February 23

This past week we got 21 hours. I am pleased with how chill I was able to be about getting so many fewer hours than my goal. Some weeks/months seem to have everything coincide. Sonia being gone, other volunteers being gone, Carl working later more often, Amy being sick so not going to daycare, etc. I was pleased with how well things went overall while Sonia was away (thanks to my mom and C.) especially with starting the GAPS intro. Laundry, cooking, grocery shopping and cleaning all occurred. And it was also once again abundantly apparent that in order to do Sarah-Rise at a full-time level, I really need/want full-time help from someone who also does lots of Sarah-Rise time. The really exciting news is that Sonia is back. Hallelujah!!

For most days lately, Sarah eats basically all the time. Every hour, sometimes for an hour. This is at her request. She ends her days with a huge belly. She is 33lbs! This is the heaviest our little pip squeak has ever been. For most of her life she has been below the 3rd percentile, meaning her data is plotted below the drawn graph. At 9 month old she was diagnosed as "failure to thrive." I am stunned and thrilled that my little one, who seemingly didn't used to like to eat at all, is now shoveling it in so much that I worry about overfeeding her. Sometimes she eats 18oz of yogurt in one sitting. I am just now allowing the rest of us to eat yogurt, realizing that it is ok if we run out of a food Sarah likes to eat. There are alternatives and the rest of us need to eat too. And the yogurt is good! And probably 4 servings of yogurt a day is enough for Sarah anyway. I marvel at how many beliefs I still have regarding Sarah and eating and my old fears about her wasting away. But we really don't have to cater to her every whim. Lots of whims maybe, but not every single one. The world will not end if we run out of yogurt or avocado pudding. In fact, as was demonstrated this week when we did run out of both items, she is actually able to handle the news that we don't have something at all better than she handles the phrase "ok, I'll get it out to warm up and you can have it in half an hour" (re frozen avocado pudding), which often results in screams and tantrums.

To digress for a moment about having two parents... I am so grateful to have Carl by my side for all of this. I know many families have both parents fully on board but I know there are also some families where one parent is not supportive. While this journey is totally amazing, it is challenging. I am so so so grateful to have a supportive, loving, awesomely amazing husband who does great SR time and supports us doing GAPS and is, as always, my best friend. Since I usually use the term husband to describe Carl and since I have lots of wonderful friends and my best friends from childhood and my mom best friend and my sister-in-law best friend, it was actually a new realization to use the phrase regarding Carl and say "I get to live with my best friend." Then the part of me that is still a first grader thought "Whoa, my best friend is a boy!" Anyway, here's to best friends and to wonderful husbands! And now back to your regularly scheduled update...

While Sarah is eating all the time, she is still not a fan of meat or stock and sometimes still has a bit of a gag reflex (this is new since starting the GAPS intro). So I am resorting to hiding meat and stock in other things. I started making a yogurt-coconut milk shake that has a sploosh of stock in it. My real genius though (which continues to astound me) was in my creation of squash cookies. I took my recipe for squash pie (squash, stock, eggs) and changed it a bit and then baked it in cookie form. Both girls love the cookies. The first day I made them, Sarah ate 8. One batch of cookies includes: 1 butternut squash, 3 eggs, 1/2-1 cup chicken, pureed. That's all.

Sarah's pronouns are improving, as is the clarity of her requests/directions/demands. We've been working on pronouns for a while and Sc. has recently started working on them 3 time a week, which seems to have helped S move into her new bracket of understanding and better use. Sonia had been working a lot on some of the small connecting words. Overall she is saying more fully complete sentences. Among her phrases this week:

Read to me: Not a Stick (said while looking at me for the whole sentence)
Sit in the light (re sunlight in SR room)
Nice in the light
Play with marbles in the light
Play with marbles on the mountain (we have a new balance beam toy and she likes to have us build mountains, a description she provided from her own imagination)
Play cat in the hat on the mountain
Uncle A. come up too
It's different (referring to one of my milkshake concoctions)
It's coconutty (re: milkshake)

Her eye contact while making requests is probably at least 25% better than it was a month ago. She also now often looks right at Carl when she says "bye, Dad" (he then celebrates hugely).

Sarah's uncle A., Sonia's husband, is here for a few days and Sarah is as attached as ever before. Now she just has even more words to make her attachment known. Calling him "Uncle A."  is new and she picked it up immediately after Sonia referred to him that way.

Sarah and Amy both request books all the time. Sarah is amazing at filling in the blank if I don't complete a sentence. She must have so many books and songs memorized. She is starting to do more singing when I start something.