It was actually less than a week ago that I posted what I thought was a pretty amazing video of Noa doing the ASL alphabet with Ben modeling all the letters for her... and now this: Noa does all the letters all by herself!!!!
Yeah, she needs alittle side coaching, but look at how deeply she thinks about when she knows she doesn't have the letter quite right. There's a lot going on in there...
I will say she has been pretty much obsessed with the alphabet - asking for it to be repeated over and over. In fact one night this week she was crying in bed and squirming around as if she were in actual physical pain - at my wits end I tried the alphabet and quickly realized that was what she wanted all along! In fact, at the end of the alphabet you'll see that she immediately wants to do it again.
She also likes to try to say a lot of the letters, which is really interesting - the signing really seems to inspire attempts at language that just don't happen any other way. It makes some kind of connection for her. I especially love the way she says "W" - listen for it, it's fun.
In other signing news, she is also doing great with signs for food - and using the sign for please a lot, which is lovely. Also finally getting her to sign "mommy" instead of just grabbing me.
On the challenging side of the coin, she has suddenly stopped drinking - over the weekend wouldn't have a sip of anything at all. It was a real puzzle. Finally yesterday I got her to take a few sips of a drink if I held the cup (AND I had to count so she knew I was serious about the drinking - and she wasn't exactly happy about it). We don't know what motivated this. Just so you know, since she still eats pureed foods she is getting liquid in her diet, so she's not in immediate danger of dehydrating - but it's been a LONG time since we've had a step backwards in the eating/drinking world and we don't want to lose ground there.
We've also seen more hitting, knee and elbow banging and lashing out when she is frustrated and can't communicate - this will happen sometimes either when she has a sign that we don't understand (either because she's mistaken some innocent gesture for a sign, or she's not quite doing the sign correctly so it takes a while for us to sort of dectective out what she wants, or she just doesn't know the sign for what she wants). This is hard to see, and when she is upset it can a challenge to just calm her down and try to patiently sort it out.
On the plus side of this coin - because she understands more, I've actually been able to start more effectively use the concept of a time with her to make it clear to her that hitting herself will not get her what she wants - which is usually me.
The othe plus side - she is mostly walking just holding one hand now! She does lose control of her legs... pretty often. It's actually kind of funny because she'll try to recover by walking faster (which starts to look a little like Monty Python's School of Funny Walks). It usually ends with her crashing into me, but I can see her focusing more on figuring out how to stay in control using her own balance and her legs - rather than pulling on my arms for stability. So that's a big switch.
All in all --- always something new, in the Land of Noa!
btw, thanks to my mom (Grammy) for taking this video. you'll see my dad (Grampy) making a cameo in the background!
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