Emilia - Twenty-Nine Weeks Home

As of yesterday, Emilia has been home with us for twenty-nine weeks.  The last two weeks with Emilia have been challenging for me.  It’s not actually about what she’s doing, but about what she’s not doing.  She continues to be the most stubborn child you can imagine and resisting any structured learning or acquisition of skills.  I am getting so frustrated with her avoidance behaviors which range from walking away to smiling/hugging/charming to whining to screaming with covered up ears and eyes.  As soon as she gets her way, she is happy as a clam, but if not, she can hold out for longer than I have seen her pay attention to anything else.

That said, physically Emilia is doing great.  I no longer worry about what she will eat as just about anything non-dairy or very low dairy works at this point and she has a great appetite.  She tries new flavors and rarely rejects anything.  She’s also drinking quite well.  She walks, runs, and climbs incessantly.  She sleeps soundly through the night and goes down easy.  Her rocking behavior is all but gone.  She wakes up happy.  She keeps busy all day long on her own terms, moseying from one toy or activity to the next.  Emilia now loves to watch Super Simple Songs on youtube, likes playing with Craig’s cell phone, can’t resist any book to be read to her, and likes to sit on my lap while playing.

I have been working in increments of a few minutes at a time with Emilia on fine motor tasks.  Her pincer grasp is still very poor and I can tell she has to concentrate hard to use her index finger rather than her middle finger or even crazier hand contortions to pick things up.  However, she has learned to pick up jelly beans and put them into a water bottle.  She resists while we do the work together, but sometimes when left alone, I hear the jelly beans clicking into the bottle because she wants to shake it.  Hand over hand inset puzzles and stacking are still most hateful tasks to her, but finger-feeding is getting a bit better.

As for language, I know Emilia understands us.  When she wants, she responds properly to statements like, come here, put in, where is mama’s nose, no no no, give me a kiss, switch the toy to your other hand, shake, etc.  Similarly, when she wants she can repeat several sounds (all vowels I think, for example), but she will not repeat words.  However, she consistently says dada/daddy clear as day when Craig is around and she blurts a powerful Bulgarian ne, ne, ne when she is unhappy with us.  I think this is meant to be yet another lesson for me that I cannot will her to speak and that these things are not going to occur according to any schedule I may have had. If you know me, you are aware that I am an impatient planner and somewhat of a control freak and my kids are simply teaching me to live differently than I have been.  It’s so hard for me to change though, to be the bow that bends, as Khalil Gibran says in his poem about children.  But bend I must and trust in the archer’s plan.

Last week, Emilia had some updated testing done through the county’s early childhood program. There are so many different developmental assessments and their results tend to vary from what I have seen with Rex.  In any case, with the ASQ, Emilia scored completely in range at 35 points with the cut-off being 57, but in the HELP screening, she was out of range in all areas on average.  Her scores on this test were very scattered with some skills as low as 8 months, but some as high as 36 months.  Go figure, this child’s a mystery.

Of course, some of the skills Emilia should have at this age are affected by her tiny size.  For example, she is supposed to be able to go up stairs upright unassisted.  Well, the steps in my home are 8 inches which is more than ¼ of Emilia’s height.  So, clearly, it’s not easy for her to lift her legs that high without losing her balance or holding on to something.  To put it into perspective, proportionately, this is equivalent to me at my height taking 17 inch steps which I think would be almost impossible to do without using my hands to steady myself.  Trust me, I tried it using a chair… very difficult.

On the whole, my little Bartleby is a good girl that just needs to experience that defining moment where the switch flips over and she starts wanting to learn.  For my own sanity, I hope the moment comes soon, but I know it’s not really in my hands.  I can guide and assist and experiment, but the willingness to open up lies with her.  Mama’s waiting on you, lovey girl, so let’s go!