Mary Alice started crawling and pulled to standing at 10 months,
first steps at 17 months and walking at 19 months.
She is uses a
cross-pattern when she runs now.
By age 3.2 she mastered jumping with both
feet off the ground.
At 8 she started learning to jump rope, and so far has made up to 25 jumps in a row :-)
She was born with a hole in her heart, an Atrial Septal Defect, which I
am so grateful has not needed surgery and has closed on it's own.
She is rarely ill and has never been hospitalized since the time spent in the NICU when she was born.
I feel this is partly due to the Nutrivene-D protocol and we are very happy about
it!
We're homeschooling and when I'm working with Mary Alice, I just work
from where she is at and keep building on what she can do and
comprehend.
This is fun and easy for me. For me, with no other children, she is "normal".
It is still hard for me when we are with other people and I sense the "differences" that they are seeing,
and see how easy it is for their kids to learn and understand everything around them.
Things
that other kids just pick up on, we work on specifically. But as long
as I find the right way to present things, she learns quickly and
retains well.
I don't believe in inculding at age level if it's
beyond where the child is functioning. I'll never forget a documentary
on inclusion at age level of a child with DS that I saw.
The only thing I could tell that he really learned was that he was different and "stupid", his word.
I couldn't bear it if my child thought that of herself.
She is now participating in a gymnastics class that she loves.
I have her in a developmentally appropriate class.
Here was
our little computer junkie with her Easyball at age 2. She has been booting up the
computer, navigating and playing all her many games
by herself for years now.
Her favorites
include the Winnie The Pooh series, the Jumpstart series, the Living Books
series, Bailey's Book House, Let's Go Read and other Edmark software. It always
thrilled me when she was little (5-6 y.o.) to watch her ace the race in Arthur's Reading Race.
She has also
run the VCR and TV since she was little. Her favorite videos include the Love and Learning videos,
Richard Scarry's Best Learning Songs and Mother Goose videos, Winnie the Pooh,
Little Bear, Blue's Clues, Caillou and of course Barney!
She also loves the Signing Time videos, which are wonderfully done.
Mary Alice in April 97 at 18 months:
"She's really growing up, and
understands almost everything we say to her.
She knows her basic colors and
correctly identifies many dozens of objects and characters in her beloved books.
She "reads" all the time. She loves to bring a book to us to read to her, then
she takes it, and yaks and points her way through it. She is such a precious!!
Now she's saying a number of words and approximated words."
Now for a
word about ears. "A little ear fluid" anytime in the first few years
can
be DEVASTATING to speech development. Stalled her speech for a long time :-(
My suggestion would be to get the
ear tubes ASAP. We got them too late and Mary Alice has some permanent hearing
loss caused by the fluid, even tho she had had no infections.
She loves music.
We encourage it
all we can.
Now she is into playing drums and loves to dance too.
She has her own drum set which she plays daily (they are very loud - WHAT was I thinking ?!?).
Daddy's favorite picture of Mary Alice at 9 months
sitting in
his first homebuilt airplane, a Sonerai II.
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