progress

It's been a while since I've posted about Ella's progress, so here's a quick post on what she's up to.

In the signs department, Ella's now up to 95 signs I've got documented, but I'm probably missing a few. She now picks them up fairly rapidly if used in context.

In the eating department, Ella still isn't using utensils, but she's very good with an open cup. She can even pick up an open cup one handed now and drink from it (with some chance of spilling). She's starting to be willing to pick up large foods and bite chunks off, as she did with the flatbread, but she still needs many foods cut up for her.

We've also been potty training Ella recently, with fairly good success so far, largely thanks to mentalmother. We've been training for about a week now, and she still has a lot of accidents, and sometimes she gets a bit stubborn about it, but on the whole she's taking fairly well to it.

The past two weeks have also been very talkative for Ella. She's not using words routinely, but we're getting a lot of babbling and a variety of different sounds. In general she seems to be experimenting with her mouth a bit, which is a good thing.

Anyway, I best be going, hope you're all well.

Fruit, shoes, flatbread and pizza..

I'll post some progress later, but right now I wanted to take a minute to share some short and amusing stories from this weekend.

On Saturday, we were packing up to go out shopping. So I picked up two pairs of Ella's shoes, and asked her "which pair of shoes do you want". She pointed to the pair in my left hand, then signed "pear", "shoes". Very cute, but it raises the question, how do you teach a toddler about homonyms? :-)

On Sunday, we went out to lunch, trying the new Cosi restaurant here. They didn't have Ella's staple chicken on the menu, so we tried ordering her pizza. She would not touch the pizza, but my meal came with a side of a dense, chewy, whole-grain flatbread. That she ate. Even more strange for a child that rarely bites chunks off larger foods, she actually ate it by biting chunks off the big piece.

Just goes to show, there's no predicting what might appeal to a toddler.