It was a beautiful day today!! So we got out and enjoyed it. Ian refused to take the nap he desperately needed, I gave up and we took off for the afternoon. Since it's Thursday, we did a quick stop at the library. Then we needed to go to Hobby Lobby. We like to go to Petco while we're out that way, today we parked in the middle and walked all the way to HL, then Petco then back. I did have Ian in the stroller though since I don't quite trust him not to try to run away and it's always so busy in that parking lot.
After that we went to Snug Harbor park and walked around by the water's edge. The kids had a great time picking up chunks of broken up cattails from last year and throwing them into the water. The wind was at our backs and it made some of the pieces twirl and flutter before falling into the water. We also saw the decomposed carcass of a fish. It was really neat, but I was so worried that Ian was going to grab it. Yuck! Alison and I checked it out as best we could.
Ian really has no sense of self-preservation though. On the shoreline there is a 6-8 inch drop down to the water and he constantly wanted his toes on or over that edge. I guess there wouldn't have been much harm in him accidentally falling in since the water is pretty shallow, but I still didn't want him falling in getting all wet.
On the way home from there, we stopped at another waterfront park that has a playground. There was a soccer practice and softball practice going on so there were lots of other kids there. Alison started running around and playing with some of the girls who were about her age. Ian was the smallest one there for quite awhile. He holds his own amazingly well. There was another little boy who was probably close to 4 years old. He tried to push Ian a couple times or tried to go up the slide that Ian was going down. Ian was really good at hitting him and pushing him out of the way (Not like I want Ian pushing and hitting, but I'm glad that he stands up for himself. I'm always a little worried that since he can't talk that other kids will take advantage of him, but watching him today he made it quite clear when he didn't like what the other kid was trying to do to him.) Alison really didn't want to leave the park, but Ian was getting cranky and throwing tantrums and trying to run away, so we really did have to go. We were gone for 4 hours and spent at least 3 of those outside. I love spring!
Oh and in other updates...
Ian's speech therapist came again today. I've been playing with him this week with trying to move his tongue around. What I discovered is that it is really hard for him to move his tongue up. That could go a long way to explain why the sounds for n, t, & d are hard for him. Jen also used had him try to push his tongue out. While he can stick his tongue out when we are making faces at each other, he can't really push that hard with his tongue either. She also took a look at how he puckers up his lips. Usually when he blows, he makes an f sound and his mouth is more of a skinny oval than a circular pucker. I've always wondered since he had such a hard time nursing when he was little if there was a correlation between that and his speech problems and it looks like it might be a piece to the puzzle. So our main things to work on this week are to put peanut butter up behind his top teeth for him to try to work down with his tongue, also to put a bit on his lips for him to lick off. I also need to put something like chapstick on his lips to see if I can get him to close his lips and rub them together side to side. We get to play with bubbles too. She showed me what to do today (and you might wonder why I need instructions on how to blow bubbles). Well first she blew the bubble and caught it so that he could just blow it off the stick. Then (and this is the amazing part) she showed me how when he blew at something that was far away, he'd make the f sound, BUT if she put it super close to his mouth he actually made an O shape with his lips and didn't make the f sound at all. I couldn't believe that just a couple of inches made that much difference. Bubbles and peanut butter, here we come!
She also brought lots of new pictures for us to play with, including 2 picture boards. These are groups of pictures that all relate to a topic. For example, I told her that we were going to start doing more art and playdough. So she made a group of picture for playdough. There are pictures for "I want" "help" "playdough" "cookie cutters" "rolling pin" "squeeze" "push" "roll" "more" "scissors" and "cut". Right now, I'm just going to show him how to use them by pointing at them while I talk. I can say "I want cookie cutters," and point to those two pictures or "help roll". He's been doing really good at trying to say the things on his single word picture cards and we are hoping that he will start to put more words together and actually try sentences.
Alison got 4 new chapter books from the library. She's really enjoying a series of books called "The Pony Pals" and we've read all of them that our library has. So we inter-library loaned some and got all for that we requested this week! She reminds me of me when I was younger, while we were driving around she was skimming through the books giving me the highlights of what was going to happen when we read them. I love that she loves books as much as I do.
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