It just couldn’t wait till Quailday….

1….2….3….4….5….6…. count em! 6 assisted steps!!!!!!!!! I am thrilled. It happened Saturday while she was on stage after her Santa visit at the Down Syndrome Family Alliance Christmas Party!  Soooooo incredibly proud of her. Maybe Santa whispered in her ear while she was screaming at him. Or maybe she felt like rocking the wild piggies atop her noggin. Most likely it was the pink-hi-topped-Garanimal-pseudo-Chuck’s-shoes. Either or any-way- she’s on her way! I had asked her to stand up and she grabbed my hands and when I told her to come here- get this….she did!

Sweet baby girl….

Gratitude Journal

1. An Ethics Bowl win! Way to go Lovey!

2. Fun with friends

3. Wayyyyyy too much to eat

4. Lots of sleep

5. A baby standing in her crib every morning

6. new favorite dishes- pumpkin bars, grilled turkey breast, pop-overs

7. chocolate cheesecake offerings! Yum!

8. snuggle-bug babies

9. a radio in my office sporting Christmas caroles!

10. a sense of humor

11. An invitation to schedule a Girls Night Out! I heart my friends!

12. snow on my blog!

13. high praise on a snap from one of my favorite photographers

14. cocoa & clementines as a mid-morning snack

15. The Elf on the Shelf joining our family

16. a hot bowl of penne alfredo with roasted red peppers and chicken

17. Nobody at our table screaming at our first meal out in weeks

18. a kid screaming at a table at the other end of the restaurant (Sorry- it makes my kids behave to hear someone else losing it for some reason!)

19. Evita ordering her elf helper to decorate her gingerbread house while she sits back eating bowwwwwwwwllllllsss of candy

20. Dora Nursery rhymes and the Quail clapping after each song

21. The Quail getting a good feeding eval- so much progress!

Fave-O-Lit Friday

Funny Face

 

Diagnosis

by Sharon Olds

By the time I was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long. My mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face—
he held me, and conversed with me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She’s doing it now! Look!
She’s doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.

“Diagnosis” by Sharon Olds, from One Secret Thing. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

Quailday: The Toddler Diaries

I keep forgetting to mention that she has tooth number 10! It came in about a week ago and I will be thrilled when they are all in. The poor lamb is  gnawing her thumbs in her sleep- ugh.  When it’s obvious that she’s having pain before bed we give her Motrin, but I’m sorry to say we don’t always see a sign of it until morning and lo and behold she now has a little spot on each of her thumbs from it.

I tell ya, beauty is hard to come by in this house. Between the teeth and the hair! See those precious piggies up above? Well I’d do them every day if she wasn’t so argumentative about them! And those bangs- well, we’re trying to grow out a page-boy style before doing any cutting. Each morning I put a little clip in her hair to pull the bangs out of her eyes. As long as she knows what I’m doing she’s content with it. Probably because she’s figured out that once Momma leaves for work and she’s in the car and out of direct line-of-sight of Daddy she can yank it back out. Oh well…

The girl’s on the move these days. She’s crawling and pulling up regularly on everything. Considering what a long-time coming this accomplishment is you would think we would be tickled. Of course what it means on a day-to-day basis is we no longer have a captive audience for various activities. Twice this month she’s just gotten up and left her therapy session! I’m guessing that insistent part of her is about to majorly assert itself. We may have to hire professional comediennes to practice her exercises and activities with her so that she can be continuously entertained!

Ok- so we are almost caught up on cute school anticdotes- the last couple of weeks:

11/18/10: After about five minutes, she decided I wasn’t as fun as the toddler dance party going on at the other side of the room and crawled over there. She spent the next fiveish minutes standing and sitting and standing and sitting some more while giggling at herself in the mirror. The toddlers were about to start story time so I tried to get her to crawl over to where they were sitting. She wouldn’t, so I crawled over to her and we raced back over to the toddlers with her crawling on all fours the whole way. Ms. Ren was reading a book about ducks. She asked “What sound does a duck make?” and the toddlers started quacking. Usually, she looks around at everyone thinking they’re strange when this happens but today she looked up at me and quacked along with a loud “da da da da.”

 11/19/10: I picked Abby up and she pointed to where she wanted to go. First she pointed to the bright yellow leaves on the tree so I lifted her up to grab one and said “leaf” and she repeated “ee.” She sat up from laying on her back on my legs eight times today! I had her do it a couple times and she was getting frustrated so the next time she sat up I layed back down on my back. She thought it was funny to crawl up on my belly and grab my mouth/cheeks/nose. So everytime she sat up from laying I’d lay down and let her crawl on me. She also did a good job of staying up on all fours crawling to get to my nose. (She’s a big fan of knocking her sister over as well 🙂 After that it was time for snack. I spent a full five minutes trying to get her to crawl to the door to go outside for snack. She absolutely would not do it. She did everything from getting excited and flapping her arms to putting her arms on her hips and pouting at me and laughing when I crawled over her to try to encourage her to crawl but it didn’t happen. I gave in and picked her up and we went outside for snack. During snack, she signed “more” everytime she got close to finishing a cracker. Once snack was done she looked up at the book holding the door open and signed “book” so I got it down to read it to her.

