Sophie Evelyn
Born Tuesday January 08, 2008 2:43pm
3lbs 5oz, 14.75"
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Leaving Journey Learning Center
Today was Sophie's last day at her old school. She starts the new one on Thursday. Today they had a party for her. She and I made cookies to take. And they made her the star today, singing ring-around-the-rosie to her and letting her sit at the head of the table. And there were balloons and bubbles. She had a ball. I'm not sure she understands yet that she's not going back, but we've been talking about it for the last few days. And she's seen some of the other kids there leave. She's pretty good with change, so I think she'll be okay with the transition. Here's some pictures from the party and a video at the end.
Sophie just started this last Tuesday. We are super excited about it because it's the first time she's learned how to blow. For years, the speech therapists were doing exercises with straws, cotton balls, tissues, etc. trying to get her to learn how. But then she got this whistle from a birthday party that is very easy to blow (and very loud).
We're hoping she'll be driving us nuts with it soon.
Stephanie and I have been giving this a lot of thought over the last week or so, and we think Sophie might have a word! Or two, actually. She started making a 'b' sound after her birthday, and at school they worked on reinforcing it every chance they could. And we would practice it at home for her. We think she is now saying bye bye. She also will try to say baby, blue, and bear. Anyway, they've been working on it and she's been doing good and reproducing the sounds, but we've been trying not to get our hopes up too much because we have probably gone through 3 or 4 times when Sophie has picked up a new sound, made it for a week or so, and then lost it. But I think with them working on it so much at school and her going 5 days a week now (have I mentioned that yet? we made her "full time" in January), it may stick. They also reported one day that she attempted to say each letter of the alphabet and made some sort of sound for all of them. And they have a "bye bye" song they sing everyday when each kid leaves, and Sophie loves it. We sing bye bye to lots of different people names and animals everyday.
So, back to her speaking. She's just recently started doing a good "mama" and today did it spontaneously when she went into the office and saw Stephanie sitting there. Byebye she hasn't done without prompting yet, I don't think. Also, every time we have snack or mealtime in her booster seat, she would sign all done at the end. I started asking her to do an 'a' & 'd' sound for it, and she says "ahh duh". This evening she did that spontaneously, too, after she finished her supper. To say we are excited about this is an understatement.
This is one of Sophie's favorite songs. When I was picking her up from school, she went over to the little bus on the shelf and started it playing the song. Then she did this great little dance.
Thank you to everyone that ordered Christmas cards from Sophie's school. We ended up selling dozens of packs and raising a lot of money for them.
On Monday we went to the cardiologist for Sophie's annual appointment. Sophie is never excited about the EKG, blood pressure reading, or echocardiogram, but she did pretty good this visit. The great news is that the doctor came in and said that everything on the scans looks fantastic! She said there was no sign of scar tissue build-up or other problems and that this time we don't have to come back for 2 years. Yay!
Sophie just started doing this hand over her mouth thing last week. One of her previous speech therapists tried to get her to do this for months and said it was an important step. So we are very glad to see/hear it. Also, she's doing somewhat dependable raspberries when we ask for it.
I'm trying to get her to do raspberries for elephant sounds. She's currently going through an elephant phase. So, she has lots of little plastic animal toys that she carries around with her. There was a set she got months ago and I think they are bath toys? There's a chicken, sheep, cow and pig. Well, Miss Piggy is by far her favorite. She gets baths with Sophie and many nights I have to pry her out of Sophie's hand after she falls asleep. I can frequently convince Sophie to try some food or drink she won't accept by asking if the pig/cat/whoever wants some? Anytime we go somewhere in the car, Sophie looks for somebody to take with her. I've finally convinced her to leave them in the car so that we don't lose them somewhere. One week the pig got left at speech therapy until the next session the following week. We tore the house apart and I looked all over the backyard for her because we couldn't find an acceptable substitute. Anyway, yesterday she got out a puzzle that has zoo animals in it and she's been carrying around the elephant puzzle piece and wanting to sing this song about them, too. But she also will carry the whole set around and move them different places. I found most of the zoo puzzle animals in the sandbox today and also a bunch of farm animal puzzle pieces were out by her slide. We're excited by this because it's an important developmental milestone.
