New priorities for the new year?

A-One's laptop came back from repair on Tuesday (2 days ago), so he has been able to resume his online brain training yesterday and today. We're finally back into the swing of things after a long vacation period.

The most challenging aspects of the vacation period was when I needed A-One to do some jobs by a certain time, especially being ready to go away on holidays. I still haven't struck the magic formula for having him co-operate in that respect, which heightens the stress levels all round. Nevertheless, once we do get away, he is more willing to do as asked by those not from his immediate family.  So I'm thinking I need to more actively pursue brain training alternatives this year which involve people outside his immediate family, who may be more successful in having him give it higher priority.

It has been almost two months since he has logged on for anything. For a while he had access to another PC in the office, but his sister decided to reformat her external hard drive, and it seems she included its C: drive because it no longer boots up.  So A-One occupied his time mostly with X-Box and DVDs while eagerly awaiting his laptop repair.

Happily, when I went into his room yesterday, he was logging in to his Lumosity training (after some reminders).

A-One: Mum, see how the dot in the calendar appears in the middle of the week? Isn't it better to start next Monday so that the calendar shows dots for a full week of exercises?

Mum: No, it doesn't matter.  It's better that you resume your training as soon as possible.

I had to go out, and when I returned, he was happy to show me how he'd gone.  He was given all new games to do, so all were personal bests (PBs). He had dropped 43 in his overall Brain Performance Index (BPI) from 737 in December, mainly due to a drop in speed.  I wondered how long it would take him to recover his former scores.

His conversation however was all about a slight glitch he had encounted while playing World of Warcraft (WOW). He was keen to describe, at length, the glitch and his attempts to fix it including posting a question to a game master.  Today he received a reply, and spent many hours following the tips, which resulted in his now being unable to log on (hooray!).

Mum: How has your brain training gone today?

A-One: Fixing this is more important!

Mum: ... a repeat of a conversation we've had many times ... my patience is waning ...

I wish!

Nevertheless, by the time I came back to 'remind' him again, he had logged on.

Several hours later when I was free again to see how he went, he had almost recovered his former BPI score!  He had again gained PBs for all games, including the old 'cafe' game where he had to remember people's names from way back in December!  He was also keen to show me how to play the new games, so I was happy to see his willingness to play them again.

Lumosity has games specifically for working memory, so I've started encouraging him to add in some additional games each day, just for that.  Now I have to think about how I'll get him to do it ...