Remy Update

What a difference a month can make! December was a great month for Remy. He is doing a lot more mimicking (sighing, snoring, dancing), some naming (all letters of the alphabet are met with a confident "EH!"), some imaginative play (especially with his wooden pots and pans) and doing great eye contact and experience sharing (holding our hands and checking for our reactions to things.)  His fine motor skills and problem solving skills have improved too, he can now do the tool box puzzle all by himself.  Maybe most amazing to me is that he will now grunt and squawk at us when he wants something, which is a huge improvement over a month or so ago when he would remain silent or just whine and stomp around on his own, but not try to communicate to us about it.

The biggest change to what we have been doing was adding flash cards to our play time. I had resisted flash cards because it seemed pointless to me to start drilling him on vocab words or the alphabet when he didn't even know basics like "Mama" or "Remy" but I changed my mind when I read somewhere that children who love books usually love flash cards. Add to that his love of the  letters and I wondered why I hadn't realized what a great fit it would be earlier! We started with a set of ABCs and a set of  early words from Bright Kids. Unfortunately, they are so flimsy that I had to keep them out of reach most of the time. Then for Christmas Noah and Lauren got him the heavy duty Eric Carle flash cards and they are WONDERFUL! When he is not looking at the pictures or shouting "EH!" at the letters he is stacking them like blocks or sorting them into piles. He brings them to me again and again so that we can go through them together. For some reason it seems like more than all the repetitive labeling we were doing as we played with his toys, it is the cards that have shown him that things have names.  

We have a big day coming up this Wednesday. We are going back the Early Intervention offices for a hearing test and a speech and language evaluation. If he fails his hearing test this would provide a very welcome alternative to the autism explanation.  I am also really interested to find out how much language he may actually have because it's hard for me to guess, he is so inconsistent with it.  

This may all read kind of strangely. It is kind of awkward for me to write it. It's my effort to remain objective - some days I think I am too optimistic and some days I am too pessimistic, so "realistic" is kind of allusive.  But I don't feel as stressed as I was. I am really grateful that Remy is happy, healthy, funny, curious, adorable and sweet. All this "developmental" stuff is just kind of a side-bar in our life.