Worth the Wait!

Wow, I can't believe I haven't posted since January. Real life just totally took over blogging life - guess that happens.

But Noa has been doing some amazing stuff in the past few months as this video will demonstrate. As you will see, she lets go of her walker for extended periods of time to sign - and looks very comfortable doing so. She's at that place where she doesn't even realize what she's doing - she is just focused on what she wants (in this case a toy called "hook" that vibrates) then she's perfectly comfortable. The walker gives her more confidence then trying to stand when she is holding our hands because if she loses her balance she knows where the walker will be.

She is also doing a lot of new signs and talking up a storm. I will will will try to get more stuff up because it's really wonderful. A few weeks ago we started a new plan: work on just two signs per week, and it's made a huge difference. She was learning so many signs in so many places and sometimes picking up stuff that she thought was a sign, but in fact was just someone doing a gesture (she's a sponge like that). So, while she may get a number of new signs in a week casually, we focus on two that at school, at home, in therapy we will also try to use.

Last week she did something amazing - she totally unprompted traced a circular cut-out on her chair and said "circle" (yes, said out loud!)

A few amazing things about this -

1) it was not prompted, so she just recognized the circle and decided to tell us about it - which is very unusual. She tends to just talk when she wants something. This was just to share!

2) she made the connection that it was a circle. She loves sorting shapes, and so she'd been checking out a lot of circles - connecting that all these things are circles is a huge conceptual leap for her.

So for now - enjoy this great step forward for Noa-kind, and I will try to get more up in short order.