Nearly Naked

John's day on Friday was pretty darn good. He did well at speech therapy, even paid attention for the first 3/4 of the hour, silly boy, the last 15 minutes he was so totally on his own agenda. He was able to do well with the new verbs that he is learning though and also got into his gait trainer unassisted again, this is always impressive to see.

Swimming pool time was hilarious. John figured out how to squeeze the little water toy and squirt water at himself and Mr. Paul, he also figured out how to hold the toy in the water and fill it back up - smart cookie this one. John has now decided that he wants to be on his own, floating on his back, and also that he likes to go under so about half way through his session we took off his little padded swimsuit/floatie device. He wasn't so sure about getting back it the water in just his swim diaper, and was definitely out of his comfort zone for a little while, but once he was strapped in a little floaty thingy he was happy to be on his own again and was even good with going under at the very end. So no more suit/floaty for John and he gets to graduate to little swim trunks.

Today has been okay, we increased his formula concentration last night again, this puts him at 80% of the new formula, and so he's had kind of a not so great day but he's doing well enough that he's sleeping in his own bed and not riding to the hospital. He did play with his books this evening and made one heck of a mess in the living room, we didn't know he could reach so many things. He also figured out how to pull things off the end table and as you can well imagine the dogs were sure to stay clear of those little hands!

Good Check-Up Report!

We went to St. Louis last Thursday as John had a GI appt on Friday and he just gets too exhausted and sick if we make him go there and back again in one day. So we spent the night at a wild Day's Inn that the inside looked more like a theme park than a motel, but it was reasonably priced, thank you Cheaptickets, and it had a heated swimming pool! Of course the air was so frigid that you had to stay in the water but John loved the pool and also that it was bordered by trees decorated with lights, so he got to use his 'Christmas Tree' sign a whole ton of times too!

Friday's appt went great! John is now 21 pounds 9 ounces, that's still smaller than when we started the winter but a great improvement over his last discharge weight, so finally he's really starting to bounce back. He got the official a-okay on Coco Puffs. I was kinda nervous to tell the GI nurse that the child was hooked on coco puffs, after all he's not supposed to be eating junk food, but she says that they've reformulated many of the children's cereals, coco puffs being one of the reformulated ones, and that they are now pretty good for kids! Of course we aren't telling John this because at that point I'm pretty sure that he will quit eating them.

This weekend has been fun, our friend, Becky, from Springfield came up to stay and John thoroughly enjoyed showing her all his new tricks.




This is John's latest modeling picture.

When he was all done taking pics he was ready for a book break and amazingly he's getting strong enough to stand at the book shelf and pick out his own!



You can see dad's foot at the bottom right of the pic, he wasn't going very far, but John was able to stand at the shelf for a few minutes, flinging books on the floor and giving us commentary. Of course we have no idea what he was talking about but we're pretty sure it was important due to the volume at which it was said :)

Two Handed Goldfish

Tonight was John's first taste of Goldfish and oh does he love them! One handed, two handed, give me more! His other favorite is, of course, ice cream. The sign for 'ice cream' is to close your hand with the thumb sticking up, sort of a Fonzi position, and make the motion of licking your thumb, without actually licking it. Well, when your 3 and love ice cream that sign looks more like licking your whole hand and maybe going to eat it if you don't get some soon. We now have to spell 'ice cream' and I'm relatively sure that won't work for long either :)

Ready, Set, Boom...

...giggle, giggle, giggle! John ordinarily will not lay himself down, but wants to hold your hand and then ease himself backwards until he's laying down. This evening he discovered the fun of falling. He was sitting on our bed and we pushed him over and he giggled and signed for more, after a couple times of this he was ready to solo and would sign 'more' and then flop backwards and giggle, by the end of the show he was signing 'more', throwing his hands in the air as he flopped backwards and giggling from start to finish, what a silly guy. Of course he still needs help to sit back up, but he would lay there giggling sign 'more' and hold his hands up to be sat up so that he could go again. As you can tell, John is doing great!

07 Modeling Debut

John is doing great!!! He had a good day at school, even paid attention pretty well and all of the rest of his day went really well too. We started out the morning with pictures for the first auction of the year...





... as you can tell he was really enjoying it! He's been asking for this shirt for the past couple days so it was nice to get to let him wear it to school today. He loves to tell us that it has a 'dog' on it and a 'hat' too!

Our other new thing for the day is starting to help, require, urge John to use complete sentences with his signing. He did pretty well with it and this evening was even coming pretty close to "I want more ice please, mommy" on his own.

Pull Up

Today John did something entirely new and entirely worth celebrating!!!! After speech therapy was all done, and he did well, very well the whole time actually, he was sitting on the little couch and I pushed his gait trainer up to it so that I could help him stand up and step into it, well, he reached out grabbed the back handles and stood himself up and walked into the gait trainer on his very own!!!!!!

Some Winners

A couple real winners from the Wednesday Library trip this time a few oh-so-so and blah ones too.

The winners:

Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! by Mo Willems - Oh we love this! It is fun, funny and John is really starting to get into it as much as we are.

Does a Cow Say BOO? by Judy Hindley - So very cute, and John loves it, even holds his hands over his eyes in anticipation of the end.

Ginger Finds a Home by Charlotte Voake - Well okay, but really by the end we don't care.

Aardvarks Disembark! by Ann Jonas - Ugh, they could have stayed on the ark.

Alphabet City by Stephen T Johnson - Nice city type art, alphabet book maybe not.

Alphabet ABC by Marianna Mayer & Gerald McDermott - Cute but ripped up by some other kid, hmmmm, somehow we should really try to treat library books better.

I Unpacked My Grandmother's Trunk by Susan Ramsay Hoguet - Packed or unpacked by the end we don't care.

Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson - This one is still too old for John, so we're keeping it on his needs to read list because we both think that he is going to love it!!!

And where did I get the idea to get all these books from the library, well all but the winners were recommendations from the New York Times Favorite Children's Book or something like that, well that book is certainly going back to the library and why in the world did I ever think that the New York Times had a clue what a good children's book would look like. The winners this time, well the Pigeon book was a recommendation by Amy, John's speech therapist, and the Boo book we just happened upon in the library.

So anyone that wants to leave comment, we would love to hear what your favorite children's books are for kids John's age, or even older and we'll put them on our someday list.