You Talkin' to Me?

Practicing her rock star moves in the lobby of the therapy office.

I am pretty sure IKEA is Swedish for getting into lots of trouble.

Coordinating their plans for world domination.

Caught purple handed!

Amelia has been making big strides in her speech lately. Some of her words include: uh-oh, go, stop, night night, dog, eat, yuck, yum, cookie. I need to keep a log of all her words. I think she may have about 30 now. She can sign: eat, more and grumpy (the Sign Times lady from Nick Jr. does this one in a song about feelings and I have used it so much with her she finally started signing it back)! Oh and she can blow kisses upon request. She puts her hand up to her mouth, pulls it away and says "Mwah!"

I have really been working on stop and go. I put her in a basket in the store and I push her fast down the aisle and say: "go, go, go!" and then I come to a halt abruptly and say "Stop!" She thinks this is pretty funny. Then I tell her I am going to go until she tells me stop. I start pushing her and I tell her "Say stop!" And when she says it, then I stop. Then I stay in one spot until she says go and we start all over again.

She has finally started addressing me as momma with more frequency. I think she is saying other things, but I am not clear on what they are. The exciting thing is she is trying to imitate and is able to do that more successfully than she had in the past.

She grabbed her therapist's keys the other day and ran to the door and pretended to put it in the door handle to get out. She carries a baby doll around and gives her kisses.

A big milestone happened the other day in speech therapy. She was able to say "baby", "dog" and "ball" when shown the cards. She was shown a tire on a tractor and when she was shown a truck, she pointed to the wheel.

She is starting to jibber jabber conversationally to us, but they are not real words, just imitating the cadence of conversation. When she is sleepy at night she gets very talkative.

I bought her a children's sing CD that is geared towards kids with speech difficulties, most specifically apraxia (mouth motor function planning), but speech delay, articulation problems, kids with Downs, etc. The songs are sung slowly and the articulation is very crisp. The idea is that is slow enough for kids to process the words and gives their brains enough time to make their mouth move to the words.

One of these days she is going to pull the cork out and she will be a little chatter box. I swear I won't complain (much) when she does.