Progress and more progress
Zoë is doing extremely well. She still has her bad and cranky days, of course, but the improvement in her demeanor, overall behavior, and speech is amazing.
Today she had a full conversation with her dad. He asked what she did at school, and she told him she played in the gym, she had music with Andrea (the music therapist), she answered him when he asked what songs they sang, she said she played outside and that they had a story. She was clearly understanding the questions and had the ability to answer them. Yay!
She's also understanding more complex commands, such as "get me some soap from the cupboard under the sink" or "go in the bathroom and wash your hands and then turn out the light".
Her speech is still quite idiosyncratic. Tonight she and her sister were supposed to be going to sleep (they have bunk beds in a shared room) and they kept playing and talking and such. After a couple of warnings, Andrew went in and said very sternly that they were to stop talking and go to sleep. Zoë responded, "No talk noise," either telling Miranda to be quiet or acknowledging that they wouldn't make any more noise talking (and they didn't after than third warning).
She's also lately shown great interest in doing that which I refer to as "pencil puzzle". These are quite popular in our household, with lots of sudoko, crossword, and other such puzzles around. Zoë has watched us do the puzzles and will sometimes sit down with a puzzle book and a pencil and write stuff in and erase it and write more (because, of course, the point of sudoko is to write things and erase them, hehe).
We finally decided to make her some simple "word hunt" puzzles. It took me showing her about three words, how to find the word at the bottom and circle it in the puzzle when you find it, and from then on, she had it. She did a couple yesterday, and two more today, and she really seems to enjoy it.
The only trouble is she has no idea how to use a mechanical pencil and she keeps getting leads all over the table as she ejects them... We're going to move her to a highlighter pen for her puzzles!
Not at all well
Zoë came home sick yesterday. She said she was cold, then said she was hot, then said she was cold and then she went to sleep for a while (remember, this iis a special school with a very small and highly specialized classroom, so she could curl up in a beanbag chair and do that, and they're very flexible so they let her rest a bit). Her teacher called me in the afternoon to tell me that Zoë was sick and asked if I wanted to pick her up or have them put her on the bus. By the time I could have gotten there, it would be time to leave, so I said just go ahead and put her on the bus. She apparently slept most of the way home.
Today she's been sleeping most of the day and she's got quite a high fever. Twice her fever has "broken" and covered her in sweat, which of course wakes her and she finds it disturbing. I've been letting her ride the fever out because it's how you fight infection, but the last time she woke up in a sweat, she was trembling all over and whimpering about being hot, so I thought I'd give her some relief and I gave her some Panadol to bring the fever down a bit.
Thankfully, she's still lying down and she's not running around all over the place the way she sometimes does when you give her pain reliever/fever reducer when she's sick. She must be sick enough that it's really wearing her out.
She's not coughing or sneezing or throwing up or anything (she did throw up last night, but I think it was a bit of a fluke), just has a high fever and seems very, very tired.
Poor kid. I don't think she'll be going to school tomorrow, either...
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