"I got sidetracked."

We've been working a little more purposefully towards helping Amelia stayed focused. You don't realize how much you encourage distraction when you let your daughter constantly interrupt you, or let her constantly follow her meandering imagination. So we've been getting her to focus on things and trying to stay vigilant about recognizing when she is going off-topic.

Amelia was a late talker so when she finally was giving us a window to what goes on inside her head, it was easy to just go with the flow and more or less observe whatever she said and did. As a result, I've become very, very accustomed to how fluid the changes of topic and interests can be. It's been an excercise for me to be aware of how she can veer. For example, she'll be reading a story and something will spark a memory and she wants to talk about that which then prompts her to find a toy that is related to the memory, and then she has to go to the bathroom where she will read a different story. Upon  leaves the bathroom, she will start another activity and the original story just sits there unfinished.

I've been redirecting her distractions by telling her to focus or stating a simple phrase like, "Read your story first." Someone, I think, has told her (probably only once) that she was getting sidetracked and she has picked up that phrase. She is now self-regulating her distractions much of the time, which is great, but it totally makes me laugh to hear her suddenly say, "I got sidetracked!"

I also think it's funny that she likes the phrase so much since it has a train connotation. We have a 2-hour delay today due to icy roads and she is busy planning our next family trip to Tweetsie, a railroad themed amusement park, which dosen't open until the very end of April!