It’s hard to believe that today marks two years since my first blog post here. Last year I wrote about so much that had happened in that first year. I thought I would continue with year two!
Last year at this time, Mary was rolling to get where she wanted. Now, she is walking everywhere she can. And just last weekend she started climbing stairs. She is still just as stubborn, but now she has opinions and she will share them (it is still babbling, but there is a lot of finger pointing and loud vocal inflections involved).
While she is making great progress on her motor skills, she is still delayed with speech so that is our next goal to work towards. We are noticing her saying words in her own way: Mama, Dada, Alex (Ahyay), Vixen (Vihyeh), chip (chih), and bye-bye. It’s very similar to the delays Alex had at that age, and still struggles with sometimes. I may try to have Alex help with her sounds and see if that can help his too.
It’s been a year since we started Alex on the medication for ADHD and it made a huge difference. His IEP team noticed it when we were reviewing his IEP. He hit so many of his goals and we were able to drop one of his behavior goals completely! His report card this year was all As and Bs. All of this shows us that adding the medication to his routine was the right choice. We still limit it to just the school year, and going med-free for the summer. This might not always be possible for him and that is something we are aware of and are watching for.
In the last year, the number of doctor visits have decreased dramatically, especially for Mary. We no longer have to check in with cardiology (yay!) and most of the doctors just want 6 month to one year check-ups. We have seen the ENT doctor quite a bit due to frequent ear infections and drainage, even with the ear tubes earlier this year. She was getting frequent colds and congestion that would back up into her sinuses and build up in her ear canals, causing the drainage. We were finally able to get it cleared up in June and have her hearing tested. She passed the hearing test!
Alex is going into second grade this year and Mary still sees her Help Me Grow coach biweekly. Both kids are progressing and blossoming in their own time. As a parent, it does get frustrating when your child is struggling with a developmental milestone and you can only do so much to help. There have been several times I have had to ask Bryan to take over working with Alex on reading a book. Or I need to give myself a time out after working with Mary on letter sounds and she just blows a raspberry at me instead. And sometimes that is what you need to do: take a break and regroup to try again the next day. I’ve seen it happen where we work on it for months and it seems to go nowhere until one day it just falls into place and they take off.
This last year has been a focus on personal growth within our family. We’ve experienced a lot: from more loss of loved ones, to my parents serious car accident earlier this year, to our wedding day just two months ago. As always, we continue to take this path that our children are leading us on, sometimes taking detours, sometimes working to overcome obstacles, but always moving. And always full of love.
Happy Anniversary readers!
Raising Special Roses 