Cinder-Livvy

Cinder-Livvy

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

In True Liv Style

Books, experts, other families and doctors will say that babies should be really communicating by starting to make sounds that sound like the beginning of words around a year old.  Think ba, da, ma, ca, etc etc.  When you have a baby that has any sort of delay in development it's just best to throw books and any expectations of "normal milestones" out the window.  Olivia had physical and developmental delays brought on by the hospitalizations following the Norwood and Glenn; moreover the physical restrictions that we had to enforce to allow her chest and upper body to heal properly made for even more physical delays.

So no surprise, we get her assessed for early assessment around six months old and start the recommended PT because she's behind her age group.  In six months she went from being around three months behind her peers to catching up to them and even excelling in a few areas like fine motor skills.  Early Intervention said we could discharge her from the program so we did until we got around 18 months and felt like frustration with communication was getting bad for everyone involved.  Speech comes in, does assessment and says, "Yes, considering she's around adults all day she is pretty non-vocal" - we recommend speech therapy once a week.

That was last week - since then, it's been consistently the following (I kid you not)


  • What dat?
  • Mooo & the ASL signal for "More"
  • Meow - although it's the most pathetic sounding cat meow ever she will definitely do it when you ask what sound a cat makes
  • Ruff - pretty weak dog bark too but we're getting there
  • Mama
  • Dada
  • Baba - "Baby"
  • Yea!
  • Dis - "This"
  • Dat - "That"
  • Walk
  • Apple
Pretty sure I've heard other semblances of things for milk, sock, shoe, outside, and kiss.  It's how this girl rolls, everything in her own time and with her flash of style.  Probably going to tell EI later this week "Thanks but no thanks"  Who knows - maybe Olivia will tell them herself :)

1 comment:

  1. It is amazing how similar Hope is...she does everything in her own time. We started all the therapies too and she is finally graduating from each one of them. She is way ahead in her fine motor skills, her gross motor skills are where they should be, and now she is repeating everything (YES...EVERYTHING) we say...not always a good thing. So now, we will probably be getting rid of speech therapy too. Who will visit us all the time now? Hehehe...it will be nice not to have appointments all the time.

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