Super Duper progress!!!

Ah Dallas.... what can't I say about how amazing she is. In the last few months we've been watching some sign language videos to pick up the necessities for communicating. She know about all the words I know I could rattle them off but I know that I would forget a lot. She knows about 25-30 different signs but will only use just a few a day. Her favorites are please, thank you, your welcome, milk, blanket, help, and more which now actually means more. She makes her own variations of the signs and we've learned what she means with certain signs, it's definitely a second language. It's so hard to see her signing something repeatedly over and over and us not know what she means and then her scream in frustration and start signing again and again and cry because we just can't figure out what she wants even pointing sometimes will result in that. We've called in a speech therapist that is helping with us and went to a few classes to find that everything we are doing is everything we were supposed to be doing and just to be patient and the verbal language will eventually come......and it is!!!

She says and signs mom and dad, papa and grandma. She recognizes all those people and knows us all finally. We taught her ca-ca the other day and she'll say that while pinching her nose. She now tries to mimic words when we ask her to most of the time. I think that she knows what sounds she can say and can't and if the word is too complex for her she'll just laugh as in saying "your crazy expecting me to say that!!" We'll go on walks in her "ca" which is just short for car. She has a cute little red push along car that we'll take on walks. She would sleep and live all day long in that car if we let her. She wants to go on walks constantly she can even sign walk...her own variation at least. So when we go on walks we'll ask her to point to the flowers and trees and grass which she has down pat. Just today she said the word flower when she used to just say flow without the er. She'll say moo and tries to quack while moving her hands like a ducks mouth. She'll whisper the ff's in ruff and she'll say ba-ba when i pick up my keys, leaving somewhere or when going to bed as a replacement for bye-bye.

Her movement is every progressing. She is amazing when she puts her mind to it she is determined. She stands quite well now and pulls up on things to a standing position and will stand for quite a while as long as she is holding on to something. The longest she has ever free stood is about 10 seconds and then realized what she was doing and fell down. I think that she still feels unstable and is scared. She is not confident in herself enough to fully progress. We've been using her braces and shoes over her braces every single day all day so that she can build her confidence. The shoes have a really wide base to better stable her. They're "keeping pace" brand and I believe they're made to go over the braces because they are made to fit wider they've ugly as sin but they're a godsend. She's finally now decided that walking is the way to go and decided that she wants to try it. She has started to cruise which is walking side to side while holding on to something like furniture and going from one furniture or object to the next. She's getting better at it but is still quite unstable and I can tell she'll second guess herself and feels more comfortable crawling. She's really quite good at crawling and sometimes she'll just book it somewhere surprising everyone how fast she can move. Her latest crawling has turned to a yoga upside down dog facing position and then crawling like that. If she does that enough she'll learn to stand on her own hopefully. She can walk quite far weight bearing while holding on to someones hands for balance. Her balance is really bad she's very wobbly but at least she's weight bearing and taking steps left then right. Its so funny to see pictures from just a month or two ago and how much thicker her legs are getting. If its fat or muscles its good to see her gaining something. Our hopes are to have her walking by Christmas but her occupational therapist said that her back muscles need to strengthen for that to happen so we're trying by crawling and balance exercises but she can only handle so much....her determination and confidence will get her there! Maybe not by Christmas but that's our goal.