Happy Halloween

She looks pretty pleased with herself,
doesn't she? And she should be!!!

Today we went to the peds office for Hannah's second flu shot. No fun, as she saw the syringe and knew what was happening as Mama pulled down her pants so the nurse could put the shot in her thigh. Dada held the top half and Mama held down Hannah's bottom half. Interestingly, she screamed more when the nurse was putting on the band-aid then when she got the shot. After the band-aid was applied Dada held her and Mama signed "all done" and said all done several times. Hannah broke out a smile and signed "all done" and the crying stopped immediately.

Today our speech therapist was very pleased with how far Hannah's vocabulary has come in a short period of time. New words this week are please "peas", up "bup", door, more, juice "oooce", and others that I can't remember right now. Seems like she'll repeat new words back to us for about a week or two before she uses them independently. Hannah is quickly learning that Mama gives her what she wants when she says "please," and she's stringing "more please" together in order to score yummy treats. She likes the results of "up" because we'll quickly help her climb into the chair she wants to sit in, or up on the couch, or when she wants to be held. This next week we're working on open, close, on, and off.

Until we had this experience with Hannah, I would have imagined that physical therapy and speech therapy was about the therapist teaching the children new skills. For us... the sessions have mostly been about the therapist showing US how to engage our child to encourage her to try new words, use a specific kind of play to specific muscles, and a lot of praise to encourage Hannah to keep going.

Last week Hannah got to touch bubbles that she speech therapist blew into the air. She'd blow more bubbles when Hannah attempted to say "bubbles." This week Hannah knows what the bubble container looks like. She used her words "more," "bubbles," and "please" several times to ask the speech therapist to blow more. Then the speech therapist closed the bubble container and encouraged Hannah to mimic the word "open." When Hannah said something that kinda sounds like open, the speech therapist opened the bubbles container and blew some more, closed the container, and started all over again. Participating in this is so exciting now that she uses new words all the time and thinks it's such a fun game.

This "pumpkin booty" shot is for Andrea, the Happy Hippy. :)