Sophie woke up very talkative today. The first hour she was awake, I probably heard more noises from her than I have in the past 2 weeks combined. And then after lunch we had one of the best renditions of Old McDonald we've had in a long time. I honestly don't know how long it's been since she's made this many noises. Early 2010, maybe, or last fall. Last Thursday she was making more different sounds than she had in a while. We heard 'd', 'g', and a blowing noise like an 'f'. We hadn't heard an 'f' since April, I don't think.
We're not sure if all this noise is from the extra speech therapy she gets now, the new medication we started last month, or from going to school. But whatever it is, we're glad to hear it and hope it's an indication of greater things to come.
So this past weekend we went to San Antonio, since Stephanie had a 3 day weekend to celebrate the end of the tax season. We went down there Thursday afternoon. Then Friday morning we got up early and drove to Port Aransas to see a specialist. After that, we had lunch and then went to the beach to play in the surf. Sophie had a fantastic time! This was kind of like climbing stairs and swinging at the same time. She looks like a drunken sailor here at first, but then she picked it up. But she kept wanting to wade out further as each wave receded, and then pretty soon the next wave would knock her down. Conditions were great, we had the whole place to ourselves, and the water was nice and warm. I guess right after that, the tropical storm from Mexico blew in because it rained on us all the way home and Corpus got 4" of rain that afternoon.
We'll definitely be making this a part of our SA trips in the future, I'm sure.
By request, here's another video. This one's longer, and you have to tolerate hearing me sing the hat song, but this is Sophie's favorite obsession right now (along with water). She was even smiling, dancing and signing just now watching this video of herself. She throws out a bunch of different signs in this: hat is obviously touching your head, please is rubbing her hand on her chest (again, I didn't realize this til Stephanie watched the vid and pointed out to me), more is fingertips together, no is one hand fingertips closing and yes is one fist "nodding". For a while she was pretty much silent, but lately she has starting doing more little grunts, especially in response to questions or when signing a word, which you might be able to hear.
Sophie has been doing somersaults for a week or two. At first it was on the bed, but now it's anywhere the fancy strikes her. There may be objects in the way or it may be on the tile floor sometimes. About half the time she even goes straight!
It was recommended by her speech therapist as another transitional step toward speech. We made her a bunch of little pictures of things that she frequently wants, like popsicles, stickers, playdoh, etc., laminated them, put little pieces of velcro on them and made a little book with velcro to stick them in. When she wants something, she pulls the picture out of the book and brings it to us. We had no idea she wanted the craft box and stickers so much before! For now it's mostly food, drinks, toys or activities, but you can also make cards for people, feelings, places, and verbs. You start building grammar with it, too. For example, we have a card for "I want". So when she brings me "playdoh", I would put the two together and say "want playdoh". I did that a few times, and the next day she brought me both "want" and "playdoh". Pretty cool! Of course, I haven't reinforced it enough and she hasn't done it again since, so we need to work on that. You can build on it and do "sophie" "wants" & "playdoh", also.
Another big benefit is that she can take it with her places (once we get more pictures made), like to grandmas' houses or to school. Sophie has a lot of signs, but not everybody knows them or knows her interpretation of them. So this will hopefully help her communicate with everyone else for now, and not require us to translate for her.
Here's a couple pictures and a video from a trip to Tyler SP we took in April. This was a trial run for our trip to AR in May. As you can see, we got a new backpack carrier for Sophie, and it worked great (maybe a little too comfy).
Here's a video of Sophie outside. She has a sandbox, but her favorite thing is playing on the stairs of the deck, followed closely by picking flowers, berries and leaves.
