Coloring

Dougie and I hit some of the back to school sales last week to get some cheap supplies. While we were there he picked out a coloring book. He's never really been into coloring but 25 cent crayons will make you try anything. So, we tried it.

It started out innocently enough.




Dougie was super excited that there was an elephant in the book.


Then Dougie decided that perhaps he wasn't being as efficient as he could be.


Oh yes, this is much better.




Sadly, the resulting picture was not the most conventional art but he sure had a good time coloring it!

Dougie's Stroller

Dougie has a doll stroller (he loves to push things).


Unfortunately, he seems to have missed the memo...


... that dolls are supposed to ride in it.


(pardon the jammies, the air conditioner hadn't been working and we were trying to stay as cool as possible)

Who Eats Like This?

In the continuing adventures of "why does Dougie do this" we have discovered another food oddity.



Dougie takes a bite out of one side of a sandwich and then the other. He eats it almost evenly. I've never seen someone do that but it strikes me as a bit odd. He does something similar with quesadillas - he takes the point off each piece and then takes another bite out of each piece. It looks even stranger since there are usually 8 pieces or so.

Cookie Behavior

At first, I blamed Scott for this bizarre Dougie behavior.

Cookie Carnage


He has since reminded me that he would never waste a cookie.

I was then reminded of my childhood snacks that involved eating the stuffing out of a double stuffed Oreo and then throwing out the cookie - unless my dad is reading in which case, I never wasted the cookie either. :)

More Therapy Updates

Yesterday, we had Dougie's evaluation with his group speech therapist. It was an interesting session. I went in expecting to hear that Dougie was far advanced compared to the other kids and that he no longer needed the program. That wasn't quite the message though. He has definitely made some improvement but he has the verbal ability of a 23 month old which is still a notable delay. They feel that he would be best to stay in the program for at least another term.

In exciting news, Dougie's private therapist feels that he has much such great progress in his PROMPT therapy that she wants to increase the number of sessions he's getting. He should be able to retain more and make faster progress with the increased sessions so we're very excited to get started on that.

All this means that he'll be doing speech 4 times a week starting in the fall. We've arranged it so that it will only be on Tuesdays and Thursdays though so he'll still have lots of free time to go to play dates, take classes and just be a kid.





Speaking of being a kid, Dougie has finally learned the name of one of his friends. Her name is Lauren and I go to the gym with her mom and she's in our playgroup. Whenever we get near the gym or her house, Dougie starts saying "Hey Lori", "Lori?", "LLLLOOOORRRRIIIIII." I'm so excited that he's bonded to someone and is excited to see them! Our next step will be saying her name correctly.

"That Doesn't Look Like a Boy"

We had our "big ultrasound" today. The baby is measuring completely on target which is great news!! We checked all the various parts and everything is looking normal and where it should be. All in all, she came back with a good report.

.... yes -- SHE -- we also found out that we're having a little girl.

Here she is:



Praying that her brother won't beat her up.



Even Dougie is excited - he still needs to learn how to properly hold a baby.

Making Brownies

By now you know that Dougie loves baking. As you also know, Scott loves baking with him. The other weekend, we were looking for something sweet and remembered we had brownie mix in the cupboard. Out it came and Dougie and Scott went to work. I didn't manage to get any pictures of the "baking" process but I did manage to get some shots of the aftermath.

Mmmm... brownie mix


Scott tried to have a turn licking


Dougie managed to get Daddy's hand off


Is there a better way to spend a morning with Dad?


My contribution, in case you were wondering, was to get Dougie's shirt off before he covered it with chocolate.

Welcome to Holland

A friend of mine reminded me of a poem today. I thought it was so thoughtful that she reached out that I wanted to share it.



WELCOME TO HOLLAND
by
Emily Perl Kingsley.

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

PROMPT Therapy

Today, Dougie started a new type of therapy. Our therapist recently took a training course in the PROMPT method and felt that Dougie would be a good candidate for it.

What Is PROMPT?

PROMPT - "Prompts for Restructuring Oral-Muscular Phonetic Targets" is a technique that uses tactile-kinesthetic articulatory cues (PROMPTs) on the jaw, face and under the chin, to develop or restructure speech production. The PROMPT-trained speech-language pathologist helps to manually guide articulators to help the child produce specific sounds or words. The clinician uses his/her hands to cue and stimulate articulatory movement, and at the same time helps the child eliminate any unnecessary movements.

When she brought him back, she was clearly very pleased with how the session went. She said Dougie responded exceptionally well. She gave me a few demonstrations of the progress they made. It was remarkable!! In tried getting a short video of Dougie doing it at home but the camera messed it up and then Dougie decided he was done making videos.



The only disadvantage to this therapy method is it is not something we can work at home. Parents are discouraged from "prompting" their children because the method is quite difficult and you can just get them confused. Having seen some of the methods used, I can see why they say that. We've asked our therapist for some advice on what we can do at home though.

Dougie Talking

We're taking another break from vacation pictures to share a video of Dougie chatting this morning. I always seem to have trouble getting the video camera on him in time to catch a lot of talking but today we got lucky.

