September 8

This week we got 13 hours and 40 minutes. This was mostly me with a little bit of time from Carl and some from my mom, J.

Sarah had a bit of a tumble down the last of our concrete steps outside. I don't know if the fault lies in her new sneakers being sized with room to grow or that they were so interesting to look at that Sarah was a bit too intently focused on seeing her shoes and not on her balance. I know that I was going to get Amy in the car while Sarah came down the steps on her own, as she always does, and I turned to see her tip head first into the cement and roll out of it. So it is good that she sort of knows how to do a somersault because it made it graceful and it was low velocity and a short distance, but cement is cement and one's head is bound to lose in such a pairing. So she had a large goose-egg on her forehead and some scrapes under her eye. I took her to the doctor and he said she was ok. That night she had a fever and was low energy the next day. I took her back to the doctor and they thought maybe she had gotten a virus at the same time. Given that one day later she was totally herself I think maybe the whole fever and low energy day were due to her body processing and healing from the fall. Now Sarah has added to her rules to live by: no fall down stairs and no somersault down stairs. Good rules to be sure.

The day after her fall I did some SR time that was very chill and low-key. At one point we were lying on the floor and she looked at me and said "Mom, fahnd dahk boo paydough" (mom, find dark blue playdough). I frequently model that kind of sentence construction with my name at the start of a sentence. This is the first time she has used that construction beyond "mom, help." So exciting. She is also starting to fine tune some of her language. As I ate a bagel for breakfast she said "cunch....cunch....cunching" (crunching).

When I picked the girls up from daycare on Friday, Sarah noticed me, looked at me with a smile and said "mom! ha" (mom, hi). I know that I keep describing these little moments so one might think they occur all the time. They are picking up in frequency but are still novel enough to be exciting and unexpected each time. It will be marvelous when I start taking them for granted.

As I mentioned, my mom is visiting. Hallelujah! Carl is away for some rowing and business trips so it is really great to have the extra help, especially over the weekend since weekends alone are always the hardest for me. The last time J. saw Sarah was in July and she says there has been a language explosion even since then. I agree. J. also noticed that what Sarah says is more often relevant to what is going on, as opposed to in the past when she was obsessed with certain stories and would reference them out of the blue.

J. had a lovely 40 minute SR playtime all focused around making Sarah's bed and Sarah being a lump that couldn't be smoothed out. This wasn't in the SR room but was very clearly SR play. When I came over at one point to say hi to Sarah she clearly told me to move away.  I love when she can so clearly say what she wants. She was also attending to the game and giggling about it for 40 min! That is huge.  We definitely hit that length of attention span these days but it isn't all the time. When I introduced the peg board into the room last week, she and A. played interactively with the pegs for 90 min. That might be a record. I often get 20-30 min times but I also often get 10 min interactions before we change to a different activity. The lump in the bed game is extra exciting because it was J.'s game that she introduced to Sarah. Many interactions in the SR room center around Sarah's chosen activity and then we build in new ideas in small ways.