Chilling Discoveries

Sophia and I went to one of the many classes I’ve signed up for her today and we were the only ones there. Since we still had another step in Sophia’s evaluations, the instructor asked if we could just complete that while I was there. Absolutely! Anything to move forward with diagnosis and treatment works for me.

I was asked a ton of questions, and for the things I was unsure about we brought Sophia into the sensory room so that her actions and reactions could be observed. They really need to rename that room to the 70’s room. All it was missing was some gaudy-colored shag carpet. It had the mirror wall, beanbags, and bubbling tube of water that changes color with the press of a button that closely resembled a lava lamp. A disco ball and some roller skates could have also completed the picture.

The good news is that she saw absolutely no form of autism in Sophia. I feared that label. Many people equate autism to extreme social awkwardness tied in with superhuman counting skills and a series of odd phobias (AKA Rain Man syndrome) even though there is a varying range to which this behaviors show up. I didn’t want that stigma attached to her. I mean who does, right?

I was given a bunch of handouts to read and assess which things seem to fit Sophia and in reading one of them, I found me. It’s creepy how specific the description was and how well it fit me. It wasn’t like reading a horoscope, “You’ll find your true love soon.” And after weeks of searching you decide that it must have meant the dog you fell in love with at the pound. This was specific even in describing the vision problems I have despite my perfect eyesight.

The motorcycle rolls in, “Daddy’s home,” I say. She runs to the window watching him check the mail, then runs to the top of the stairs. “Eh-Low!” She shouts.

“He can’t hear you from there.” Down the stairs she goes, pushes open the door purposely left ajar, “Eh-low, eh-low, eh-low”. She says in rapid fire.

Flash Fiction Friday is hosted by g-man. You may also visit Flash Fiction Friday 55′s, a blog dedicated to hosting 55 Flash Fiction Friday posts.

It started with some playtime that included trying to get Sophia to blow bubbles and letting her swing for a bit, and then moved to the focus of the class, eating. The facilitator said she began the class with other activities like blowing bubbles in order to “warm up the mouth”. The class already seemed kooky to me. She asked me what things Sophia will eat. She knew it was a limited list. I think word got around that my kid only eats white foods.

Sophia’s list of foods include: Oatmeal with dates and raisins, Muesli, scrambled eggs (occasionally I can get her to eat it with shredded zucchini), cheese (mostly cheddar and string cheese), apples, banana, breads of all kinds (wheat, banana bread, cornbread, zucchini bread, pancakes, Dutch babies, carrot cake), rice, nuts (almonds, hazelnuts, cashews), peanut butter, French fries (we don’t eat “freedom” fries because that’s just retarded – we like the French, they provide health care to all their citizens), tater tots, and beans.

The only food that isn’t a white, brown or other earthy color is sweet potato.  But she won’t just eat sweet potato it has to be made into a sweet potato pie.  I didn’t count the blueberries she ate in pancakes because that only happened a couple times. Now she eats around the blueberries.  The only meat she’ll eat is bacon.

The facilitator was impressed, “You’ve been working hard at this.” I looked at her a little confused, “For such a limited range of foods you’re doing a good job.” She said. I was relieved. It felt good to know that it shows.

Halfway thought my list she said that it seemed like Sophia only liked soft foods. Apples aren’t that soft and she hates applesauce. I listed the nuts and breads with nuts in them. She wrote everything down as I mentioned it and went over the list. I told her that Sophia has also had animal crackers, graham crackers, saltine crackers, Doritos, tortilla chips, sour cream and onion chips, and pretzels. I didn’t list them in her foods because these are not staples. Sophia doesn’t get those snack foods very often and when she does I limit the amount. She eats so little that I try to make sure what she is eating has a positive nutritional value. “Wow, she really seems to be avoiding color.” Yep, that’s the only connection we could come up with.

Since this was Sophia’s fist class the facilitator said she would take it slow. She took a quarter of a graham cracker and put it in a cup with a spoon for Sophia. She did the same for herself and then asked Sophia if she could break it up with the spoon. Sophia snapped the cracker in half with her hand and began eating it. Armed with tiny cups of peanut butter the facilitator opened one. She broke up the rest of Sophia’s graham cracker and poked little cracker spikes into the peanut butter cup.

Sophia hesitated with the peanut butter graham crackers so the facilitator took one out and licked it. “Can you lick the peanut butter off?” She asked Sophia. Sophia took a cracker out and it came out peanut butter free. She just held it. “Can you smell it?” the facilitator put her own cracker up to her nose and sniffed it, and Sophia copied her. “Can you march it up your arm?” The facilitator marched the cracker up her own arm. Sophia copied her and eventually ate all the crackers in the peanut butter and asked for more. I was impressed that Sophia was mimicking a stranger, but not that she was eating those foods. She’s had both before, just not at the same time. It seemed kooky to me. More like a class teaching kids how to play with their food.

