And then my friend, whom I never talked to in real life when we were in college together, but now that we both have a son, we've actually become friends on facebook (not just "friends"), she suggested looking at this problem from a new perspective. She asked if maybe the promise of a reward could help him get through the page. Now, when anyone mentions rewards as a means of getting kids to obey, my red flags of "is this bribery" go up. Then I remembered a blog post I had seen on Pinterest a while ago. This mom taught her 2 year old daughter the names of all the states of America by putting a cheerio on the state, and if the girl could answer correctly, she got to eat the food. That's not bribery. I could do something like that.
And look what Grammy had just sent a couple days before:
I told him that as he said each row, he could hold another piece in his hand, and if he said the whole page in 2 minutes, he could eat all the pieces. If he took too long, I would take one piece away for next time, so he would only get 5 pieces instead of 6. He dried his tears and took a deep breath.
120 seconds later, the last answer escaped his lips. It did not take him 1 minute 59 seconds; the timer flipped that very last second up and the last number of the page became audible.
We jumped! We hollered! We danced! And then before getting too carried away, we ate some candy corn.