Spicy Dragons & Dinosaurs

We had quite an exciting day today, but I am starting to fade out so I have to revert to unconnected bullets of information. Ugh!

- In speech therapy, Kimberly gave Julia a vocabulary test during which Kimberly said words and Julia had to point to one of four pictures which best described the word. Last Friday when Kimberly gave her a similar test, Julia was wild with her pointing. This past weekend Julia and I were working on a workbook and she needed to point to her answers before she wrote them. I tried to teach her to use a 'quiet finger' instead of the 'noisy fingers' that she has used with Kimberly. We did this on both Saturday and Sunday, and today, she used her quiet finger to take the test with Kimberly. I am amazed, so was Kimberly. I never expected her to use what I had taught her so quickly. Added to that, Julia did really well with the testing. She stayed on task for most of the time, and considered her answers before she pointed.

- Annie, Julia's OT, commented that Julia seemed different. She described it as a different quality of listening. Julia did listen and followed directions pretty well. At one point, she got angry at Annie, and I tried to calm her down. I told her that Annie was one of her grown ups and cared about her. I said that Annie wanted Julia to be safe and the Julia should trust whatever Annie tells her to do. Julia seemed to take that in today.

- On our way to our next stop, I put on our Chinese kids music tape. Julia started to sing the songs -- in a fake Chinese -- but then after the second song, she suddenly got very quiet. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw Julia looking rather sad in the back seat. I asked her if anything was wrong and she told me that she was sad. I asked why, and she said that the Chinese music made her very sad. I immediately turned it off and when we arrived at the doctor's I gave her a big hug and told her how she could tell me about it when she was sad so that I could try and do something for her. Like turn off the music.

- We went to the doctor's office after therapy because Julia has been complaining about one of her ears and her neck. Julia doesn't complain about pain much. The nurse practitioner could not see one ear drum because it was blocked with wax. Julia was very cooperative at the office and was very appropriate when they washed her ear out with warm water. A huge piece of wax finally came out of her ear and we are hoping that her ear problem is solved. Her ear canal was irritated and the wax was leaning on her ear drum.

- And finally, a blog about school lunches and what kids are learning about food in school asked our food group to contribute entries. They have just published the first one that I wrote for the blog. Check it out: F is for French Fry.