And then we were 1
Mon Jun 29 18:03:01 CDT 2009
Update!!
After only a month….
She keeps us pretty busy.
Well, first and foremost, Angela Katherine Bryan turned one year old on Saturday, June 27, 9:15 am. We celebrated with some Chinese take out from Asia Market/Cafe, a Finding Nemo birthday cake, (she likes the little fish), and ice cream, the latter of which I forgot until people were leaving. I don’t know if there is some psychology behind that or not but now we have 1/2 gallon of Blue Bell strawberry – homemade vanilla, and a pint of rainbow sherbet. (btw, why don’t they just go ahead and put another ‘R’ in sherbet? No one calls it ‘Sher-Bet’, and everyone calls it ‘Sher-BERT’ anyway, and it is easier to say.) Uncle Billy, Aunt Judith, and Aunt Erin came over, and helped us sing Happy Birthday, and brought some great presents, too.
She liked having extra people over and getting some more attention, and mom and dad didn’t mind someone taking over for a bit. 
She didn’t seem to mind wearing the little birthday hat, but didn’t seem to know what to do with the cake, and was taken aback by all these people singing happy birthday.
We had another sedated ABR hearing test, rather Angela did, last week. Results were the same as last December. She has some hearing loss in the higher frequencies. That is, the sound has to be louder than 20db for her to hear it. They use 20db as the metric. We have an appointment with a pediatric ENT Wednesday and will discuss then about what kind of plan going forward.
I got a call today from a lady Carol who is a referral coordinator for early childhood intervention for children who might be or are at some risk to be developmentally behind. I don’t know if she is behind now or not, but don’t want her to get that way. She called to explain to me what happens next, which is that someone will call to set up an appointment to come out to the house and we will do a developmental screening questionaire with them for vision, nutrition, and hearing, and go over the results, then next event is someone will come and do an actual observed Assessment and go over goals and strategies. If everything is cool at this point, ie no problems, then they will or can do an follow along program where she is re-evaluated every 6 months. There was something about bringing in a hearing specialist from the Leander ISD. I hope she doesn’t have to wear any kind of aid just yet, but we’ll see. At home we haven’t noticed anything that would cause us to wonder about her hearing but we can’t tell what she is not hearing or hearing well enough. She ‘talks’, repeats ‘words’, will say things herself for appropriate pictures without prompting, not pronounced totally correct but don’t know if that is from hearing or just not being able to yet.
Ok, since last time…
-Today Aijuan told me that Angela had climbed up on the sofa and was standing up on it. She hadn’t climbed up there before. so going to have to watch that. But we are watching her 100% anyway.
-She’s not walking-walking yet, but will do a transfer from one thing she is holding on to, to another thing, so she has to have one hand free while she reaches. She seems happy to be able to do that.
-She can climb up the stairs by herself now and likes to go up there and play in the rooms up there. Aijuan has put toys out and a quilt down in the loft room. Have just gated off the computer room but is free to wander and explore the rest. Still under supervision.
-I think when she is crawling it is pretty much standard 4-wheel drive now, and not the modified army crawl like at first. We put a big rug out in the entry because that tile was sort of hard on everyone, and didn’t want her conking her head too hard.
-We’ve got electrical outlet covers on all outlets now. Have a toilet seat lock and some bumpers but haven’t put them on yet.
-She may be doing some more teething lately. For a couple of weeks she has been waking up a time or two at night again, and is hard to get her settled down. My current trick is to carry her and hold her while looking in the refrigerator. That will pretty much stop the howling and wailing. Gets her attention and breaks that crying jag. I think the light, the coolness, the colors, the feel of cold things on the door shelf, snap her out of it. Then she likes to play a bit with the magnets. At that point can usually lay her down on the living room quilt and stay with her and she will go back to sleep.
-Aijuan says she is eating more.
-She might be saying ‘ma ma’ and ‘ba ba’ for Aijuan and me respectively, but I’m not yet convinced it’s 100%. Aijuan says when Angela hears me come in, she will say ‘ba’ or ‘ba ba’ but I don’t know if she is getting prompted.
-She will kind of dance some to music. Just sitting and bouncing when some active, up beat music is playing. (“It’s got a good beat. You can dance to it.”).
-She likes to hug her big bear and her Elmo. When she sees her Elmo she will say “uh-muh!” She’s never seen on TV yet, so just knows from home. We actually don’t do any TV with her, is pretty much limited to home movies and picture slide shows played to the TV from the Apple TV.
-Aijuan is making more of her food now than before, so is getting more real people food, although it is prepared for a 1 year old. She loves her Cheerios, and seems to prefer vegetables over fruit and meats.
-There’s this one book, “Going to Bed Book” that has a crescent moon in the latter pages, and she’ll point to that and proclaim “MUH! MUH!”. I tell her “moon”, but when she says it, it comes out “muh”, but she knows the word for the shape apparently.
-There are pictures of things on the wall in the bedroom and other places, and although she can’t say them yet, she seems to know them by the words. Aijuan will ask here “where’s the fish?” and she will look over to that pictures, etc.
-Her hair has gotten a bit longer, and now has a little curl in the back. It’s still brown, but sometimes looks like it wants to be red, and sometimes like black. We’ll see.
-I think she has gotten even cutre! ;-D
-She will sometimes take the brush and brush my hair too, if I’m brushing her hair.
-I know she is learning more Chinese, because I’ll say a word or phrase in Chinese and she’ll look at me like “Hod did YOU know that?” Like “beedzi” for nose, “wo ai ni”, I love you, and such.
-There’s probably more that I am not thinking of right now, but I will add later.
10:01 pm
Remembered a couple of things:
-I showed her how to work the light switch on the wall, and maybe it is unrelated, but she’s discovered the power switches on her toys, at least those with batteries, which is most of them.
-She’s learned to crawl through the end table in the living room, it’s like a little tunnel, open on two ends and slats on the sides, and raise up a bit. There’s just enough room for her to sit up in there.
Best,
Johnny, Aijuan, Angela
