A lot can happen in a month..

It's been over a month since my last update.. wow.. I really need to fill you all in more often..

Ok, so here's where we are now:

Rolling - Ella's now rolling quite a bit, although she rarely rolls completely from back to stomach to get onto her hands and knees, she will do it if there is something really exciting to motivate her. Most of the time she'll roll over onto her stomach, but keep one arm crossed under her chest and use that to flip herself back onto her back after a bit.

Cruising- Ella cruises quite a bit now, going from one piece of furniture to the next, around corners, from high to low surfaces, etc. She's also done some cruising against a sliding glass door with no help, but hasn't done a normal wall yet. (glass is a bit easier since your hands stick to it better when you press them flat to it)

Walk behind - Ella is now using a normal walk-behind toy instead of a chair. We've still got a 3lb weight in it to slow it down some, and she does it a bit hesitantly, but she does it.

Getting to standing - She now "pushes" to standing on objects that are below her shoulder height when she's tall kneeling. She's proficient at it enough now to crawl up to it, get to kneeling, then stand up pushing down on it. She still doesn't have the hang of grabbing onto things over her head and pulling up, but we're working on it.

A recent addition in standing is following this weeks PT session we've been working on having her sit on a bench, with a low table about 6" out of reach. From there, she's now comfortable standing up and thrusting herself forward to catch herself on the table. This little "leap of faith" may not seem like much, but it builds her confidence level so she'll start taking steps on her own. This trick basically took her only a day to master.. Our PT came on Tuesday, and she was doing it without hesitation on Weds..

The other activity the PT has us working on is getting her to bend over and pick things up off the floor while sitting on the bench. This is to help her build balance, and while she's definitely improving and can do it, she's not very comfortable with it yet.

Receptive Vocabulary - (ie: words she understands when you say them to her) I continue to be amazed at all the things Ella can correctly identify when asked. My most recent discovery is she knows what a rhinoceros is, or at least that the gray wooden thing with a horn on her busy zoo is one. (I've asked her on two different occasions "where's the rhinoceros" and she went straight for it..)

Speech - here there's no definitive progress, however our recent vacation has led to her getting back into babbling a lot. There's also been a few times where she might have been saying a word. Over the weekend, she grabbed a ball and made a sound like "ahwl". Which might have been random, or might have been an attempt to say ball. This kind of thing has only happened a few times, so we can't say it isn't coincidence, but we're watching for it.

Gestures and signs - Our special educator currently has us working on teaching Ella basic signs. We've been using a few for quite a number of months now, but now we have some better tactics for teaching them. At present there are few gestures of any sort that Ella does with any meaning. She reaches for things she wants. If you try to give or feed her something she doesn't want she turns her head away and puts her hands up to block you.When she's excited or happy, she claps a lot. Sometimes she does claps when she's bored to entertain herself, but that's less common. She also shakes her head "no" sometimes, but that's always simply because shaking her head is fun. She doesn't associate the gesture with "no".

Well, I best get some sleep, hope you've enjoyed the news..