january 8, 2011

Where do I begin? Lily is doing awesome, as usual. Things were rough with her relationship with Meadow for awhile. It was so hard to watch Meadow crave Lily's attention so badly to just have Lily reject her. We tried every kind of encouragement we could think of. I even tried bribing her to spend time with her, thinking if she only started the interaction maybe it would increase...no go. Meadow tried so hard and now that she is crawling she can literally chase Lily for attention. Sometimes Meadow would just look at Lily and laugh (her only hope of Lily looking her way). It worked initially, and then it stopped. Lily's resentment towards her sister was just too great.

Now? Things have FINALLY made a turn around. We were all stuck home sick for 2 weeks over the christmas break. Lily had no where to go to get away from her sister. With lots of positive reinforcement and lots of time together things began to improve. A friend of mine suggested I write Lily a "social story" outlining her "story" of getting a sister and how great it is to have a sister, what you can do with a sister etc. I wrote up a pretty lengthy one and included lots of pictures of everyone and Lily LOVES it. She calls it her "adventure book". It made all the difference. Lily actually shows excitement to see her sister in the morning when they get up. She recently invited her to play and introduces her to strangers at the store when we are out.

Have I mentioned that Lily is READING!? I can hardly believe it! She is really very good and it is so wonderful to listen to her. She recently is doing better with writing, though she still has a lot of difficulty, she loves to connect dots or trace letters and numbers. She actually asked me yesterday if she could color...wait...isn't this the girl that HATES to color? Lily LOVES to do arts and crafts and loves to work on workbooks that I buy for her at Target in the dollar section (whenever I happen to see some).

Lily did better going back to school this week. For the past few months she really had a hard time with going to school and would have meltdowns in the mornings ranting about not wanting to go to PE, or do table time or have to go to the potty at school. I really think all those were excuses and that she just couldn't voice that she wanted to stay home with mommy too. I think she was jealous of Meadow. Since her relationship with Meadow got better, so did her outlook on school...coincidence? I may never know for sure.

Lily is changing in so many positive ways. I'm hard pressed to come up with other things to work on with her...yay! She still has difficulty following a point, so I need to describe where things are instead of pointing. We will continue to work on her writing, that part of her brain needs a lot of repair. Auditory processing is going to be her longest hurdle, but she improves every day.