1-25-09

Lily has been doing wonderful. Her speech is continuing to improve, now she is able to do two sounds (one right after the other) with prompting. I’ve learned it helps to break up the word, like AAAA----PUL (for apple) and it makes it easier for her to say. She’s starting to say more without prompting. The other day she was trying to carry a bunch of her characters and couldn’t hold them all so she gave one to me and simultaneously said “ep” which for her means “help”. She has finally started to say “no” sometimes when asked to do something! I must be the only mom around here that gets excited when she tells me “no”, lol. I actually wish she would do it more often so I wouldn’t have to ask so many times!

Anthony taught her the sound “pssstt” so that has been her sound of choice recently. That along with snoring while pretending that she is asleep, lol. She knows what it means to be quiet and when you tell her to be quiet because someone is sleeping she will put her finger up to her mouth and say “shhhh”. She can also make a happy face when you tell her to (she laughs while she does it) and sometimes will give you a sad face when you ask. She can now correlate tired with sleeping, hungry with eating, and thirsty with drinking. Her separation anxiety is still improved, but still needs work.

The battle of wills continues daily, sometimes taking up to 20 minutes to get her from the car to my door (getting her out of the car takes the longest because she tries to crawl into whatever space is farthest from me and get into a ball to make it nearly impossible to pick her up). I try to look at her power struggle issues in a positive way. It means that she has a deeper understanding of who she is and what she wants and her stubbornness has been an asset to her so far. It’s so hard to remember that though! She is getting heavier everyday and it’s difficult to have to physically move her out of areas that she does not belong (on top of the kitchen table or counters, for example) over and over and …..over again. Or places in the store, or running right for that pile of dog poop! The scenarios that my day encompasses are endless!

We’ve recently had a lot of family visiting and that has really been great for Lily. Though she can get over stimulated if too much is going on, she really enjoys interacting with everyone and gets excited to see them.

I recently did a little video taping of Lily for my sister and noticed something that I thought was interesting. She was watching her favorite show (Yo Gabba Gabba) and they were giving directions on how to be a dinosaur (where to put your hands and so on). She was very good at following direction, but towards the end she paused what she was doing to get a closer look at the tv and seemed to have stopped listening and following direction, but had about maybe a 5-8 second delay in finishing what was asked. They had moved on to another clip and she turned around with her arms in position and roared like the T-Rex. I know sometimes it takes her a long time to process information, but this gave me a new perspective on her and how she may operate sometimes.

I bought Lily a set of Cars puzzles (she’s really been into that movie lately). They are 6 piece cardboard puzzles and there are 4 of them. She can now do them all by herself, even when given all the puzzles together. We have been playing more with play dough recently, but she’s still been snacking on it. Not sure how to stop that, as she doesn’t seem to mind the taste.