Good Stuff

One characteristic of S is that she is silent in the car. She's said a word or two to me when it's just her and I in the car, but it's rare. Yesterday, she just started talking. It was just babble and not to anyone specific, but it was shocking to hear her voice. I am always looking back at her to make sure she is okay because she is so silent all of the time. The other big thing that she did yesterday is that she hit the floor and tummy crawled all on her own. We have a mat that she crawls on, so if she did it on that, I wouldn't be so surprised. The shocker was that she did it on the tile in a totally different area. We moved to the mat and she did some more crawling. We place whatever object at the far end of the mat and tell her to crawl to it. When she gets to it, we slide it to the other end of the mat. She loves this little game, and sometimes we let her play with it for a minute and then slide it away to the other end. Tonight, when we made our way back to the mat after her spontaneous crawl, she found a little play plate that was the size of a quarter, and she slid it across the mat so she could crawl to it! I was so worried she was too young for this before I began, but now I think she is the perfect age for it. She can be entertained by the whole process and doesn't mind playing games with it. I think an older child who had a broader world, might get bored with it. Of course we are only a week and a half into it, it might be harder to keep her interested after a few more weeks. This morning, she was a little fussy. I took her in the chair and spun around with her for a few minutes. This seemed to calm her and she was okay after that. I've found that when she is getting into trouble and doesn't know what to do with herself, that's when she needs some sensory stimulation.

S's transformation reminds me of the movie Awakenings. If you've never seen it, it was amazing movie. Robin Williams played a doctor who experimented with different drugs and brought people out of a catatonic state to normalcy. When the effects of the drugs wore off, they returned to their previous state. Robert DeNiro was the patient. The ironic thing is that the movie was on when we were in China.

Today, I was talking on the phone and said something was stupid and she started saying, 'stupid'. I told her that wasn't a nice word and she shouldn't say it. I was saying, 'no' everytime she would say it and she shook her head in the affirmative and said, 'yes'. Now this doesn't sound like anything at all, but it is huge for her. When I said she was uncooperative, this concept illustrates how stubborn she is. She will not answer yes or no to anything. When we ask her something, we always ask her like we're expecting an answer, even though we never get one. She shook her head no when we first got her, but she must have found that the gesture of pushing whatever away was more effective. Her sister has been teaching her to shake her head and say yes or no, and she'll mimic her but never use it on her own. Today she didn't use it to answer a question, but she used it in response to me saying no.