Ryan’s Construction Themed 3rd Birthday Party

It recently dawned on me that I may have forgotten to share details from Ryan’s birthday party…LAST YEAR. I searched the blog and, sure enough, I somehow completely skipped sharing these images. Well, his birthday is in December so I’m sure that I was in full panic mode about Christmas coming up next and kept thinking, “I’ll post it in January” and never did. Initially, I thought that I would skip sharing it altogether but it was such a monumental party for Ryan that it seemed too special not to share.

Let me provide a bit of background information…

Last year, Ryan was obsessed with all things construction. We’d drive him around to different areas in the city just so that we could park and watch construction vehicles and the happenings at various construction sites. He was enthralled. In fact, we partly credit his intense interest in construction vehicles with his learning to talk.

At twenty-one months of age, Ryan’s speech skills were labeled as “Significantly Delayed”. We enrolled him in speech therapy and words slowly began to emerge. Around two years of age, his interest in the vehicles and the construction world began to strengthen. We used simple descriptive words such as “Go” and “Up” in relation to his vehicles to help teach language. Because of my professional background working as a developmental therapist with children on the Autism spectrum, I knew that capitalizing on a child’s interests in crucial when teaching. Making a dump truck tip it’s load out and saying, “Out” was far more likely to encourage Ryan to try to imitate sounds than using some random object that he had little to no interest in…and it did work! I share all of this to illustrate how obvious it was to pick this theme and how important it was for all of us. The construction world truly helped shape our little guy.