Chillin' in the Garden

Very excited to be sharing this video of Noa in the Garden yesterday with her new BFF Yvette. Yvette is a recent member of Team Noa, she is hard of hearing and is ASL fluent - she also works as a teaching assistant at a School for the Deaf. As you can see from this video, Noa really gets that Yvette is someone who communicates with hands - and you can see how she is really focused on listening to Yvette in a different way. It's really terrific to watch them together. Of course, the only problem now is that Noa is learning signs faster than we are!

In the midst of all this great weekend stuff, I'm going to go ahead and address a couple of struggles. I realized last week that the videos and all are so positive and it's easy (and fun) to focus on all this great stuff. But I think it's important to remember the difficulties as well, if nothing else they are a testament to Noa's determination and good nature: in spite of all we are struggling with in some areas, Noa continues to be a happy thriving kid.

But at home, potty time continues to be a huge struggle. Noa seems to be obsessed with "wiping" - and always wants more wiping and will cry, head-butt and monkey wrestle with you to keep you from pulling up her pants until she's ready... which seems to be never. We have literally spent 20-30 minutes trying to sort through it all (she'll do a ton of signs and whine and complain - but we can't understand any of it.) Sometimes we can bribe her with a toy or activity that she wants - but often it just goes on and on. She'll even sometimes just insist on getting back on the potty. It's a huge and frustrating mystery - often when we do get her pants up she is very unhappy, but after a couple of minutes she seems to be over it - emotionally anyway - she may still sign "wipe wipe" for a bit. A couple of times we've thought we had it solved, but then it returns. We've called school and they don't seem to be having any problem there... and with me going to Idaho in a couple of weeks, it's difficult to think about leaving Ben to deal with his on his own for a couple of weeks. It really is extremely draining and frustrating to deal with. So that's sort of the major struggle at home now.

Of course, I have to end with some good news - Noa had a dentist apt this week with a new dentist. Our former (expensive) dentist, dealt specifically with special needs kids, but this was a more regular dentist and so we told him we'd serve as assistants to hold Noa down (I have a kind of a jujitsu hold for Dr. visits, but still need Ben to keep Noa from using her giant, hard head to clock me in the chin). Noa did great! She did scream... but not right away, and while she did try to clock me in the head a few times, she wasn't trying to get her arms free and squirming her head around so the dentist couldn't get - she just tried the clocking mommy moves when he took his hand out of her mouth. We were very proud (and thanks to Ben for being a better holder than the assistant at the other dentist who didn't quite believe that Noa would try to clock me... until after she already did).