and thought he might like to play it. It is the one where you shoot the water into the clowns mouth. So, Brendan and I were going to play. The game started and all of sudden the music blasted on the speaker and startled him. He was in between wanting to cry to wanting to finish the game. Of course, the darn balloon wouldn't pop! It finally did and he grabbed his purple shark and we left. He held it together very well. I did get headbutted 'lightly' a couple of times because we had to cross the street amongst wall-to-wall traffic.
I was bummed that we had to leave so early. The weather was beautiful and they were going to have a Polynesian show at noon. Brendan would have seen live hula dancers (which he has never seen before, only on video - and he loves his hula girls!). Oh well, that's the way it goes...
He tried to stay awake but ended up taking a nap at 5pm and got up at 8pm. So, we are all still up. The rest of the day and evening went well. Hopefully, we'll get to bed by 2am.
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