For those of you who haven't seen him in a while, you'll notice he's started making attempts at words he doesn't know. We're very excited about that! As you can tell, he still has trouble saying some of the words clearly but he's so excited to be talking!!

Port Stops - Stockholm and Helsinki

Our cruise port stops started in Stockholm. We considered going to see the original Ikea but instead opted for the Absolut Vodka Ice Bar. It was very cool (pun intended).

When we arrived, everyone had to put on parkas. Thank goodness they had one child sized one.



Dougie was cold and not too thrilled to be there.


He started to perk up quickly though.


We turned in our drink tickets and got some drinks. Something with vodka for Scott and Dougie and I split a cranberry juice.

The ice glasses


Though Scott is not a big drinker, he thought the flavored vodka is pretty good.


We were only at the bar about 30 minutes and then we had to get on the bus to tour the rest of the city. It was a great time though!!


The rest of the tour was a talking tour of the old city. There were some interesting sites, including the Noble museum but nothing particularly interesting to photograph. The only thing was this:

This very tiny statue is apparently world famous. You're supposed to rub his head for good luck. In the winter, people send little hats for him so he keeps warm. Scott and I each took a turn rubbing his head and then Dougie gave it a shot.


After a day at sea, we stopped in Helsinki. Since Scott and I had both already been there, we decided to take a tour to a small island to see a UNESCO site. The site was interesting but a challenge to see with a toddler. He did enjoy the boat ride there and back but would have enjoyed napping more.

Just call me Mimi

Anyone who has spent any time with Dougie lately knows that he has learned the word "Mama." It's very southern but not a term that we use or had planned to use. I was so happy that he was calling me something though that I went with it. We continued to refer to me as "Mummy" in hope that someday, he'd start too.



We're not quite there yet but we've made progress. Dougie has started to call me "Mimi." Dougie has some trouble changing sounds in the middle of a word so we think he's picked up the second part of Mummy and just doubled it up. It's pretty cute and occasionally, very rarely, it comes out as Mummy.

The Cruise

The next step in our vacation was to get onto the cruise ship. This was a special trip for us because we were celebrating out 10th anniversary (it isn't really until September but I'll be too pregnant to cruise by then). We opted for a room with a bit more space because it was such a special time and because we'd have Dougie with us and knew he'd need a bit of extra room. Much to our surprise, we then had our room upgraded. It really was a thrill!

The Room












It turned out that it was great to have the space. With Dougie's naps and early bedtimes, we did end up having a lot of time in the room.

We did manage to escape from the room though. Dougie invented a new game of golf. It involved hitting the ball once with the putter and then picking the ball up, putting it beside the cup and rolling it in. Tiger Woods he is not but Scott is looking into getting him on a junior tour.

Dougie also played some basketball. Being less than 3 feet tall, it isn't quite his game yet but, with Daddy's help, he managed.







We also made several trips to the buffet. Dougie learned they had "cook-kee-kees" which he requested every time we got near the buffet or any time he just thought about it.





Not to worry though, the cruise wasn't all about cookies, there was ice cream too.







You can see why we enjoyed it so much. We'll cover port stops soon.

Vacation - Copenhagen

After our quick trip to Canada, we had a handful of days at home and then we were off to Europe for a family vacation. As you can imagine, we were more than a bit nervous about having Dougie on a very long flight across the Atlantic not to mention our concerns about dealing with a toddler and serious jet lag. Overall, we all did exceptionally well with the trip. We had a few early flights that taxed all of us but we pulled through and made it to Copenhagen without any major international incidents.

Our first day there we spent mostly in recovery mode. It was raining most of the day and we were all very tired so we napped and didn't wander too far from the hotel. Fortunately, we were very close to a lot of the action of the city so even with just a short walk we could experience city life.

Day two we decided to get out and do some real site seeing. We took a boat tour in the morning. It was a great way to see the city and Dougie enjoyed the experience of being on the boat enough that he was happy to sit through the tour.



After some lunch and a short nap, we headed to Tivoli. It's a small amusement park right in the center of Copenhagen. I think that may have been the highlight of Dougie's entire trip. There was a large children's area that had an inflated mattress like thing that the kids could bounce on.





There were also slides and other more standard play things.



It was a challenge to get Dougie away from that area but eventually, we did. We decided to try him on some of the rides. Daddy took him on the first one.

It looks like he's screaming there but he's actually saying "Hi Mama."

I drove with him in some little cars and then we moved onto the carousel.



Dougie loved the carousel so much, we did it again. This time, he wanted to ride the giraffe.

It really was huge. Scott kept a hand on him the entire time though.




It has been a long day by the time we finished on the rides so we had some dinner in the park. Scott decided to get some ice cream but Dougie felt that he should share.







We decided to finish the day by burning off a bit of energy back on the bounce thing.



There were a lot less kids the second time so Dougie was able to run without worrying about hitting someone else.



It was a fabulous day. The next day we headed for the cruise ship. More about that soon.