Let the Games Begin

We've had the game Don't Break the Ice for a long time. The children love it. They never actually played the game mind you. I would spend three minutes carefully setting it up and they'd spend 5 seconds frantically pounding out all the pieces of ice in a fury of excitement. They simply couldn't grasp that the concept of the game was to prevent the bear from falling down.

This weekend Michael asked to play Don't Break the Ice. I pulled it from the shelf and set it up and in a rather pessimistic way told him, "Now, you lose the game if you make the bear fall. You win if the other person makes him fall." He got it. He loved it. I even loved it. Now that we were actually taking turns and using strategy to try to keep the bear from falling, each "game" lasted longer and I had an opportunity to play too. So far, he's a good sport no matter who wins. Game playing finally became fun.

I got really ambitious and pulled out the Candy Land game I bought ages and ages ago when Michael learned his colors and I overly optimistically assumed that meant he was ready for Candy Land. Turns out he's also ready for Candy Land. We played 4-5 games in a row. He wanted to discuss every character and really wants to build a real Candy Castle. I have rediscovered the fact that I personally find Candy Land to be a little boring and I think I'll search out some other games that might be fun. Any suggestions?

Oh, and Happy Father's Day. Enjoy it everyone.

And to my husband: Happy 7th Anniversary! I love you. (And Happy Father's Day - You are an amazing Daddy.)

Simultaneous Relief and Sadness

Oh my goodness is she talking. The other day Ava commented that, "Daddy put peanut butter on Ava's really really big pancake." That's a 10 word sentence coming from my little girl who's only 27 months old. It is such a relief. 6 months ago she had only three words in her vocabulary and couldn't imitate. Now she's talking in multi-word sentences. Obviously her language is fine.

However...

More and more, I can't understand her at all. I'm pretty good if she's talking about something immediate and in front of us (like Daddy and the pancakes). If I have some context and we can see and point at it I can understand most of what she has to say. But if she's talking about anything else I'm clueless. You often can't understand a word of what she's saying. If she starts rattling off her opinion of a tv show I haven't watched or telling me about something she did at her grandparents' house I often have no idea.

As you would expect for Childhood Apraxia of Speech, the longer the utterance, the less you can understand. It's killing me. She has so much to say. Her little mind wants to tell stories. She wants to engage in back and forth conversation. Instead she says something which I hear as, "Garble, garble, garble, garble, garble" and I just look at her and reply, "Uh huh sweetie." And then I try to change the subject. Sometimes I say, "I'm sorry, sweetheart, Mama didn't understand you. Can you tell me again?" But I only do that when I think I have some chance of getting it. Otherwise, she just gets frustrated at trying to tell me over and over unsuccessfully.

I know we're working as fast as we can. I know she's made phenomenal progress in a relatively short time. I know she can communicate so much more than before. But honestly, I feel that it is terribly unfair that she's worked so hard, she's finally got so much to say and is actually trying to say it, and she still can't communicate successfully much of the time with her loved ones. That sucks.

The Weekly Review: Week Fourteen

Best Blog Posts of the Week

• Linda at All and Sundry writes an online column at CafeMom. She wrote an incredibly brave and honest post that is definitely worth reading.
• To continue with the more serious theme of the best blog posts of the week, Rob Rummel-Hudson at Fighting Monsters with Rubber Swords wrote a post this week about an outing his family had at the pool, the connection his daughter made with another child, and the feelings and observations he and his wife made during the experience.
• To finish with something lighter, at the end of this post, Swistle links to a site where people are posting really cool pictures. They take a picture from their past and go to that same location. Then they line the old picture up with the real life background and take a picture of the picture and write a caption. Hmm. That description doesn't make much sense, but the pictures are really touching somehow and you should definitely check out the site. It is Dear Photograph.

The Weekly Michael

"I'm going to get you with my slapula!" - Several hours earlier I had taken the toy spatula from the kids' play kitchen and was poking Ava with it making her laugh. Apparently Michael was unfamilar with the word spatula and given the context, interpreted the name of the device as Slap - u - la. My husband's parents were in town at the time and we all laughed long and hard. We made jokes about it for the rest of the visit.
• "Mama, are you making a baby?" - Wow, that one came as a complete surprise out of nowhere right before bed a few nights ago. Last week, Michael and I had a brief conversation about how you can't buy a baby at the store because mommies have to make babies in their tummies. In response to his question, I told him that, "No, Mama is not making a baby right now. Mama is probably done making babies. I have a Michael and an Ava and that is enough babies for Mama." At that point he promptly began begging, "Please Mama! Please make a baby." Ava jumped right on the bandwagon also chanting, "Please Mama, please!" Don't think I didn't hear my husband laughing as he eavesdropped from the other room.

The Weekly Ava

Ava is counting everything. She'll just randomly burst into sequences of numbers. They tend to go something like this: "one, two, three, five, seven, eight!" Eight seems to be her favorite ending number. So, we'll be climbing the stairs, or I'll be putting grapes on her plate, or there will be five (eight according to Ava) frogs in a book and the counting will begin. It's adorable. The teacher in me wants to correct the counting, but the Mama in me just smiles in adoration.

Project of the Week (or month, or year):

The card sets are definitely the obsession of the week. I do not use the word obsession lightly. I have been pretty much been spending every spare minute on them. I'm pretty sure that I will not be able to maintain this level of intensity for long, but I'm hoping to do about one new card set a week indefinitely. Let's do the math. There are 24 consonant sounds and theoretically I'd like to do an initial, medial, and final card set for each one where appropriate. (Not all of the consonant sounds appear in every word position so there will not be three for every one of those 24 consonant sounds). That's approximately 65 card sets. Hmm. Over a year's worth at one per week. We'll see.