Happy New Year

Just thought I'd post our 2009 Holiday Greeting on the ol' Blogisphere. The photo taken by the ever fabulous Talya Arbisser (otherwise known to Noa as that nice lady who makes the clicking noises). She was in town just before Thanksgiving and took this photo of Noa enjoying the Ball Pit - her reward at the end of PT session.

The print is kind of small:
"There are two ways to live your life,
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle."
- Albert Einstein

Of course one of the truly joyous things about Noa is that she really does live her life as if everything is a wonderful miracle, and hey at the end of a long day of school and PT... a moment of giggly solitude embraced by colorful plastic balls? Yeah....

Holiday Fun!

Just wanted to share a couple of photos my Mom jus emailed me of Noa enjoying family time over the holidays. In the top photo, from Christmas, Noa plays her favorite Hand Game with Grampy at the kitchen table.

In the lower photo, from Thanksgiving, Noa chills in the playroom at my folks house with her cousins Abby and Aidan. It can be difficult for Noa and her cousins to figure out how to play for long stretches of time, but they don all seem to enjoy each other, and Noa is definitely aware of who they are. In fact over Christmas Abby created a sign for her name and taught it to Noa and she picked it up right away. It's funny, Noa looks A LOT like Abby did at her age, and even in this photo you can see that they have very much the look on their faces - it's hard to believe that they aren't blood-related, the likeness is pretty uncanny at times.

Good Toy!

This is a great toy we got from a woman who lives down the hall from us: you draw on this special cloth with a water pen. It just writes in blue, which is perfect for Noa. Blue is the color that most motivates her. I did start the doodling, but she did most of that blue blob herself. It's hard to tell what she is enjoying the most: the feel of the pen or the color, but she did seem to get that she had to hold it that way to make it "work" - and she signs that it is a "good" toy. Yes, for those of you who actually know ASL, her sign for good is a bit modified. She seems to do this to make it different from the sign for "thank you." The interesting problem is that a lot of ASL has to do with the facial expression and the context of the word... things that are kind of lost of Noa, but her solution: to find her own way to make them different, seems to work right now with her limited vocabulary. Again, this is a totally new toy! In the past, she would have just handed that pen back to me and signed "finished." So this is really a whole different world of behavior for Noa.

NEW Toys!

A lot of people ask how Noa learns signs, well here is a perfect example.

First we have a highly motivating situation: Christmas! Actually this is the first year that Christmas has been such a great motivation. Her resistance to anything new made new toys... a bit overwhelming and not always a great event. But this year, she loved all her new toys and played with most of them right away. She actually also ripped some gift wrap and stuck her hands in her Christmas stocking - both very new activities for her.

This is actually her first Christmas morning gift - some great block from Grammy and Grampy that I think really got her in the right mind-set for the rest of the gifts. I took the opportunity of her realizing that this was a "different" toy, to teach her the sign for "new" - a sign that we'd get to use a lot since there would be a lot of new toys.

As you may notice, she actually says the word "new" when I ask her if she wants to learn the sign. She does a lot of this repeating, but when she wants to express herself she tends to use signs.

As you can see, she really gets that I'm teaching her a sign that she wants to learn. She just keeps putting her hands out for me to repeat the sign again and again. A few days after Christmas, and the sign is pretty well set in so much as she can make the sign if I ask her to. Sometimes her understanding of the concept comes later as she tries using the sign - though she seems to be doing pretty good with this one so far.

She did a lot of verbalizing on our Christmas trip to Grammy and Grampy's - she was trying to say "Christmas" a lot. For the first time I think she really got that it was a big fun event full of toys, and she did great with all the holiday hub-bub of noisy kids and their toys.

She also started doing the sign for "no" - which has been a tricky one. We've been doing it as a sort of song and she likes doing it that way. The trick will be transferring it to situations in which she wants to say "no" since she is usually upset and so doesn't always remember her best communication skills (a problem I think we can all relate to).

No Snowa Noa

Every year we take Noa out after the first big storm of the year, and every year she about the same reaction to the snow... which is essentially not positive. It just takes her a long time to get used to any new thing, and since we get snow so rarely she just has never had the chance to really get used to it. But we keep trying. One of these days we'll get to making snow angels... it just won't be today.

Chillin' Old School

In my ever-continuing efforts to heal my bum shoulder, Noa and I had kind of a hip, mellow day last weekend. After a walk back from the bathroom (Noa did all her own walking with the walker), we made a quick stop by the hat/scarf bin where Noa picked out a velvety blue scarf and then made our way to the beanbag chair to chill out and strum some tunes. So here is Noa in her first ever internet guitar solo.

Sorta Sorting

Okay, so the story of this video goes all the way back to Thanksgiving when we met with Sandy, the woman who has been assessing Noa's vision in terms of her Cortical Vision Impairment and helping us do the kinds of work at home that will help Noa use what vision she has as best she can. As many of you know, we've been working mainly with a light box, but at my parent house we started out our session just using the white table top and actually Noa did great just with that. Better in fact. She'd been getting kind of antsy at the light box.

BUT the big breakthrough was actually mine. I'd been working with Noa on identifying colors, but I was never sure if we were getting anywhere. Working with Sandy, I very quickly discovered my mistake: apparently we learn to match colors before we learn to identify them. SO asking Noa to pick up a red block, or a yellow block, is too much of a challenge. When Sandy gave Noa a colored block and asked her to find the bowl it went into - suddenly it was clear, she knew what to do!

Thanks to my Mom who on the spot insisted that we take the table with us. Noa has been enjoying it.

Of course the fun thing in this video is that she following my directions, but I'm not not being really clear. I do have other video where she gets it right, but this sort of interests me more because it really shows her trying to figure out what I'm asking, and demostrates how specific I have to be in talking to her.

Noa seems to understand what we say more clearly now. For example, the other day, I asked her to take off her shirt and after asking a few times (without any physical cues) she did it. On the other hand, she continues to have problems figuring out how to express herself when she wants to say "no." She'll scream ear-piercingly loudly and then smack herself in the head.

The loud screaming has also come into play with some discomfort she seems to have in her leg... or maybe its her feet... or her bowels. Honestly, its impossible to tell what is bothering her but it is very upsetting and she screams bloody-murder. She did this all the way home from music yesterday and I got numerous comments from friendly people about my lack of mothering skills. That was fun. We have a doctors apt. next week and hopefully we'll learn something. It's very upsetting to see Noa in such distress and not have any idea what is going on.