long days

Here are all the weekly activities we are juggling for L. this spring: three mornings of carnie school, one session of occupational therapy, one session of speech therapy, one therapist-facilitated playdate and one session of family/parenting therapy/intervention. And her OT would like us to get her in a weekly gymnastics and swimming class. Until I typed all that out, I was also considering driving her 1.5 hours each way every day for three weeks to Walnut Creek for an audio processing treatment that is supposed to be (anecdotally) extremely effective... but I think there's probably no way.

I've been so gung ho on getting her into all these therapists offices for evaluations and getting all the treatment ramped up, but it's starting to dawn on me that maybe she doesn't have to have every single possible treatment this month. For one thing, right now if she starts making major gains, we won't know if it's the omega 3 oil supplements or the homeopathic zinc or the probiotics or the gluten free diet or the listening therapy or the one to one aide specializing in relationship development intervention or the pragmatic speech therapy or the deep pressure brushing to stimulate her sensory integration... the list goes on. And then we'll have to keep doing all of those things because we won't know which one to drop. And we can't keep doing this all, for the rest of her life.

T. is too little to realize what is going on, obviously, but even she has realized that it takes some major squeaking around here these days to get any grease. She started out as the most mellow, even-keeled baby ever -- or at least in comparison to L. -- but she seems to have figured out that if you want to get attention in this house you need to demand it. If you walk by her without picking her up, she now shrieks in outrage. If L. tries to take a toy away from her -- more outraged shrieks. And I think tonight she decided that if she didn't scream loudly every time baby food was offered, I might never get the message that she'd really prefer some of my chicken, along with bites of cheese and toast for dinner. Well, I guess we're done with baby food, then. Thanks for letting me know.

I'm so glad that she's learned already to make her voice heard (other than at 3AM), because I worry about her slipping through the cracks with all the attention that's focused on her sister. She is so adorable and charming and still just wants someone to laugh and talk to her just like she always has since the day she was born. And smart, too! She can clap -- already! She crawls with the determined intensity of Frankenstein or some other old time movie monster --the ones you could never outrace, because they will just keep going and going after whatever it is they want. I suppose it's too much to hope that by the time TJ (I just remembered she has cute initials, so I might as well use them) is big enough to play with her big sister, she will have a willing partner.