March 24, 2014

Maybe spring is finally here...just maybe.  Aubrey sure does like to play outside, so I hope it stays nice for a while before we have to suffer through the 100 degree/99% humidity days of summer. 

Smiling in the back yard swing

Like I said, Aubrey is an outside girl right now.  Or maybe it's just that she likes to walk walk walk walk walk everywhere, and the outdoors gives her the most ramblin' space.  She wanders around the yard, babbling away, to see our dog, Murphy, who resignedly endures baby fingers up his nostrils with stoic grace.  She sits in the driveway and examines rocks, then hurls them backwards over her head with flair.  She picks bark off of the trees and scatters pine straw to the wind.  We must go up and down the steps to our deck a minimum of 15 times a day--she loves steps.  She goes up on her hands and knees and we have to hold her hands for her to walk down.  She'll immediately turn around and want to go up when she gets to the bottom.  Good extra exercise for mom.  Though she'll let me hold her hands on steps, she doesn't want me to help her much anywhere else.  She'll snatch her hands away and put them behind her back, the stinker.  There's a slight possibility she got her mother's independent streak.

"I can do it myself!"

Therapy went well last week.  They let me stay back in the gym area with her, and, while she got upset a time or two at first, overall she cried very little and did what they asked of her.  She did have to step away and get a mama snuggle a couple of times, but I always put her back and made her finish what she was supposed to do.  She loves a good ball right now, and she took a bunch out of the ball pit and threw them everywhere. They wanted her to step over a small rubber speed-bump-looking-thing to see how she does with her balance and walking, and after crawling over it the first time and putting both feet on top of it the second time, she stepped back and forth over it like a pro.  Her pinching is getting better as well.  The OT said that next week she and the PT will do their official assessments (they have a guide that specifies what she should be doing and how at her age) to see if she can be done with therapy for a while.  They both think she's doing really well, so hopefully she'll graduate.

Therapy is SO exhausting.

Aubrey likes to ride in the cart when I go grocery shopping, so after wiping it down with 2 germ-killing wipes I put her in.  She smiles happily when I go over bumps and watches all the people and holds onto Adam's bagels for me.  When we were checking out last week, the cashier looked at Aubrey and said to me, "was she a preemie?" I was a little taken aback; what would make her ask that? So I said, yes, and she said that her son was born at 29 weeks and weighed about 2.5 pounds.  I told her about Aubrey, and then she said that her son was 8 years old now and doing just fine.  There was a line behind me, so I didn't get to ask her what made her think that Aubrey was a preemie; she doesn't look different from any other baby as far as I can tell, besides being small.  I thought it was strange, but then I don't really mind having a chance to tell anyone who'll listen how amazing my kid is. :)

Aubrey's first "selfie," taken with my phone. I was holding it and she pushed the button!

 -Keli