Still More motor progress

(ok, this is getting wierd. I swear I published this this earlier this morning.)

Ella's been continuing with more challenging motor tasks. This evening she climbed up a low slide by herself (on the slide part, not the stairs).

In the speech department we're still mostly vowel sounds, "du" "ga" and "tooka", with the occasional "ba" "pa" or "ma" tossed in. However, she's getting more free about echoing sounds back to you.

More motor progress

This was supposed to be published back on the evening of Sunday the 19th, but for some reason I hit save instead of publish. Ooops.

Well, part motor, part self confidence. Regardless, this weekend we managed to get Ella to do several new gross-motor and balance things we've been trying to get her to do for a while.

First, she stepped over the timbers surrounding the mulch at the nearby tot-lot. The timbers are small, onlt 4" wide, and only sticking up 2" from the ground. However, up until yesterday we'd been unable to get her to take a step over them without holding an adults hand (often making a grossly over-large step and unbalancing herself). Both yesterday and today she stepped over without any help, and kept her balance, with only slight hesitation.

We also got her to run around in our yard without help. Our yard slopes gently, and while we could get her to go across the slope, or up it, she would not even walk down it without holding hands. We had a grilling party yesterday, and towards the end we went and played in the yard. We were mostly playing a game where I'd run away, then sit down and wait for Ella to come tackle us. We had her running all over the yard, uphill, downhill, in circles, whatever, without any problem or hesitation.

I also took her to the "big playground" yesterday, and she actually completed several circuits using the low slide of the gym without any help. She climbed up the steps, across a platform, got on the slide, slid herself down, got off, and ran over to the steps and repeated it all.

I was also impressed with one of her feats of fine motor skill. One of our friends brought over a stomp rocket (link has best picture I could find) and she was readily able to thread the rocket onto the black launch tube (these fit fairly snug), and she was doing it holding the rocket at the middle and the pad was just sitting on the ground. We might have to get one of those (or a jr version) as the stomping part may improve her ballance.

Anyway, hope you're all well.

Back to school, and sign list..

Well, Ella's back to school following spring break, and she seems quite happy to be back at school. Today she even showed us a new sign related to school. We were at dinner and she signed "learn", and when asked about it she signed "learn - school". I guess our semi-recent addition of signing time vol 13 has a lot to do with that.

In general Ella continues to become more and more sociable, and communicative, and she continues to babble a lot and will repeatedly make specific babble sounds when prompted (Da, Hu, Gu, tooka, dooga). That's good because it demonstrates she has the idea of making specific sounds for a specific purpose. While she does a few other babbles (bu, and rarely pu), the odds of her echoing them back at your request is pretty low (15%?)

I've also converted my list of Ella's signs to a google doc, and I've added a link to it in the links section on the right, or you can just jump from here. I figure that will be useful for anyone interacting with Ella and wanting to know which signs she knows. It also has notes about some of her modifications to various signs.