News of the QQ

Things change so fast in the world of QQ that I often forget what new milestones we've hit from one day to the next - even from morning to evening. I try to store them up to tell M. when he returns from work...but he gets home so late, and I'm usually asleep. By the next morning we're already off and running on a brand new list! I need a dry-erase board, or a Blackberry....some way of keeping track. I'll do a little stream-of-consciousness here and see how much I can recall (but bear in mind that this is only a tiny fraction of the bazillion facets that are QQ at 18 months of age):

- She goes to bed each night without a fuss - just a grin and a "mum-mum!" and a little face pushed out for a last kiss before I shut the door. I know that we are lucky.

- She will nap for three hours in the afternoon if I let her (though I usually keep it to two and a half). She's a champion napper. It takes her a bit to wind down...she sometimes stays up playing for half an hour after you put her in her crib. But she never complains.

- She is an expert mimic, and also an expert mime. The speech therapists felt that this was a large part of the reason for her speech delay. She just hasn't felt the need to try. Her miming abilities are one of the things that seem to impress every therapist that she has been exposed to. One of her most recent developments is the ability to mime blowing bubbles. First, she grabs a bubble wand, and holds it out to me. Then she reaches both hands into the air and waves them in an eloquent fan, fluttering her fingers to describe the bubbles. Then she pretends to see the bubbles and mimes a huge theatrical grin to show me how she would react if I blew them for her.

Another recent one involves icecream. In her early days, we tried icecream a lot, and she hated it. More recently, she has conceded to take the occasional lick from my icecream bar (I'm fond of Haagen Dasz bars myself). But today, I asked her if she'd like some icecream, and she stuck out her head toward the refrigerator and make a licking motion. This is particularly surprising since I have only said the actual word "icecream" to her maybe twice in the past four months. Usually, I don't say the word, I just offer her the bar if I happen to be eating one, so I was amazed that she made the association between the word and the action.

- Two days ago, out of the blue, she decided to sign "more" in ASL. This was quite a breakthrough, since she has been resistant to signing with actual sign language. She prefers to create her own signs - and that's fine, since her signs are really good and easy to understand. From the start, she has responded to my signed words, so I know she knows the signs. If I sign "more" or "drink" or "eat" or "thank you" she responds in kind. She just has shown absolutely no interest in signing herself. But the other day I had given her a tiny preview of a lunch (involving avocados, a favorite). I sometimes do this to "prime" her for a meal when she's less than enthusiastic about eating. She sucked down her lunch sample, handed me the bottle, and signed "more". You could have knocked me over with a feather. Independent as she is, she has her own way of doing it. Instead of both hands with the fingers pinched toward eachother, she does one hand in the correct position, against the other palm held out flat. She insists on doing it this way even when I show it to her the other way. Tonight, she had a very late lunch, so I put her to bed with her dinner bottle, knowing she wouldn't eat it in my lap. I stayed to watch her eat it (the dentist warned us not to let her drink while she's sleeping for the sake of her teeth) and, just to get a bit more mileage out of it, she put down the bottle in between every couple of sips and signed "more" at me again, just to show me that she was enjoying the bottle. Then she'd wait for me to pick it up and hand it back to her, and squinch her eyes at me which is her own personal sign for "thank you".

- She seems to grow more affectionate with each step in our lives together, even when those steps involve something painful like another surgery. Since the last surgery, she sometimes reaches up while I'm changing her diaper, and either puts her hand on the back of my head or grabs my hair to pull my face down for a kiss.

- Her dexterity continues to amaze me. She continues to practice with the pegboards, putting things inside bottles and jars, and recently has learned to put caps back on bottles. She is now trying to learn the motion of twisting the caps on their threads to either tighten or loosen them. This, I think, is both exciting and potentially dangerous.

- She continues to be alarmingly high-tech. She knows how to scroll on my computer keyboard, and when I'm not reading blogs fast enough for her taste, she will reach up and scroll down the page. Whenever she finds a remote control device (of any kind) she points it either at a light, a ceiling fan, or a TV screen, and tries to turn it on. As for cell phones, she is still marked by her early exposure to video-conferencing. When she hears the voice of someone she knows over the cell phone, she immediately turns it to look at the screen, expecting to see said person's image there. The girl is a bit ahead of her time.