Today Bryce went to UBC Thunderbird Arena to watch the Vancouver 2010 Paralympics Ice Sledge Hockey game between Czech Republic and Italy. I wasn’t there, but I heard he had a lot of fun and enjoyed the event.

Daniel really wants to get Bryce into sports but I don’t think he’s ready. He probably would be really great at a lot of sports, but a majority of sports involve communication and talking to your team mates, and although Bryce is verbal, he does a lot of parroting. He will repeat almost word for word or add a couple of his own of anything you say. Sometimes it’s very funny when he does it, like when two adults are talking and he’s overhearing it and repeating it, but of course it has its inappropriate times too.

Don’t get me wrong though, Bryce is very capable of compiling his own ideas and thoughts and sometimes verbalize them. Sometimes we help him with the conversation, like he’ll say “water” and we’ll say, “Do you want some water?” to which he repeats, “Do you want some water” and we say, “say please” and he says, “water please”. Other times he’ll tell us things in a full sentence by himself like “want to go to pee”. But if I ask, “How are you today?” he replies, “How are you today” and that’s parroting. He learns how to say a lot of words by parroting, but if he actually knows what they mean, well that’s another story.

I’m still undecided on when it will be the right time to get him into sports or what sport to try him out in. One of Daniels hobbies is playing hockey (floor hockey, ice hockey, and even Xbox Live hockey hehe). Hockey is around this house all the time so Bryce is very familiar with that sport. We’ve even taken Bryce to a couple of Canucks and Giants games and he seemed into it. Maybe that will be the first sport we get him into.

Thanks for reading,
Tanaya