Look! Flowers!
Zoë's talking more and more all the time. It's really wonderful, and sometimes surprising.
We went to meet her new speech therapist last week (since her previous one has left that particular practice), and when we arrived there were flowers blooming all around the parking area. Zoë enthusiastically said, "Look! Flowers!"
She had a reasonably good session, eventually decided to interact with the therapist and all. She was counting and laughing a good deal, and using various words she knows. Pretty good omen, I think.
She's also very definitely understanding a lot more than she has before. There are so many more things I can tell her or ask her and she responds very well to most of it (granted, I know most of what she understands, so I do try to keep with that and only push her a little to more understanding; if I push too hard she gets very frustrated).
Oh, and this has nothing to do with speech, but the other night she was playing with some old Post-it notes she found, and she stuck one on each side of her head and pretended to be a dog with floppy ears! Pretty clever use of Post-it notes, I think!
Look!
Zoë got a little "show bag" at pre-school today, probably because they were talking about the Royal Melbourne Show (for non-Aussies, that's very like a state fair). In the bag was a bag of popcorn, a small chocolate (Freddo Frog, yum), a coloring page, a colorful paper mask, and a balloon.
Zoë was very excited by her bag of goodies and poked through it for a while and then announced to me, "Look! I got a balloon!"
It wasn't terribly clear as far as pronunciation, but she definitely used a full sentence spontaneously!
Oh, sh*t!
Very early this morning, I heard a crash. I said to Andrew, "Did you hear that?" He replied, 'Yeah, something fell off the wall in Zoë's room. We'll look in the morning." (Note that the crash was in a place that was well removed from her bed, which is why neither of us worried.
Later, I heard Zoë as she woke up. She likes to play in her room for a while before she comes out, and I heard her talking and singing a bit. Then I heard her get out of bed. Then I heard her go over where the crash was and I heard, "Oh, sh*t. Oh, sh*t."
My first thought is that I'm going to have to use a different word from now on.
My second thought, though, is that it's excellent that she's picked up a phrase and is using it exactly in context and spontaneously!
For what it's worth, the crash was actually something fairly minor. It just made a big noise, and Zoë apparently felt it was serious enough to swear over it...
Big improvements in language
It's been far too long since I made an entry here, but I'm doing it now, so there.
Zoë's comprehension of languge has been improving tremendously. She's much better able to understand simple commands and comments, and she's also figured out that if she doesn't understand, someone is likely to show her what they mean.
And, big improvement here, she's realized that it's frequently a good idea to ask for assistantce. For example, she finally worked out that, 'Your shoes are on the wrong feet," meant that there was something not right about her shoes and that they needed to be fixed, although she hasn't quite figured out the whole thing about which shoe goes on which foot. Today while getting dressed, she asked for help in being shown which shoe went on which foot.
Over breakfast, she was making a cute little face with a sort of wiggly nose, it's a bit hard to describe. She then looked at her dad and announced, "Rabbit!" She was making a "rabbit" face. In the past, she's pretended to be a cat, and a dog, and now she's a rabbit. (Can't wait to see what animal she is next...)
Oh, and another big improvement is that she's decided she likes to eat pork! We had pork cutlets for dinner and she had something else, but as I was cutting my meat she opened her mouth for a bite, so I gave her one. She ended up eating about half of a large pork cutlet. From now on, we'll make sure she gets her own helping of pork when we're having it, since she'll eat it (getting the kid to eat has always been a bit of a fight.)
Her behavior has been generally fairly good, other than when she was sick earlier this week. She's always very crabby when she's recovering (while sick, she's actually very quiet and extremely subdued), and this time was no exception. She's gone to early intervention playgroup today, though, and had a reasonable breakfast, so she seems to be over the worst of the illness (I have it now, though, unfortunately).
So, actually, we're seeing an overall improvement in pretty much all areas lately. This is good, and a big relief. For a while, I was despairing that she wasn't improving at all. It's amazing what small dietary changes and a bit of time can do.
|