The boy likes feeding dogs their treats.  No matter what size the dog, he likes feeding them their treats.  The only dogs we let him do this with are dogs we know very well.  Still, he’s careful with his fingers and finds it pretty exciting.

This weekend, he was feeding my father’s dogs their cookies.  The dogs are a bit taller than him, and much heavier, and still quite young and excitable. There is a lot of action going on.  But the boy still wants to do it.  He even makes sure to feed each of the dogs.  Feeding just one isn’t acceptable - he wants to make sure they both get a treat from him.  To the point that he’ll deny one dog a treat, which is a little risky given their relative sizes.  But things worked out okay.

Right - the language part.  We’ve taught him “all done” as both a sign and now he says it as well. But it’s something that has always been conveyed by him about his feeding time (he’s all done) or by us, about something he wants (watermelon’s all done!)

Though, over the weekend, with these dogs running around him wanting more treats, and in the center of their tornado, he was in the middle shouting “cookies all done” and making his sign for “all done” as well.  It was nice to seem him shift his point of view for the phrase…though, the dogs didn’t really get the message.