Look what I made!

First let me say that I am not, by nature, an artistic person.  People who are genuinely creative are mystical beings who are worthy of my admiration.  However, about a year ago I decided to buy a sewing machine.  I didn’t know how to use one.  I bought it almost on a whim.  It’s shocking what curtains cost, really.  I bought a beginner’s sewing book and did little projects like making a pincushion and a sewing machine cover.  My first major project was the curtains for Ava’s room.  I was quite pleased with myself actually given that I hadn’t touched a sewing machine since one small unit in high school home economics.  I don’t make particularly beautiful things, but I like the idea of making practical ones.  Here are my curtains (see picture – I made the curtains, not the valance).

Not so long ago we converted Ava’s crib to its toddler bed form.  She was ready.  We did it spontaneously though, so I hadn’t bought any “big girl” bedding.  We still made it up just like her crib with her crib sheets.  She sleeps in it holding her stuffed kitties and covered by one of her baby blankets.  A couple of days ago I decided I’d try to sew a pillow for her.

I dug around in the box of old baby clothes and found a couple of old baby dresses.  I cut them up for the material.  I shredded all the scraps that were left over and a bunch of other scraps left over from other projects for filling.  The scraps are mostly fleece so the stuffing is really soft and fluffy.  I serged the edges of the material together leaving a small gap so that it could be filled.  I turned it inside out, filled it with the cut up scraps of material using a funnel, and hand sewed the gap closed.  Voila – pillow.  Ava loves it!  I finished it just in time for nap.  She grabbed it from my hands and ran upstairs to her room to put it in her bed.  She wouldn’t leave the bed to get dressed.  I had to put her pull-up and pajama bottoms on her in the bed and she didn’t want her usual books and songs.  She just went right to sleep that day.  It was adorable. 

Then I made a second one so that when one set of bedding is in the wash she can use the other one.  I added a border to this one so it looks slightly more fancy than the first one.  The first one is the pink one.  The second one is the purple one.  Ava, of course, won’t touch the second one because it is purple and not pink.  She’s recently decided pink is her favorite color.  And it’s icing on the cake that I did the entire project from stuff I had lying around the house and so it didn’t cost a penny. 

Unexpected Crisis

Saturday night got exciting at about 11pm.  There’s nothing like a “Should we go to the emergency room or not?” situation to fully wake you up.

Ava came down with a cold Thursday morning.  (Somehow that never fails to happen the day –after- you visit the pediatrician for a check up.)  It was just a normal little kid cold: tons of snot, fatigue, crankiness, and a fairly impressive wet cough, but nothing particularly scary.  In fact, I commented Saturday afternoon that things seemed to be getting a bit better because now I was only having to wipe her nose once every half hour instead of once every 5 minutes.  

Just as I was drifting off to sleep at around 11pm Saturday night I hear Ava start to cough and cry and cough and cry.  It went on and on.  We very rarely go into our childrens’ bedrooms at night, but something just seemed off here.  My husband volunteered to go check on her.  Moments later he was back in our bedroom with Ava.  She was wheezing.  The cough was croup and she was having trouble breathing.  That was causing her to panic which just made things worse.  

It was Ava’s first time, but not our first time.  Michael’s colds often end up with croup/wheezing in the middle of the night.   Once it was bad enough that we did end up in the emergency room with him.  We knew what to try first.  We turned on the shower as hot as possible to get the bathroom steamy.  I sat in there with Ava cuddled close to my chest rocking and singing to her.  She was extremely hot.  So hot I didn’t even bother with a thermometer.  We just got a dose of ibuprofen into her as quickly as possible.  She completely freaked out about taking the medicine which made the wheezing worse, which made her panic…  Then I just continued to sit there with her rocking and singing in the warm steamy bathroom while my husband prepped her room. 

