I DID NOT TEACH HER THAT

We've been teaching Lauren her body parts lately. She's really gotten excited about finding her nose. So far she knows nose, ears, mouth, hair, belly, bellybutton, feet and hands. Not too shabby!

She had her monthly development check up on Friday and she's doing great. We have been encouraging her to try to speak more and she's also picking up new signs really quickly. With her signs and speaking, she can communicate around 30 words.

Her understanding is a whole different ball game. She is scoring months ahead on her comprehension of language. It is somewhat frightening when you tell her something that you think she totally won't understand and then suddenly she is doing exactly what you wanted (half scary because she understands and half scary because she's doing what we asked).

It is hard not to be constantly thinking about where your child is developmentally when she is being checked out so often. That's why I'm glad that we decided to wait a bit on speech therapy. And I have loved these last two months of just enjoying her being a kid without one appointment after another. Watching how she is coming along, you would never know that anything out of the ordinary happened to her last year.

Other than the scar. As you can see from the double nose jab photo above, the top of her scar is almost non-existent. The bottom half is still a bit obvious. It is the part that was cut open three times and had the large tubes for the bypass machine so it is a bit wider, still red and doesn't sit perfectly flat. Now that she listens a bit better, we've decided to give the scar strips another go, this time on the bottom half of her scar. So here we go, 1 week down, 11 more to go.

But I still think that scar is beautiful. It's why she is here.

PS - Lauren saw the picture of herself with her fingers up her nose, grinned and shoved them right back up there. She is trouble.