Bedtime Discussions

Every night since we returned from vacation, we have had the same discussion. These discussions have all been spurred on by a fabulous gift Dougie received while we were there (thanks Miss Naz).

Me: Dougie, it's time for bed.

Dougie runs off to grab his elephant


Me: Dougie, Eli can't come upstairs. He has to sleep downstairs. You two can play again tomorrow. (This comes from experience - even turned off he will continually try to make it sing)

Dougie holds on tight to Eli


Me: Okay Dougie, play with Eli for 5 more minutes and then we'll go to bed.

Dougie likes to help him move his ears.


Sometimes, he just likes to listen and watch.


A few cute looks to see if I'll change my mind.


Finally, we hand over Eli and head to bed.


Tomorrow, there will be more singing about whether or not your ears hang low and wobble to and fro. Until then, 'nite 'nite Eli.

Poor Auntie Suz

Dougie heard that Auntie Suz had hurt her ankle. He was concerned and immediately wanted to hop on the next plane to California. Though I'm sure she would appreciate seeing him - we suggested that perhaps he could help more in other ways. He reminded us of his skill at removing wine bottles from her wine rack but we still thought something less invasive would be a better idea. So, Dougie settled to make her cookies.

Daddy helped




Dougie was a bit confused about the adding the chips to the cookies part


Finally, he found a few for the mouth, few for the cookies method that seemed to work (our apologies if the cookies are a bit low on chips)


You can see how full his mouth is before he was willing to pour some


Why yes, he did resort to taking them back out of the batter (don't worry, his hands are clean)


Stir stir, mix mix (don't worry, Scott's hands are clean too)


Once the cookies were done and cooled, we packed them up. Dougie thought the box we picked was a bit dull, so he decorated it.







Hope you feel better soon!

Baby Updates

On Friday, I had another appointment with my OB. Things are going along well. I'm still down in weight but I had gained a pound since last month and so had the baby. We had another ultrasound and the baby was actually measuring a bit ahead - so everything is going well.

We got more pictures which are a bit grainy but you can sort of see her face.


I had my test for gestational diabetes while I was there. I failed the first test with Dougie and had to go back for a 3 hour test (which I passed) so I'm hoping to avoid that this time.

Another Grape Stomp

Today was the annual Grape Stomp at the local vineyard. As you may recall, we took Dougie there for the first time last year.

Unfortunately, Dougie had swimming this morning so he missed the harvesting but he made it in time for the stomp!

We had to wait a while before they filled the vat with grapes. Dougie hung out with Daddy and some friends from my MOMS Club.

At first, he watched them load the grapes into the destemmer.


Then he started to get a bit bored with the wait.


More bored.


It has GOT to be time to stomp.


And it almost was. They filled the vat and the kids got going. Dougie did a lot better this year.

At first, he tried to just get his feet out of the vat.


He kept pulling the grapes off but then he'd put his foot back in it and get covered again.


He stomped a little with Daddy's help - you can see how thrilled he is.


He was all smiles again once we got him out.




He even talked his way into a lollipop from a friend of mine.


Overall, it was a great morning! I'm sure we'll be back next year.

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.