Without jinxing the rest of the day, I must say that the last few days have been going exceptionally well. I am really proud of her. It started on Monday morning when it was raining out. The sun wasn’t out and her curtain was covering her window, making the room the lowest daylight so far. I took her out of the crib, gave her breakfast and noticed that she was extremely calm. I took the opportunity to film her. Wow, I’m so glad I did. It was absolutely priceless! Usually Simmi has little to no attention span and she doesn’t communicate with us to tell us what she needs or wants. She is all over the place moving constantly and often times gets very irritable and angry. We have been able to adjust that behavior quite a bit by putting the curtain up, but after seeing how calm and receptive she was and even had better balancing skills, we realized we would need a darker curtain for when the sun is out. I was in heaven and truly amazed at how wonderful she was. Then she actually took a nice long nap! Wonders never cease. While she was sleeping, I was reviewing the footage I took of her and we decided to take it one step further. We decided that when she woke up from her nap, we would open wide the curtain and let all the light in since it had stopped raining. What we saw amazed us even more. She was irritable, aggressive, then happy and totally unfocused. We filmed that experience as well. The way she was acting in the second part of the day with the full light coming in is how she used to be all the time when we didn’t have curtains on the windows and light was flooding the house. Seeing the difference in her helped us to understand that Simmi CAN pay attention, she CAN follow direction, she CAN sit and learn a new skill for longer than one or two minutes (she performed a task for 20 minutes), and even more amazing is that she can TALK and communicate her needs and wants. Although she still hasn’t asked me first if she would like a bottle or to eat (she will repeat after I have asked), she did ask for help and allowed me to show her how to do something. She even had patience while I was instructing her on how to do a task. Simply amazing! Since I started wearing the lipstick, these are the words she has learned and used purposefully:
- eat
- foo (food)
- open
- plee (please)
- help
- help eee (help me)
- stop it
- can indicate “yes” by nodding when she wants something
- tie (thanks)
- corn
- dog
- bubbles (she could say bubbles before, but now she can say it if she sees them or wants them)
- poop
- side (for “outside”, while standing at the door)
Things she was saying, would disappear, but now she is saying them again:
- Bye, bye
- hi
- ball
- baby
- pee-pee
- ba ba (baba seems consistant)
- no!
- oh no
Non-verbal communication:
- she will lead us by the hand to where she wants to go
- she will go to her feeding chair when I tell her it’s time to eat, and she will sit down
It has been an explosion of new things, and the more we tweak the light to find that perfect amount in the room, the more she opens up and performs. What more could I ask for? I feel we are on the right track.
Below is the footage we took on Monday. There are three clips…one is in the morning in low daylight, showing this amazing child we have never seen before, the second is after she woke up that afternoon from her nap and opened wide the curtains to let the full light in, and the third is when we put a very heavy blanket on the window to block out all the light. In the last clip you will only be able to see her when she comes close to the camera. Its a little annoying, but we found it amazing that even in the really dark room with almost no light, she was still able to navigate around the room and always located her black ball in the dark. LOL At one point she went into the closet and got very upset because she wanted the door closed.
We have been able to consistently keep her calm and focused from Monday till today. Lets hope it will continue. This is so exciting for us because we are seeing another side of her that we have never seen before. Its simply beautiful.
The whole video is about 26 minutes long. For anyone fascinated with Simmi, you’ll love watching the first clip! I have watched it over and over again because I’m so amazed.
Oh, one more thing…that moronic hair cut is my doing. While she was dazed out watching TV, I cut all her hair off. If I find that she pulls her hair out less, I’ll allow it to grow. At this new length, it is very difficult for her to do more damage to her hair. I say moronic because even though it is brushed back, when it is brushed down, she looks like “Simple Jack” from the movie Tropic Thunder.
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