11/23/10: Then she crawled over to me and I had her sit up from laying on her back on my legs. She did it three times on both sides. Each time she sat up she grabbed my hands and clapped them together like, “Hey, look what I just did. You should be clapping.”

11/29/10: I sat her up on the ball in between the two bookshelves on the red carpet and she stayed up there with me rolling the ball for a whole 15 minutes. She could reach the toys on the shelves when I rolled her to the side so she would grab one and play with it then throw it and laugh. She got frustrated a couple times and laid all the way forward with her hands on the ground but she sat herself back up and kept going. After about 15 minutes she got really frustrated and started yelling. I asked her if she was done and she signed “done” so I helped her down. The toys she grabbed were all over the so I asked her to help me clean up. She picked up a toy and I told her/showed her “drop” them in the toy bin. She put away three of the toys by herself!

corner view: rain

See what’s going on around the world:

jane ianbonniejoycekimkaytrinschritvafrancescastate of bliss cabrizetteisabellejaniskarijgylisecateotlidortebsophiemcgillicuttysunnymamadaanibbpienduzzkelleynninjasammitheresacherry bjulietteshokoofehcolegrey lemonlucylainelynnskywritingannadoritconnyl´atelierkamanaanne marierosamaríavictoriatikjewitjuniperannabelandrea valeriemerel soissesmlle paradiscacahuetewander chowbarbaraemilytallynadinedon flowtopssusannataniadanaingridtzivia lollipopmarimezza

Zuzuday: bed bugs…

Or buddies… or not so much. Zuzu is a snuggler. And man cannot snuggle alone! I’m actually surprised it’s taken this long before we’ve started finding her in the Quail’s crib. Needless to say- the Quail is non-too-pleased…

Mommaday: better than….

last year I think! It was a quiet holiday this year. We’re still trying to figure out what all we can manage with 2 little ones underfoot  I’m always so impressed with these families of small ones who still manage to put on a big festive feast in their own home. I have absolutely no idea how you manage it. We were fortunate to be invited back to the large Thanksgiving day gathering of a good friend that we attended last year.

This family is kind enough to open their home on the holiday to their graduate department who isn’t able to make it home to their families and a few other of us transplanted souls. They are excellent cooks and party hosts and we always look forward to an invitation to their home. This year we did have a few lingering coughs of colds gone by floating around our house but nothing too serious compared to last year! Gosh- last year by this time we had already had one emergency room visit for a sick Quail and still had gunk being passed around between us all. Come the actual holiday break I was down in bed for most of it. This year while we didn’t have any company staying with us, and I forgot the memory card to our camera when we were with friends we managed a very laid-back set of festivities. Zuzu happily ran around with a couple of her buddies from school. The Quail was mobile enough to to keep herself and us on our toes, but not quite mobile enough to keep herself from needing rescuing every few minutes. We managed to make a pumpkin pie with the remains of our Halloween bounty and were in charge of the yummy carrot bake from the year before. I mail-ordered our favorite Tom & Jerry mix, but we were so happily stuffed that we didn’t even break it out until a post-holiday get together with another family of friends.

On friday we managed to clean up our nest- which is a feat in and of itself and our other dear family feast friends came over to partake in the mythical BBQ from Texas that Uncle Scott had sent us last spring when the Quail had her surgery. We had kept it in our freezer and repeatedly told mythical tales of its smoky tenderness. These friends have a 3 month old as well as a spritely 2 year old and were kind enough to bring along an apple galette as well as a batter for pop-overs. Which I think might just become my new favorite bread product.

We rounded our our weekend with a little outdoor playtime, some cookie baking and coco-drinking and multiple sightings of the Momma sign! Yay!!!!

We were also invited to a sweet birthday party for 1 year old twins. There home and friends and family were all so lovely. Zuzu didn’t want to leave. While she can be shy occasionally, this time she managed to walk right up to just about every kid within a foot of her height, introduce herself and invite them to play. The Quail was also delighted to not be the youngest of the group and enjoyed her status as the toddler, whispering to the twins about their year to come.

All in all a nice weekend with plenty of relaxed home-time which is often in short demand here. Hope your holiday was just as bright!

Gratitude Journal

1. photos coming out like paintings

2. the beauty of November

3. luscious skies

4. kindness

5. spirited children

6. a renewed love of turtlenecks in little ones

7. a dora chair turning into a lazy-boy for a pudgy toddler

8. a-cute naughtiness

9. renewed connections

10. invitations

11. being on time

12. playdates

13. a lazy goat lunch

14. Plain Truth

15. a new to me Jane Hamilton and A. Manette Ansay find at the library

16. hanging my pictures at work

17. new digs

18. time with Lovey

19. Glee

20. my babycenter friends- both Ds and MMC

21. a phone call from a doctor not amounting to anything