General misc news..

Sorry I haven't posted lately, but with the holidays and all, a lot was going on.

Regardless, on the Ella front the news is mostly small things.

She had a wonderful holiday, and particularly loved the tree. Every morning she'd come out and sign tree, then star. After we took it down, she would ask about it for several days by signing tree.

In the progress department, her signing continues to progress. She's now up to 90 signs, and we're working on colors. At this point, a lot of her signs are distorted to be similar to others she already knows, but in context we can figure them out quickly enough.

Recently she's been on an upswing of babbling again, which is good. She'd slid off her speaking for a while there, devolving at one point to everything being "rah-rah". It's good that the variety of sounds is back again, but this still remains an area of concern for us.

She's also starting to make "play noises", such as "num num num" when pretending to eat off a spoon, and making slurping noises while pretending to drink. This is also a good thing, as it's using a vocalization for a specific purpose, and provides some foundation for us to build on while working on speech.

Gross motor wise I've been off-and-on working with her to try teach her how to jump. I've managed to get her up off her heels, but no real off-the-ground jumping yet. It's more like standing up really fast at this point. Other than that she's doing very well motor wise. I don't know if these have been mentioned before, but she climbs on and off of the couch without any help, crouches down to pick things up without difficulty, etc. I'm overall quite pleased with her gross motor progress.

Anyway, take care all, and I hope your holidays were as bright as ours