Slurpy Spice!

Well, it's official, Noa's a rock star!! After long meetings at school with TEAMS of people ready to deal with the terror of Noa fighting the switch to the straw cup... Noa made the transition painlessly and without incident over her spring break, a full week and a half before we had planned to take the bottle away for good. Oh kids!
I do have a video of this but for some reason I haven't been able to post it... I'll try again later.
Noa is doing great with the straw - but she won't pick up the cup. Every once in a while she'll touch the cup. I've seen her pull it closer to her, I've seen her push it away... I've even seen her bend herself over entirely to get a sip without picking it up off the floor, but she WILL NOT pick it up. We figure we'll get there eventually and we're just so glad to be done with the bottle!
Noa has been a busy girl (and so has Mommy, thus the delay in posting this wonderful news) - she is doing much better with her walking, sometimes taking a few steps while only holding one hand. And she loves to hang out in her walker - though she hasn't quite gotten the idea that she doesn't need one of use to pull it forward in order for her to walk. But with Ben's help earlier this week, Noa walked to the playground in our building with the walker - that back - which is a very long trip for her! She has also started to play the xylophone - the big deal here is not just using the sticks to play, it's figuring out that she has to take her hand off the xylophone in order for it to sound good. In other big news is that we're starting to work on toilet training --- we know this could take a while, we've had a few very accidental successes, which for the sake of good taste I will not go into in detail. But frankly, she is a big girl and diapers don't quite contain her anymore, especially at night which is when she tends to relax and just... let it all flow. We've had some nights in which we have to change her and her sheets 3 or 4 times (we've had to buy more sheets just to keep up).

Just because I don't want to end on that lovely note - I'll also add that we've had some great reports from school of Noa actually starting to play some with her peers. Until now, other kids held very little interest. They don't follow directions well (like us grown ups who are putty in her hands). So this is a wonderful development - she is even showing patience when the playing doesn't go her way.

Oh, last note - I'm in a sign language class now which has been very cool. It's really a class for grown ups to talk to grown ups, but I figured I should just learn to be fluent. Ben and I tried tutoring - so we could learn the things that pertained more to Noa, but the school uses its own sign language (modified for the kids) and so it was just to confusing.

Wrapped Around Her Finger...

So this is what happens when Daddy gets up with Noa in the morning. I come in to the living room, after having enjoyed an extra hour or so of sleep to find that Noa has convinced Daddy to hold not one, but two, vibrating massagers on her head while she leans back on him as if he's a Barca Lounger and chugs some Pedisure, hugs her fav stuffed horse and flips through a book. In fact, in the picture to the far right, she is even asking for a kiss to top it all off! Not bad for a kid who can't speak!

Sure, Daddy's a push-over, but Noa's powers of communication have found some new and creative outlets. Later this same weekend, she went to the pool with her fav swim-buddy Jess and taught her the new pool-signs she had come with. She told Jess she wanted to "sleep" when she wanted to float on her back; that she wanted "drink" when she wanted to be thrown in the air (which means that she dunks her head and gets a mouthful of pool water - yummy); and "pick-up" when she just wanted Jess to carry her around the pool. There is a great logic to this - and it seems to re-enforce what the guy who did our communication evaluation thinks which is that her communication issues are not cognitive, they are about not having the language tools she needs. But she sure came up with some creative solutions. I wish I could explain to those of you who have not spent tons of time with Noa how she manages to teach us these things but everyone who works with her has experienced this.

In other big news, we've laid out a plan to get Noa off the bottle, as I like to say. This has been tough because she won't put anything but a bottle in her mouth. The plan - to start in about two weeks - is to go cold turkey. No bottle. I started talking to her about this about a week ago - that she was a big girl and almost finished with the bottle - and we started to introduce a new straw cup that she would very politely hand back to me every time I gave it to her. Then much to our surprise, this weekend, she let me put the straw in her mouth. I squeezed the Pedisure into her mouth and though she didn't love the idea, she put up with it. Yesterday with Melissa, she used the straw cup a few times (though Melissa had to squeeze it for her) and today she was taking the straw happily and sucking through the straw herself. This is great because now we have some time for her to get used to the idea before the "mamba" as we call it disappears completely.