That night I made Chili for dinner with cornbread. I served Sophia a tiny bit of ground beef and beans and a half of a cornbread muffin. She ate the muffin first. No surprises there, but instead of asking for more immediately she picked up her bowl and picked up a piece of ground beef. She looked at it, tore it apart, sniffed it, and then licked it. She actually ate a piece of it, and then another. She didn’t eat everything I served her, even though it was a very small amount, before asking for more cornbread, but she did eat something new after just one food class. That was impressive!

The results of Sophia’s evaluation have come in. The only delay she shows is with her speech, which is 40% behind her peers. Everything else was marked as zero delay. They’re recommending Speech therapy intervention and an in house referral to nutrition and feeding.

The day of the evaluation I was told about some classes offered there, some are free, some have a small free, and others have a fee but would be free to us because Sophia qualifies for therapy. I signed up for three classes. I may not stick with all three, but I’m trying them out. One class is a preschool/play group. We’ve gone to that class twice so far. The first time didn’t go so well, but she improved a lot the second time.

The next class can very loosely qualify as a gymnastics class. Sophia definitely doesn’t need help with her gross motor skills, but I signed up to give her yet another opportunity to play with other kids her age since there is some free play incorporated in it. She was leery of the class in general, but she really latched onto the teacher. That was completely unexpected. I liked that she wasn’t hanging onto me for dear life, but it was odd.

I took her to the playground nearly everyday during the summer to help socialize her, and she does well in an environment where children outnumber adults. She’ll take off without me and play around and sometimes with the other kids. One time she found an older girl (about six or seven years old) on the playground to adopt as her big sister by taking the girl’s hand and just shadowing for the entire time we’re there. The girl was a part of a summer camp or YMCA group or something and one of the adults later told me that the girl had a sister Sophia’s age. Sophia must have just known.

At friend/family gatherings Sophia is very clingy and will cry if adults try to engage her. I generally have to take her to a quieter corner so that she can observe things. After a while she’ll usually get comfortable enough to take off and play with/beside the other kids, and when it’s time to go I can get her to wave bye-bye and high-five everyone.

I’ve had Sophia enrolled in swimming consistently since she was ten months old and she just recently started lean towards the instructor indicating that she wants to swim with her. It’s a very nice change of pace and it shows me she’ll be ready for the next swimming level when that time comes. I was a little worried, so when we started this new class and she tried to monopolize the attention of the teacher it was bizarre! In her case, I think that class might be more about learning to take turns.

The last class I thought was kooky. I chalked it up to being about as useful as alternative medicine type things like magnets for improving blood flow. I was wrong. Of the three classes, this one is definitely a keeper.

Sophia’s current baby signs are: milk, more, eat, apple, banana and water.

Her actual spoken words consist of: hi, daddy, cheese, hello, no, bye, book, shoes, Petie (dog’s name), kitty, one, two, and apple.

I haven’t heard her say hi or daddy in months, and now instead of saying cheese she does the sign for banana (string cheese sort of peals like a banana). She has also said, “momma“, but only on a couple occasions.

She loves to pull out her book, “Go, Dog. Go!” by P.D. Eastman and babble through the pages until she reaches the somewhat odd scenes of conversations between two dogs. In the book, the dogs greet each other with hellos, and then one asks if the other likes her hat. The second dog always replies with, “I do not” and then they each say, “Good-by!” Upon reaching this section as Sophia reads to herself I hear, “Hello. No! Bye.”

The sound of her hellos range from, “Leh-Low” to a British sounding “Eh-Low” depending on how excited she is, sometimes it is a very clear “hello”. “Book” she began pronouncing, “buh” and now it’s more like “buhk”, and shoes are “shush”.

Sophia loves to help, so even though it slows us down so much that we might as well undo things, we let her whenever we can. Kurt began letting her help him feed the dogs. Her job was to dump the scoops of food into the dog bowls and Kurt would count them out. I think that’s where she learned the words, “one”, and “two”. She began counting two weeks before her birthday, but I’m not sure she truly understands the concept. The first time I heard her, she was flipping through the pages of a book saying, “un, two, un, two” as if she were marching in the military. Now I’ll catch her pointing at things and saying, “un, two, two, two”. That’s how she counts to four.

Her favorite book for a while was, “Mr. Brown can Moo, Can you?” and from that book I heard her say the sounds, “klopp” and “buzz” a few times. Now she really likes a new potty book I purchased a couple months ago, “A Potty for Me!” by Karen Katz. From that book she says, “uh oh”, and “whoosh”. She’ll read the book to herself and say those words on the page they actually appear.

