Raincity Mama

Our daugh­ter has had a lan­guage explo­sion. I had her out yes­ter­day and she saw a sand­wich board sign and stopped so that she could point out the “Geee” and exclaim for all to hear that she had found the G. She also pointed out the “Peee” that is on our “Splash” bath­tub mat. It all started when my hus­band had her out­side and she started chant­ing “twoo twoo twoo” and pointed to the 2 in our house num­ber. It seems that cou­ple of days she adds another word to her vocab­u­lary, it is so exciting.

Our son is still behind in speak­ing. We had him eval­u­ated by a Speech Lan­guage Pathol­o­gist and his recep­tive lan­guage is bang on sched­ule but he has a sig­nif­i­cant delay in his expres­sive lan­guage. The SLP sug­gested that we go back to bab­bling and try to get him to imi­tate us, but that has had no real suc­cess. She also encour­aged us to con­tinue with teach­ing him sign lan­guage. My teach­ing him sign lan­guage had relied on watch­ing episodes of Sign­ing Time that we record on the PVR. It was great but now the broad­caster has stopped air­ing any episodes so we are at a stand­still watch­ing the four episodes that I saved on the PVR. Thank­fully two of the four episodes have signs that he can use reg­u­larly, but I need to start lear­ing more signs to teach him. I also need to ensure that my hus­band is up to date on all the signs that our son knows so that there aren’t too many frus­trat­ing moments where he is sign­ing and my hus­band has no idea what he wants. That said, our son has started to cre­ate signs for things and I have no idea what they mean, so I really do need to learn more signs to teach him to fill that gap.

I have to say that teach­ing the kids sign lan­guage has given both of them a leg up on express­ing them­selves so that they can be under­stood. Teach­ing them the signs along with the spo­ken word seems to rein­force the con­cept. Now I just need to get my hus­band to start speak­ing Ger­man so that they start pick­ing up that lan­guage too. It’s never too early to start right?

My son has started to get extremely inter­ested in feed­ing him­self using uten­sils so we have pur­chased them their own bowls and cut­lery. The first night we let him feed him­self we were hav­ing stew and he did great. My daugh­ter isn’t really inter­ested but since her brother had cut­lery she needed some too. I put her bowl and cut­lery in front of her and she lunged at the spoon and started in.

While our son was able to fish around had get food on his spoon and then nav­i­gate the spoon to his mouth to eat it, our daugh­ter pushed the food around her bowl but rarely man­aged to get any on her spoon. If she did man­age to load up her spoon the food rarely made it to her mouth with­out falling off. I asked her if I could help her sev­eral times but she would glare at me and say “noo” and carry on push­ing food around her bowl.

It is so inter­est­ing to watch two dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ties at work. My son is will­ing to let me help him in most things once he has strug­gled a bit. It usu­ally only takes a few attempts with help for him to mas­ter a task. My daugh­ter rarely lets me help her unless it is a task that she just can­not com­plete on her own, but she still will whine or strug­gle away until I offer to help but she will mas­ter the task too. She wants to fig­ure it out on her own. He wants assistance.

Today they are learn­ing to eat with cut­lery, tomor­row they will be head­ing off on their own secret missions.

The twins are in the mid­dle of the 18-month growth spurt, devel­op­men­tal spurt, a cold and teething to boot. They have never been great sleep­ers but this has been crazy; tak­ing for­ever to fall asleep, wak­ing up every hour or so, and then wak­ing up for the day at 5am when they usu­ally sleep until 7:30. I could han­dle one of these but the com­bi­na­tion has made for a very tired mommy. The kids seem to be get­ting over the cold and hav­ing the vapour­izer run­ning in the room at night seems to have made all the dif­fer­ence. It has been a crazy two weeks but we seem to be on the tail end of this stage. There is a rea­son that sleep depri­va­tion is used as a method to break peo­ple, but I have sur­vived. Just mark this as another step in my train­ing. From what I have read, they will go through another stage like this next year, so I will have to stay on my toes. At least I will have year to catch up on my sleep.