I sat in the corner of the speech therapy room yesterday, holding my breath. Billy was cradling a baby doll. He carefully dipped a washcloth into a tub of water and then dabbed it on the "baby's" head. A small trickle of water ran into its eyes. "She needs a towel!" Billy informed us. "Wipe her eyes!"

And he did. Then he laid the baby down, covered it with the towel, and began to recite Good Night, Beach, one of his favorite bedtime stories. He reached for the toy bottle and gave it to the baby. Then he reached for the toy juice bottle and mimed pouring it on the baby's head. We all laughed, including Billy. So he did it again.

I couldn't believe it. My child was engaging in normal, imaginative play. When offered three choices -- a toy farm, Playdough, and the baby doll -- he chose the baby doll and acted out routines with which he was familiar: bath, story time, bedtime, feeding.

This is huge for us. It was only a few months ago, when we started Floortime therapy, that the most interactive play I could really get with Billy was opening and closing doors with him. We did a lot of opening and closing doors.

He liked his toy fort. And he liked his toy barn. But mostly what he did with them was open and close the doors. If I tried to introduce some of the toy figures and engage him in interactive play, he would just turn his back on me and move on to something else.

When I questioned my fellow Floortimers -- a Yahoo! user group composed of parents, caregivers, therapists and others who are engaged in Floortime therapy -- about it, they advised me, rightfully so, that he simply wasn't ready for this level of play yet. Take it back down a step, they advised, follow his lead, and then work your way back up.

So we opened and closed doors. And Dave created a game called, "Open the latch, Daddy!" He placed his hand on the door, making it impossible for Billy to open until he asked for it. We opened and closed doors on the fort. And eventually, we had the Mickey Mouse character demand, "Open the latch, Billy!"

Slowly, Billy started allowing us to introduce the toy figures into the fort game. Then one day, I caught him acting out, word-for-word, an episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, using the fort and the toy figures. When I tried to join in, he backed away. But after a week, he'd let me play too, to assume one of the characters, as long as I didn't change the story. There are not words to describe how much I came to hate the episode, "Mickey's Color Adventure." I dreamed about it.

But then one day, something clicked and Mickey was forgotten. Instead, all his figures had a jumping contest. Uniqua from the Backyardigans won almost every time, for some reason. "Yay! She did the highest jump!" he told me. And Batman was universally crap at jumping. Puff the Magic Dragon won a couple of times, but he had wings, so he was kind of cheating. Day after day, we had jumping contests on the fort.

He began to call the figures by name: Mickey Mouse, Uniqua, "the dragon," and for some reason, known only to Billy, one of the plastic Little People, a blonde girl wearing a hat, introduced herself to the others as, "Hi, I'm Uncle Wes," in a deep, gruff voice. I have no idea why he decided this character was his Uncle Wes, who is actually tall, dark-haired and bears absolutely no resemblance to a blonde little girl, but nonetheless, in our house, Uncle Wes she is.

And for the first time in the past two months, he developed an attachment to a stuffed animal, a stage most children go through at a much younger age. Tah-Tah is named after the teddy bear in the cartoon "Ira Sleeps Over," and Tah-Tah sleeps with Billy every night and travels with Billy to Nan's house whenever he "sleeps over." In the last couple of weeks, Tah-Tah has been joined by Eggbert, a large colorful catepillar; Too-Too, Tah-Tah's little brother; and Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. Each has a place on Billy's bed, and both Mama and Daddy have to kiss them all goodnight each night. I can hear him talking to them over the baby monitor sometimes, telling them stories and singing them songs. Sometimes, he tells them, "Too-too! Quiet! It's night-night!"

I know all this probably sounds like mundane childhood play to the parents of normally developing children, but to put things in perspective, a year ago, Billy was running over the baby doll with his Big Wheel, and he rarely said anything that wasn't repetition of a book or TV show.

In addition to practicing Floortime at home, both Billy's speech and occupational therapists at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital take a developmental approach; both are Floortime-trained. So his therapy sessions look a lot like play -- in fact, they are play -- where we try to create the desire to communicate, rather than teach him specific phrases to parrot without understanding their meaning.

We are so excited about Billy's growing interest in imaginative play that we keep adding things to his strange little town that includes a medieval fort, a carnival, an airport, two farms and a train station. It's kind of like a soap opera town. And now he also has a little play house with a Mama, Daddy and baby that allow us to act out routines and social situations and practice things like saying, "Hello" and "goodbye."

When I was looking for a doll house online, I found tons of sites where parents were demanding to know whether playing with a doll would turn their son gay. Seriously. When I was a kid, one of my favorite toys was a Easy-bake Oven, and I certainly hope my son has a stronger interest in babies when he grows up than I now have in cooking.

But after Billy had bathed and fed the baby and put it to bed, he had the baby jump back up and announce, "Baby wants to play barn!" So we took out the barn, and the cow, horse, sheep and chicken had a jumping contest. The cow won.