Navigating Honesty - January 3, 2012

Two thoughts:

1. If I blog later at night, does that mean fewer people will see my posts and I can feel safer about it? (Probably not.)
2. I really need to pick some sort of names for my kid and my husband - I like reading blogs that use nicknames like that. 

So. Yesterday and today, when asked "What state do you live in?" my daughter has answered "Georgia." It may not sound EXACTLY like that word, but separate people - not therapists or family members - heard her say it. I knew she knew where she lived. I'm excited that the language is coming. It really needs to hurry up though. Her frustrations and tantrums seem directly related to her inability to communicate exactly what she wants, and she wants little to do with alternative ways.

Sure, she'll sign some things (lately she has figured out "orange" and will sign it and say an approximation to make sure I REALLY GET IT and will RUN TO THE KITCHEN to get her one - she says it with such a twinkle in her eye...such an evil twinkle...) but she refuses to use her iPad - so far - or to point to pictures in books or in booklets we create. (She likes the Happy Feet 2 app though - she likes making the penguin babble back to her.) All this at home anyway. Apparently at school she does all sorts of things with ProLoQuoToGo and her speech therapists and her teachers. And for a while she used a simple machine with eight squares each had a different phrase recorded (I forget what it was called, we were borrowing it) - I have video of her memorizing which square said what and using it to tell us things, sort of (or to make it randomly say things).

But she wants to talk. And I want her to talk so much. I used to think she'd walk first, then talk. Now I have no idea what will happen when or how. But I see it all happening. Slowly. I want it yesterday. I still have not accepted why it can't be yesterday, I guess.

I'm navigating this new blog honesty. I don't know whether I'll start to post updates or will continue to post these essays or whether I'll crawl back in my hole and only post about freebies and contests and television. I have a more private, hidden, limited-to-few blog and I'm much more casual there. But it's private, hidden, limited. We'll see.

(If you're new here, feel free to go through the two tags I've used on this post - I wrote about my birth story, my breastfeeding journey, my daughter's diagnosis, and a bunch of other stuff. It's just all spread out and mixed in with other rambling. But it's there.)