Hard to believe that tomorrow Noa will be 5-years-old!!! And she's really been piling on the skills in the past couple of weeks to catch up with her new status as a "big girl." Especially impressive right now -- food skills such as those demonstrated above. Notice how she finds the spoon. She is careful looking for it, and you get a sense when she is doing this that she is usually visual imput in some way. She is in the right area and really searching for the right spot. This is true even if I move the spoon slightly. It's not a "blind" reach, so to speak.

I love that in this clip she also reaches for the spoon for the next bite, though her sense of having to scoop more onto the spoon is just developing. Actually, she was doing this at school before she did it at home. Ben happened to be at the school for a meeting and saw her doing this - and her cover was blown. In this respect, Noa is just like any other toddler - she knows who expects what from her. She used to pretend that she couldn't pull up her pants when she potty time with Daddy... until he happened to see her do potty time with Mommy. Tricky kid.

PLUS, she's been eating more and more new foods. Just in the past week and a half she had baby food mixed with rice krispies, more pasta varities and... are you ready??... cheeseburger (fed through a food mill) mashed up with french fries and topped with a little baby food. She loves meat flavors so top most anything with a meat flavored baby food and you're good to go. She's doing well with all the stage 3 baby foods (that have chunks) which used to make her gag and even ate a whole jar of a fish flavor (salmon with wild rice). It's really a whole new world!

As we're coming up on her birthday, I guess I should share a birthday story - just a short one. As most of you know, Noa was adopted, but Ben and I got to know her birthmother ahead of time and were lucky enough to be there for her birth. In fact, when one of her friends came down sick, I ended up being one of the birthing coaches and Ben even cut the cord. But that's a different story -

For a variety of reasons, Noa's birth was induced - which gave us a great shot at being there for the actual event. Five years ago yesterday we went in for a final ultra-sound and discovered that Miss Fancy had somehow turned herself around and... basically facing the wrong way. "Go home," the doctor said, " and we'll try again next week." Of course Ben and I were disappointed - to be expected - but Noa's birth mother (we'll call her B) wasn't taking next week for an answer. Although the doctor said there was no way that Noa would turn around by tomorrow, B convinced her that we should just go to the hospital on schedule and take another look - and then she and I got to work tracking down all kinds of crazy old wives tales about getting babies to turn over.

We tried a few things - can't remember most of them but one was playing head banger music to the area where her head was so she'd move away from it. Ultimately it was a bag of frozen peas that did the trick. We put them right where her head was and within a matter of minutes she flipped right over -- and I mean it was a dramatic move. We could see it happen! So much for the doctor's theory that babies didn't turn around like that. When we went to the hosptial we were feeling pretty confident that Noa was in launching position... and she was. The rest, as they say, is history in the Land of Noa.

Shake it Up!

The most recent delay in my postings has been due to a very sad (and we hope not too tragic) event, the complete crash of my hard drive which will tomorrow undergo the computer version of heart surgery, so keep your fingers crossed!!!

But I'm so glad to be back on the blog and able to share this great video with you all today - it's actually a couple of weeks old: Noa enjoying the heck out of the blocks that Grammy and Grampy gave her for Christmas this year.

She also likes throwing them, so I don't think we've had all 50 in the box since the New Year. As you can see she loves to shake shake shake until they are all gone and then she starts all over again. She seems to get the idea that they are somewhere near enough to find and so she'll reach and roll around to find them as best she can. It's part of a whole new level of independent play that includes pulling books off shelves and opening cabinets and pulling down baskets. Makes a mess, but it's good fun and it's great to see Noa really reaching out and finding things rather than waiting for someone to come along and give her something to do.

That's Noa!

Okay, so this video really doesn't have anything to do with the story that inspired this posting, but I'm glad that I remembered I had it because it's a lovely clip of what was a real treat for Noa: Daddy at Music Therapy. As you can see in this video, Noa is doing a great job of playing along with this song - she really likes this one!

But the big news this week is that Noa actually ate some toddler mac and cheese this week (thanks Claire!). Of course it was covered in babyfood Chicken flavor (her favorite) which helped. There was a lot of screaming the first time - but she managed. And then today, I tried (I tried to break the pasta in half so the pieces were probably about the size of a pea) - and through there were some funny faces, there was no screaming, and no gagging. And she really seemed to be proud and happy when I told her what a big girl she was. She didn't chew the pasta, but it was very soft - a few times she seemed to move it around in her mouth. But just to allow it in... huge!

It's difficult to explain what a huge deal this is! Noa will be five in just a few weeks and this is really the first time we've seen her take on anything what wasn't pureed.

Alot of visually impaired kids don't eat solid food - sometimes the reasons are clear, sometimes they are not. And many of those kids will NEVER get past pureed food. There are also many VI kids who end up on feeding tubes because they are so adverse to solid food - or because they can't get enough nutrition from what they are willing to eat.

When Noa was younger, we were told the tube was an option because for a while we weren't sure she was getting what she needed - she was soooo adverse to eating. But kids who go on feeding tubes, often don't get off them because... hey, would you? If you don't like eating and you can get all your nutrition from a tube? So we battled through that one and as much as we suffered over the fact that she wouldn't eat solid food no matter what we tried (and we tried everything!) we were always grateful that we never had to do the feeding tube.

SO considering all this - getting some pea-sized soft toddler pasta in the mouth and down the throat without gagging, screaming, barfing (which trust you me, we've seen a lot of over the years) is truly miraculous.

Circus Circus!

Noa had her first trip to the circus last week: The Big Apple Circus at Lincoln Center. We went with her school - the circus does a special needs kids performance and Lincoln Center is just about 2 blocks from school so it was about the easiest field trip in the world.

It was hard to get a photo of Noa in which you could really get a sense of the Circus - we brought her in her wheelchair so just were just parked behind the regular seating. But it was quite a crowd and kids of all ages with all kinds of disabilities.

At first I was bummed because I didn't want her stuck in that seat unable to really play with me, or bounce in the bouncey circus seats - and the wheelchair tends to tilt her back. But actually turned out really well. As soon as the lights went down I just stood Noa up in front of me - cause there was live music and I thought she might want to dance... and dance she did!!! Through almost the entire circus! Thank goodness Noa's one-to-one Emma was with us to switch off with me because my shoulders are still not in the best shape.

Unfortunately Noa wanted to face me most of the time. The first time I tried to turn her around she kind of paniked and grabbed onto me. I think she was afraid I was going to give her to someone else or make her do something she didn't want to do (like get a shot). But towards the end, when she was tired, and convinced that this was a fun trip, she turned around... and then she discovered the metal railing that really moved if you shook it. When Emma and secured the railing so, she went on to pulling the velcro'd signs off the railing. Yeah, sure, it's not the best kid behavior. But it sure it NORMAL toddler behavior and so to perfectly honest I was quite proud of her for making normal kid trouble.

Toward the very end, she sat on my lap. In the final big number she seemed to be looking around and taking in the lights a bit... so we just got about 7 or 8 minutes of using her vision but I think for her that was plenty. When it was over, she took it very well. She learned the signs for "fun" and "circus." It was an all out great adventure!

Bringing it in with STYLE!

Okay, last one today, I promise.
I just couldn't resist.
I don't even have anything to say about this one...

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.