If I count the four sounds, but don’t count the word apple twice (once for the sign and once for the actual word), there are only twenty-three words for the nearly twenty six month old. *sigh* Next on the vocabulary list is Antidisestablishmentarianism. At least it’ll be an impressive word.

My guest and I met with a mutual friend, of sorts. Midway through the visit, I asked my guest, “Have you noticed how he must always RUN up all the stairs?”

“Hmm…”

I attempted to recreate the scene, but failed. Later we passed a StairMaster. Silently, I pointed it out, and we cried with laughter.

Flash Fiction Friday is hosted by g-man. You may also visit Flash Fiction Friday 55′s, a blog dedicated to hosting 55 Flash Fiction Friday posts.

Kurt’s mom came to visit back in March. Sophia, nearly eighteen months old at the time, was only tolerant of the visit. There were no hugs for Grandma. I think the closest they got to a sweet picture moment was when Grandma sat on the floor playing with Sophia’s mega blocks and Sophia got in the action by handing Grandma the next block slated for use. I wish I had captured the moment but that would mean leaving the room to grab the camera and risking a change in focus from Sophia. I think Grandma enjoyed seeing Sophia play and have fun around her even if she couldn’t hold her, but hopefully she’ll be more social at Christmas time.

We are fast approaching the time of year where activities are best done indoors. Until recently I worried about that because the majority of indoor social activities require either, a long drive, a lot of money, or both. I now have a long list of activities and services to keep us occupied through the winter. The only thing we could think to do back in March when Kurt’s mom was visiting was to go to the McDonalds play land. It was fun to watch Sophia, climb up and up and up, but then it became a problem because when she wanted out she would look down and know that was the way, but continued up.

Let me give the mother’s of newly mobile children a bit of assvice for a moment… You don’t want to send your kid up in the McDonalds gerbil trail unless you’re sure they know how to climb back down again because you’ll NEVER want to go back there EVER again if you have to go through those sewers to retrieve your darling. It’s really fuckin’ gross in there and we were at a rather new McDonalds.

The other free place to visit and play is the mall. Sophia loved playing with the shopping cart. We wanted to rent one but couldn’t figure out how much is cost or where to go to rent it. I later learned that it cost five dollars and they keep your credit card until you return the cart. I guess that’ll keep people from spending too much.

In the locker room after Sophia’s swim class the other day, we did our usual routine. We went to our locker got out the soap and shampoo, then to the shower area, and washed off all the chlorine. Back at our locker, I grab our bag and claim a section of bench for us. I towel off the toddler and then go digging for her clean diaper. I keep digging. I go back to the locker and rifle through the clothes I left behind. I go back to the bag. Surely I didn’t forget the ever-important poop containment system? Shit Fuck Damn! Hoping that she’ll hold it at least until we get to the car where I keep a fully stocked diaper bag I put the darling in some pink toddler sweatpants. She peed before I could get my own undergarments on. I didn’t look like she peed though because the super fleecy sweatpants didn’t change color at all, but pee was coming out of the bottom of her pant legs. She thought it was fun and started splashing in the puddle she was creating.

Sophia has developed a habit of shoving her hands in the back of her pants, sometimes on the outside of her diaper and sometimes on the inside. Yesterday, I didn’t notice what she had been doing and she came up to hand me something. I stupidly accepted the gift on blind faith. Why, why don’t people talk about these things? Why didn’t anyone ever tell me before I got pregnant that someday my child would hand me a little brown nugget that she made herself?

Thank you dear, I’ll treasure it always. I should have taken a picture of it or better yet, dry it out and make a poop nugget necklace.

The Laura as you know from yesterday’s post is our couch. Last year my parents bought Sophia her own couch and it’s pink with Dora the Explorer all over it. We dubbed it The Dora, it’s The Laura’s illegitimate child.

We keep some of Sophia’s toys in the living room. We can mostly push them back and sort of make them blend in. The Dora is not something that blends well. It’s not that we don’t want it to look like we have a kid, we just don’t like making it look like the kid took over the entire house. Dora has lived largely in Sophia’s room. That is, until not-a-nanny (AKA Smarmoofus) came to visit this year.

Kurt and I had talked about covering The Dora so that Sophia could have her couch in the living room but we never got around to doing anything about it. Smarmy dragged me to the fabric store and I found three yards of red upholstery that somewhat matches The Laura and three yards of a mossy color upholstery that somewhat matches The Farris. All of it was on clearance and all for nine dollars.

Smarmoofus and I finished most of it before she left and Kurt and I finally got around to putting the finishing touches on it Sunday.

We figure Sophia will be able to relate to the new Muppet Couch since she has watched all the first season Muppet shows. She’s never seen the Dora the Explorer show, and that’s not a hidden request for Dora videos.