Monday she is going to have her 2nd endoscopy. We went in for pre-op stuff today. Whee! I have learned to take lots of books with us, and a couple of toys out of her closet that she hasn't seen a while. She did fine, and seems to have gained some good weight even since last week, but we'll see for sure Friday when we see the dietitian again. Anyway, we're not too worried about the procedure, since she's had one before.
However, this time the doctor is also going to change out her button. This is something that can be done in the office without anesthesia, but it's easier to do while she's out. Her old one does not stay closed and leaks, which causes skin irritation, so we have to leave the connector tube attached to it. Also, we have to tape the tube to the button (involving a patented process) to keep it from popping out. The new one should stay shut, and the tubing twists 90 degrees and locks in place. Plus, her old one is getting to be too small as she grows, so it needed to be replaced anyway. We were hoping by the time that happened, she wouldn't need it anymore, but that's not realistic right now. Anyway, this will make all our lives easier.
Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I had one all typed up at therapy the other day (on my ipod, which takes about 10x longer to type than on the computer) and the wireless went out and I lost it and was so mad I didn't feel like redoing it.
Anyway, this week we get to start feeding Sophie. Last week we were in the room during meals and got to help praise and cheer. I'll post more in the next couple days.
Sophie went to the pediatrician for her 15mo checkup/shots today. Whee! Her weight was about the same as last time, but she's 28.75" tall now, which actually puts her on the chart!
Here's a new video showing off her newfound walking skills
Well, we had a weigh-in today and Sophie was 17lb13oz. So she's gained over a pound in a month. That's pretty good because we had to take 1 step back to take 2 steps forward. She had so much trouble with the new formula that we had to cut way back on the amount of volume we were giving her. The new stuff has 50% more calories than what she was getting before and I guess her tummy couldn't handle it being so rich. So we cut the amount we gave her by 1/3, so she got the same number of calories, but less volume (though we did give her water also, so that her stomach wouldn't shrink). This put the amount of calories she was getting almost down into just a maintain level. But she was keeping them down. We did that for a week, then added back an ounce, waited five days, added back another ounce, etc. She's now almost back to where she started, but of course now she weighs more, so we have to shoot for more volume.
Also, she's been back on the antacids since our dr visit in February and it seems like it's helping. So that makes life easier. Still hasn't grown out of the gagging herself phase, but hopefully soon.
So we're happy that she gained weight when we weren't sure she might not lose some and we're also happy with Sophie's new obsession, which is trying to figure out walking. She's started standing more and balancing and can take a step if she doesn't think about it too much. But she's getting better...
Well, the results of the swallow study are that they recommend Sophie go to an intensive "day therapy" for a few weeks. Basically, instead of the 2 30min sessions she has a week now, this will be all day from like 8-5. This just gives her more opportunities to learn swallowing and eating, and they work on the transition to solid foods with you. So, that will be good to get it all over with, instead of dragging it out for years.
On the other hand, Sophie has made good progress on eating some foods. We've been power-feeding her cheerios and corn-puffs (kinda like cheetos puffs, but for babies). Some days she does really good and will crunch and eat them. It's hard to see her swallowing, but they disappear and don't come out, so she must be eating them. And then sometimes she just crams it in without trying to chew or let it dissolve and it works its way back to her throat and she gags and hacks on it. But we demonstrated this morning the puff eating and her therapist was really encouraged. So, we try to give them to her as often as we can, which means when she's not getting her formula and when the dogs aren't around her. They've already come to recognize her as a jackpot of goodies.
We think the weight gain is going good. We only have to take her in for weight checks every 3 weeks now, so no formal numbers til next Friday. But we used our bathroom scale to try and approximate and figure she's well over 16 pounds, maybe 16.5! I told her she's out of bowling ball territory now.
Here's a video of her making noises at the dogs (who are outside). She started making a "T" sound the other day, usually "ahh-ti", and frequently directs it towards the dogs, especially Ike.
