Cerebral Palsy can kiss my behind

I'm so far behind and have too many posts floating in my head to ever catch up. In an effort to journal their progress by date, I'm going to go all incoherent on you without any bridges. Please bear with me.

This post is from 4/9/11:

EXPLORING MAGAZINES... AND THEREFORE REAL LIFE:
We've started to give them old magazines to page through and oh my, are they loving it! A fair number of them simply get torn and wrinkled, but it has bought me 10 minutes of sanity at a time. They love looking at the babies in Parenting magazine, and the animals in National Geographic.

They point to any human female, and Disney Princesses, and say, "Mamma!" and all the males are "Pappa." They once pointed to a chimp and said, "Pappa" and I about died laughing at the contrast of the Disney Princess that is their mama and the chimp that is their papa. Don't worry, I know I'll be cut down to size soon.

Now, Parenting magazine also has an ad for K.Y. J.elly. Ahem. And they point to the two adults in the picture and innocently say, "Mamma!" and "Pappa!" which leads to funny quick-thinking responses on my part, and flash forwards on how we're going to deal with all THOSE questions in the coming years. "Answer only what's asked" is the advice I've always heard, but man oh man. Did I laugh when I saw Julia Sweeney's presentation at TED.

BODY PARTS:
I know I said there aren't any bridges, but I thought this was a good segway, given the above topic. They all know "bum" or rather the Afrikaans, which is "boude." It's the cutest thing to watch a toddler hold their booty with both hands when you go through the body parts and ask them where their buttocks is.

When I say "doek" (diaper) they bend down and pull on their diapers, so they're starting to make that connection now.

They're also saying, "pee pee" when they go. It's adorable to watch them gain awareness of their bodily functions. It's always said like a proud declaration. LOL.

OTHER SOUNDS

Julia, Emma and Ada all say "choo choo" when I show them a pick of a train or when I use the word, "train."

LETTERS:
One longsleeved t-shirt that I have has the letter "T" on it. They point to it now and say, "T!" They also know, "O" because we call Cheerios "Ohs" in our house. I'm not teaching them the alphabet yet, but these two letters just naturally stuck. We drove by a bulletin board with a big "O" on it, and Julia said, "Oh! Oh! Oh!" I couldn't believe it.

She was barely 17 months old (15 adjusted) at the time and I think it's a pretty big leap to make from a Cheerio to a swirly "O" in a typeface on a billboard ad, but there you have it. Cerebral Palsy can kiss my a$$. These kids definitely have unimpaired cognitive function, for which I'm eternally grateful. They have lots of other gross motor struggles, but hopefully their intellect will compensate.

ANIMALS:
Emma said "padda" and when I asked her where the 'frog' was in the toy box, she went straight to it and grabbed it from the pile of soft toys.

They know the frog, "jumps." Thank you, "Jump, Frog, Jump" book. It was one of the first words I knew they understood, because when they were in their exersaucers and jolly jumpers around 6-9 months, I used to say the word all the time and suddenly all three would start jumping and laughing. Now they sometimes try to jump and actually manage to become airborne on occasion. Jumping requires quite a bit of motor planning and coordination, so I'm delighted that they're starting to figure it out.

We went to a gymnastics place for unstructured playtime with their PT, and toward the end of the session, all 3 had figured out how to truly jump on the trampoline. Amazing to watch their little faces light up when they nailed it!

JULIA'S SNEEZING:
The other day, I sneezed in the kitchen. Julia heard it all the way over in the nursery and started fake-sneezing. When I opened the nursery door, she belly laughed, giggled, and kept fake-sneezing to entertain me. "a-choo!" and then "a-cheet" and "a-shee". So funny.

ADA'S SENSE OF ORDER
Ada has a very strong sense of order that I've written about before. One of the Parenting magazines had tear-off cards with the alphabet printed on them. Ada put them all into a box, one by one. She managed to gather them from all over the playroom and get them all into a box, except for one that her sister was holding onto. She tried several times to swipe it from Julia to put it in the box with the rest of the cards, to no avail. This ended with Ada in tears of frustration, and me cajoling Julia to place it in the box to appease Ada.

HAVE CARS WILL TRAVEL
We bought a couple of Cozy Coupes for them on April 3. After only two days of practice, they were climbing in and out more successfully. They still get stuck sometimes, or turn themselves around and want to slide out from underneath the car (so not working), but I'm sure they'll get it in short order. All three now say "car" and "brrm" and know how to honk the horn and turn the wheel. It's too freaking cute to watch them. They can go backwards self-propelled, but not forward.

EMMA'S LOVE OF HORSES
Emma just loves to point out horses in all of the animal books. She can say, "neigh" and it's her favorite thing in the whole wide world to ride the rocking horse. It seems to be very soothing to her. She ROCKS that horse, if you know what I mean. When I ask her, "Hey, Emma, where are you headed?" she says, "Tatta" which means to go "bye bye." She makes lots of tongue clicking sounds to mimic the sound of hooves on the ground, and gives me beaming smiles while she's riding.