Ten on Tuesday...six months later...

1. When Sarah gets to the heart shaped piece on her puzzle, she puts a hand on her chest and says, “Boom! Boom!”

2. She likes to go to the mall arcade and play “basket-a-ball” with her daddy.

3. Now that we’ve turned her carseats forward, she likes to backseat drive. “Mommy, we go DAT way!” and “Go faster!” She also scolds other cars and trucks for driving too close, “No, no car!!”

4. She’s easy to please with a trip to the “cookie store” aka Publix (kids get a free cookie from the bakery). We no longer buy cookies since we’re in the grocery store 3-5 times a week!

5. She’s STILL freaked about Santa Claus. Before Christmas, we took her to the mall and she admired Santa from afar. She even waved at him, but did NOT want to get closer or talk to him. Fine with me…we spend so much time teaching our kids about “stranger danger” that it seems counter-productive to coerce them to sit in a strange man’s lap. Then
one Wednesday at our weekly library story hour, Santa popped out of a storage room right as we were finishing up. Cue MAJOR freak out. Sarah cried and hid. And now, two months later, she still points at that blasted door and says, “No, no Claus!” Ironically, she had her photo made with her school’s Santa and was perfectly fine.

6. We have eye teeth! Her 1yr molars came in back in May and since
then…nothing. I was really getting concerned about her eye teeth and still wonder if the delay is somehow related to her size. But all of a sudden, ALL FOUR popped up at once! She occasionally complains that her teeth hurt, but I’m inclined to think she just likes the taste of kiddie Ibuprofen and knows that complaint will usually score her medicine.

7. Speaking of her size, Sarah has grown 1.5” since her birthday in July. She has cropped pants that almost fit like they should (as opposed to looking like regular pants)! Granted they’re size 18mos…but hey, it’s a start. We’re waiting patiently for our Endocrinology appointment in June, though I expect the original diagnosis of “idiopathic short stature” (in other words, she’s short and we’re not sure why) will not change.

8. Sarah is considerably smaller than her classmates, but don’t think that her being small makes her a baby. I try to peek in on her class for a few
minutes when I pick her up in the afternoons and one day last week Sarah was watching one of her classmates who was looking out their classroom window. Sarah is too short to see out the window so she marched across the room, picked up a chair, carried it to the window and
voila! She could see! I was so proud! Even when she had to stand in the corner for not getting down when her teacher asked her to.

9. At the urging of her OT, we changed Sarah’s crib to a toddler bed a few days after Christmas. I’d been thinking that as long as she wasn’t trying to climb out of the crib, we should just keep her there. But then in the same breath, I’d ask her preschool teachers to NOT baby her when that’s exactly what I’d been doing. She naps on a cot at school so now she also has the responsibility of sleeping in a bed at home. The transition was seamless and once again, Sarah AND her OT proved me wrong.

10. About Sarah’s OT…I should probably call her Sarah’s FORMER OT. Sarah was officially discharged from ALL therapy in January! We started with her PT within a few weeks of her birth and eventually graduated to OT and Speech last year. Her annual evaluation showed that she no longer presents the required delays to qualify for therapy! We will still be following up with an eval thru our local school system next month – I still don’t think she’ll qualify for services, but it’s being offered so we’re taking advantage of it.