Wednesday, July 02, 2008

This is fun

So yesterday was Livvie's well baby check up. Physically she's fine, save for a minor heart murmur that wasn't a surprise to me since she had one the night she was born.

Developmentally is another story.

Her gross motor skills are outstanding. She can run, walk backwards, go up and down stairs, dump things out of bins (which is important for some reason. Don't ask me why). However, the doctor was concerned about her lack of speech. She does vocalize, but she uses no words at all. He told me to give it four months, and if she isn't speaking by then we'll have to look into a speech therapist. I'm not happy about that at all.

He called me later in the afternoon to ask me some more questions he had forgotten while we were there. One of them was if she colored or scribbled at all. I told him we hadn't started working on that yet, and he told me it was time to start in order to get her fine motor skills up to par. I said ok, and made plans to go to Target this morning.

We left bright and early, and the arts and crafts aisle was packed full of stuff that was awesome but mainly for older kids. I ended up getting her an art pad with white paper, a box of the wide, washable crayons for smaller kids, a box of 48 smaller crayons with more colors, and these cool markers that are invisible unless you're drawing on special paper. The markers came with a Nemo coloring book, and I also got her some of the magic paper to go with them.

We got home and I pulled out the brown crayon for her and showed her how to mark on paper. She was less than interested in the marking, but was absolutely enthralled with the crayon itself. She walked around holding it up and showing it to me like it was the coolest thing ever. I got the rest of the crayons out, and she carried them around for awhile too.

Then she got up on the sofa with them.

After I put her down for her nap I discovered that she had accidentally colored all over the sofa. I knew they were washable, but with what? I ended up getting the soapy kitchen sponge and scrubbing at the marks with that. It worked, so thank the gods for that. She had mostly used the black one. Not good on a tan sofa.

One thing that was promising was that at one point she was sitting on my lap and I had the art pad on her lap and she was scribbling back and forth without looking at it. It's a start.

Purple and Black.

A wise choice.

Have a great day everyone!

5 comments:

Dagny said...

Awe, enjoying the crayons Livvie!!!

I'm jealous!!

xoxo

Anonymous said...

I would not worry about what the doctor said, give livvie a bit more time, all kids are different. I was potty trained in 9months, but did not speak until I was 2 and now you can't shut me up :-).

Cyn said...

Coloring on the sofa, how fun! You can tell the doctor she is progressing on her fine motor skills excellently. Her interpretive art on the sofa is proof.

How does she deal with the fish? Any more about that?

LizLSB said...

Go, Livie, go!

squirrelgirl said...

You're doing better than me - my pediatrician was having a cow because Katherine wasn't saying at least 3 words by her FIRST birthday! Fortunately we have a friend who is a pediatric speech therapist, and she spent the afternoon with us last month, and told us not to worry any time soon because Katherine vocalizes and communicates her wants/needs. Stupid doctors - I posted a rant on Monday about my latest pedi visit. Ugh.