He got two humidifiers going and removed her smoke alarm.  Humidifiers trigger our smoke alarms, so if we need the humidifiers we have to pull the smoke alarm down.  This took him a good 20 minutes and in the meantime, the ibuprofen kicked in and the wheezing calmed down and she had almost drifted off.  However, when I stood up to take her back to her room, the wheezing instantly came back.  By the time I was in the armchair in her room I was practically starting over.  Twenty minutes after that I laid her down in her toddler bed which flared things up again so I crawled in with her.  My presence kept her calm, but it also kept her awake so I slipped out of her bed and sat right next to her waiting to see if the wheezing would stop.   We knew that if she continued to have trouble breathing even while resting, we’d need to go to the ER.  About an hour later it finally faded and I slipped out of her room. 

I finally went to sleep around 3am and was back up with the kids at 7am.  I do not function well on four hours of sleep, so Sunday was a bit of a blur.  I do remember that Ava’s temperature at one point was 102.7.  And she wasn’t nearly as hot as she had been in the middle of the night.  Getting the infant drops into her was predictably difficult again.  The highlight of the day was discovering that they make chewable bubble gum flavored acetaminophen that Ava can now take because she’s two.  I told her it was candy.  She loved it.  Is that wrong?  Technically, I lied, but if I had told her it was medicine she would have refused to try it.  I know her.  She definitely would have refused to try it.  Anyway, hopefully we won’t have any repeats of croup in the middle of the night.  And hopefully this cold will pass soon. 

Of course, I have the cold now.  And my voice is on its way out.   Parenting two little ones is enough of a challenge with a voice.  Without a voice it’s crazy.  And therapy will pretty much be out until my voice is back.  Life is always interesting.

After two word combinations start - What's next?

You’ve finally gotten to the point where you’re hearing some two or even three word combinations.  It’s wonderful and every time you hear one a scene not unlike a New Year’s celebration unfolds in your mind. So, what’s next?

You have so many choices here, and they will vary from child to child.  I’m just going to walk you through my mental processes where Ava is concerned.  I could choose to work on specific sounds she’s still missing.  She has no /k/, /g/, /z/, /l/, /J/, /f/, /v/, ...  I could choose to work on final consonants.  She doesn’t use any.  So “dog” is /da/,  “milk” is /mi/, “book” is /buh/, and so on.  The way I would approach that would be to choose words that end with a sound I know she can make and try to get her to imitate putting that final sound on the word.  However, I’m not going to do any of those things.  

 They wouldn’t be bad things to work on exactly, but those aren’t the right choices from a motor speech perspective.  Remember when I talked about why apraxia therapy needed to be different from other kinds of speech therapy?  Some therapy is designed to address specific missing or mispronounced sounds (articulation therapy).  Some therapy is designed to address patterns of errors like the fact that Ava is dropping all consonants at the ends of words (phonological processing therapy).  And then there’s the motor speech therapy that is best for apraxia. 

Ava has trouble with motor planning.  Combining syllables and words is difficult and effortful.  Even though she can do it successfully some of the time now, it tends to be through the use of carrier phrases or words and phrases that we use a lot and are over-practiced.  Or they are combinations that are very simple from a motor planning perspective.  So, for example, “mama’s milk” /ma ma mi/ is pretty simple because the consonant is the same and she only has to change the vowel.  That’s just like “baby” /ba bee/ and “banana” /nah nuh/ are fairly simple for the same reason.   It’s the same consonant with only a changed vowel.

The next step we’re going to focus on, therefore, is to stick with working on two syllable or two word phrases, but to try to make them more complicated.  Try combinations where the vowel is the same, but the consonant changes (beanie, beady, kiwi, teeny, teepee).  Then try combinations where both the vowel and the consonant changes (pony, kitty, me too, my toe, no way, see me).  So that’s the idea.  Casually, through the day, I’m still very much doing all of the things I talked about in my therapy techniques to stimulate two word phrases post.  During my focused therapy sessions, I’m trying exercises to increase the complexity of the two word or syllable phrases she can produce.