Mmmmmm Ma

What is amazing about this one is that Noa gets that I'm trying tell her the difference between Na and Mmm by putting her hand on my mouth. She gets it right after I do the Mmmm on her hand, but then goes back to Na and REALIZES it! When she puts her hand on her own mouth she is doing it just the way that I do it. It doesn't quite work so she reaches out so I that I'll do it again - and she gets it.

I mean wow. Really. This is some kind of thinking and reaching and struggling with how sounds are made that we just have not seen until now.

A kid playing with playdoh... no biggie, right?

Wrong!

Here's the thing, until a few weeks ago if you handed Noa a chunk of playdoh, she'd push it right back to you and sign finished. She didn't think to play with - or even touch - things that were slimly or sticky or wet or in any way challenging. So this is a big deal for Noa.

Last week at the open house at her school, they had a pumpkin and all the students were playing with the squishy, slimy pumpkin seeds and pulling out the insides of the pumpkin and much to my surprise, after just a bit of resistance Noa was picking up the slimy seeds and handing them to me one-by-one. She even stuck her hand in the pumpkin and pulled some out and handed them to me. It was a real first!

Noa continues to make great progress with sounds. I'll try to get some video of that. A lot of "singing." Yesterday she sang for nearly an hour straight while we were out running errands. It was a little like a cross between a battle cry and a memorial to Ed McMahon (the song pretty much went: heeey - ooohhhhhh... heeey - ooohhhhh).

She will try to say almost anything you ask her to say. She mixes up a lot of sounds: P and D, or B and T, or N and M. I don't know if its a matter of what she is hearing or just her unfamilarity with how to arrange her mouth for the sounds. But she'll keep trying and sometimes will mysteriously say something like "I did it" or "applesauce" or "go" so clearly that you think you're losing your mind.

More Toy Doggie Binky Piano

Haven't shared any video of Noa at the piano for a while, so I thought I'd share this one. As you can see, she still enjoys playing her songs - and she's trying out all kinds of new moves. One of the nice things in this video is at the end she asks for "more toy doggie binky"... then a sign she made up (the thing where she twists her finger). This is a habit right now - lists. We haven't quite figured out how to get her stop making everything into a list yet, but we're going to have a meeting at her school this week and we'll talk to them about it.

Also, as you will see at the end of the video, I ask her if she wants more piano and she immediately signs "more piano" - which means that I should change the sound the piano makes. The important thing to notice here is that she hears me and understands me and responds appropriately. This is one of those things that is wonderful... and always causes some trouble - it's one of the reasons we've had such a hard time getting sign language services: she clearly hears and understands us.

Say It Proud!

You may need to turn the volume way up to hear this one... but it's really really REALLY exciting for us. Just in the past couple of weeks, Noa has started to say things that approximate words (see our recent post with her saying "lunch") but now she's had a real explosion of - not just sounds - but also the desire to imitate sounds. This is really huge for a number of ways:

1. Noa has always loved it when we imitated her, but she has only rarely imitated us - and only when we make a sound that sounds like it might feel fun to make (spitting, vibrating sounds). But now she is trying nearly every sound we ask her to try - with varying success. For example in this clip she tries "drink" which she really hasn't gotten the hang of yet, but she makes a few attempts trying to find the right way to make some of the sounds.

2. Noa has never been able to really combine two sounds. In the past we've had "e-e-e-e" and "b-b-b-b" and even "shhhhhhh" but nothing with two distinct sounds like lunch which come out as "L-ch" or yes which comes out "ja-shh." Apparently she got "ha ha ha" from a book at school that has a vampire who says ha ha ha.

3. She seems to really understand some of these sounds and trying to use them as words, for example: yes and no (she says "na na na") and lunch (which she always does with the sign for food, so she clearly associates the two).

4. This one is soooo hard to quantify but there is a big difference between the sounds she made previously and these sounds because she is playing with the sounds, rather than the sensation. Her old "D" sound which sounded like d-d-d-d-d seemed to be about the feeling of her tongue on the roof of her mouth. But tonight we were working on drink (which she really doesn't have hear) and she was really trying to figure out how to make the sound "da" with her full voice.

The change has been so dramatic that her teachers at school and her music therapist have all be contacting us just amazed at this new, exciting development. It really has been, for us, quite a spectacular couple of weeks!

Swing Me Like I Wanna Be Swung!

What follows is a video diary of a trip to the playground in three posts (one per video-clip) - showing some of the work we're doing with Noa with the walker but starting out (above) with an example of what Noa likes to do for fun.

As you can see, Noa likes to fly! She loves big swings and lots of motion. She is very good at hanging on (she knows we take the holding on tight rule is very seriously). Sometimes people are surprised by Noa's love of the big swings, and all this spinning and turning in unpredictable ways. But she loves it! If you think about it most kids this age love to run and jump and skip and explore new ways of moving in space - it's exciting! - but Noa can't do this for herself. Still, she has to get her ya-ya's out like any energized 4 year old who can run in circles until you get dizzy just watching!

We do try to get her to play with more things on the playground, but really the swings are her fav. I think everything else feels like therapy - though there is a plastic playhouse in the garden of our building that she seems to sort of like. And she likes pounding on the "playground rules" sign in the garden: it's kind of loose in its frame and it makes a huge noise which scares the other kids (and then they want to try it) and annoys nearby parents and care-givers who would never let their kid do something like that... so... yeah, I try to not let her go crazy on that during prime playground hours.

In this series, we track Noa from the tire swing to the regular swing on the other side of the park.

And we're walking, we're walking, we're walking...

As I always tell my playwriting students, the middle is the longest part of the journey and so it is with getting from one side of the playground to the other.

I've started bringing the walker to the playground - rather than having her walk holding my hands, and it's much better for all of us. As you can see, when she is using the walker she must stand with her weight in her feet. When she is holding our hands, she tends to collapse and use our arms as her support as much as possible (which can really do a number a person's back, not to their thumbs). It is a bit of a pain to bring the walker... but the pay off is worth it for all of us.

One of the things we're working on now is getting Noa to initiate walking. She tends to just stand there and wait for someone to pull the walker. Frankly, she doesn't know why she should move, or what direction to go in (i.e., she doesn't see something she wants to go to). So we need to help her learn to even WANT to explore.

Let me take a moment to answer a possible question here: What if you made a sound and she heard something she wanted to go to? We're working on that too - but her sense of direction, as related to where a sound comes from and how far away that sound might be, is still something she is learning. We sighted people actually learn how to follow a sound by looking and seeing where the sound came from first. For example, if we make noise with a toy that is nearby, she knows she can get it. But if it is more than a foot away, it might as well be on the moon: all she knows is she can't get there. So, this is all a part of learning that she can.

Noa does know that if she keeps going with this walking she will get to the other swing: that is our routine and that is the key motivation here. Still, she doesn't always seem to get that she can move the walker without us. So we've been making deals with her (she likes deals) - we pull for 10 steps, then Noa does it herself for 10 steps. In this video, you can see she does her 10 steps and then Ben just waits. After some fussing she does keep going further than 10 (and this is some of the best walking we've seen her do: smooth and controlled).

The Finish Line!

Having walked all the way across St. Vartan's Park, Noa arrives at the finish line. The prize: ANOTHER SWING!!! We let her find it herself (with her head) and the sign she is making at the end is her telling us "more swing."