As promised...a nice, long update!

I apologize for my long absence. I know that I have let some of you down by not keeping you up to date with Miss Sylvie's progress and for that I am truly sorry. Now you can quit your yammering (mom) cuz here it is. Signing Time Sylvie's vocabulary continues to expand both in sign and in spoken word. As you may have seen from the June photos we are the type of parents who allow our child's brain to be corrupted and shriveled by regular tv watching. Well, regular dvd watching anyway. We are big fans of the Signing Time series and watch an episode almost daily. I'll ask Sylvie "What time is it?" and she gets very excited and signs time repeatedly then speed crawls to the tv where she signs time continuously until I start the show. As the signs are introduced, they are demonstrated very clearly by the host Rachel and then we're shown them being used by other adults, kids, toddlers and even infants. After a series of signs have been shown, there is usually a catchy song about using them. Theron and I watch it along with her and as a result we've all learned quite a few signs which we use with her throughout the day. I've been trying to jot down a list of signs she uses on a regular basis so that I can relate them all to you folks. The words that she also speaks, I'll put in parentheses her current spoken pronunciation. Here they are in no particular order: baby (baybee) time cracker (da-dur) cookie diaper (bi-pur) mom (mom/momma) dad (dah, dah-dah) more (mo) milk (mih) thirsty (tee) eat/food dog (dah-gee) cat (kih-tee) bird (bir)--funny story about this one. One day a few weeks ago, we were looking out the window during a torrential downpour when Sylvie started to sign bird. I looked and looked but didn't see any birds and thought it strange that one might have flown by in such heavy rain. Sylvie kept signing bird though and then I noticed that the postal truck was parked in view. Could it be that Sylvie recognized the highly abstracted eagle logo on the truck as a bird? There's no way I can know for sure but I'm just gonna say yes; our kid is a frickin' genius. bath (ba) ball (bah) cheese (teeze) apple (ba) banana (nanna) clean (kee) bear (buh) day sleep friend (Airwah)--well, Sara IS her best friend after all book (buh or booh)--Sylvie LOVES to be read to. Over and over and over again. Sometimes we even get to the end of the book but usually she'll bring us a book and we'll start to read it, but she'll crawl away to get another book for us to read. Rinse, repeat. hat cold strong--she only does this in response to us asking her "How strong is Sylvie?" Our follow up to "How big is Sylvie?" hot train all done/finished (done, done?) no (nonononono)--she is already showing signs of being a bit bossy (yeah, mom, just like I was) and will reprimand the dogs when she sees them doing something we've told them (or her) not to. shoes please (pee or eeze) thank you (chank chew, tank koo) boy--Once when Theron was playing with Sylvie, he said "oh boy!" trying to get her excited about a particular toy. She then signed boy for the first time. wash hands potty *poop--small confession...this one we actually learned from Meet the Fockers She's actually begun to string signs together in 2-4 word sentences like: more milk banana please and just this morning we got: more time banana thank you Koko the gorilla would be so proud! Click here for an excellent site that has short video clips demonstrating all of the above signs plus a gazillion more. I highly recommend signing with your babies. And why stop when they can talk? I think it would by nice to keep it up...it never hurts to be bilingual! Although technically since sign is not spoken maybe it should be biling/manual? G-tube? We don't need no steenkin' g-tube! When we last saw Sylvie's GI, we were given the great and glorious news that she no longer thought it necessary for Sylvie to get a g-tube--insert bells, whistles, air horns, trumpeting elephants of joy, etc here. The doctor had gotten a hold of a growth chart specific to Noonan Syndrome and while Sylvie is only in the 3rd percentile for weight on the general chart, she's actually 50th percentile on the more appropriate chart. I think this helped drive home the fact to the GI that kids with this syndrome are just smaller, but not necessarily in a bad way. Since Sylvie is length/weight proportionate and developmentally on track in everything except for gross motor skills (which she is quickly closing the gap on; more on that later), the doctor saw no need to resort to surgery to try and increase her caloric intake. Another thing that I've noticed, along with my friend Marla (Sara's mom) and many other parents of Noonies is that they are ALL small, no matter how good or bad their appetite or whether or not they have feeding issues. Case in point: Sylvie and Sara are a month apart in age, with Sylvie being the elder. Despite the fact that Sylvie has consistently taken in many more calories on a regular basis than Sara, they are only about 1lb. apart in weight with Sara being the scale tipper! I've said it before and I'll probably say it again (because I suck at coming up with new material) but I think that a lot of the calories Sylvie takes in goes to her hair. Well, it's the only explanation I can come up with as to how she stays such a skinny minnie when she eats like a horse most of the time. Bleedin' good news On advice from our pediatrician, we'd had a series of blood tests done to check Sylvie for bleeding disorders which are commonly associated with Noonan Syndrome. Our most recent trip to a doctor's office ( I say 'a' instead of 'the' since she's has so many different ones) was with the Hematology department at Children's Hospital for follow up blood work because of an abnormal result in a platelet aggregation test, (not excess platelets as I had originally thought). The doctor was very nice and explained that all of the other tests had looked fine but they wanted to recheck this one thing to be on the safe side. Long story short, (yeah I know, too late) the follow up test was a-ok! Woo hoo! We'll still have to have her rechecked before any surgery, but we don't have to worry about adding a hematologist to her list of regular specialists for the time being, thank goodness. Sylvie's most recent measurements were taken at this appointment and she weighed in at 17# 2oz and was 28" long. (Either she shrunk an inch and a half since her 15 month appointment with her pediatrician or the nurse who measured her then was just reeeeaaly sloppy when she did it.) Poop, here it is On three separate occasions now I've gone in to Sylvie's room, hearing she's awoken from her nap, to find that she's decided to do a little exploring. In her diaper. Which was FULL OF POOP. She'd be sitting in her crib, proud as can be, murmuring in her sweetest voice and holding out a stinky little butt nugget for me to see. I guess I'm lucky that each time she's done it the poops have been nuggety and not squishy since that would have made the experiences all the more disgusting. Hopefully there will be no more visits from Mr. Hanky. Fun and Games Sylvie has learned a new game from her Thursday playgroup called Where oh where has gone? (basically, it's Peekaboo!) At playgroup, this game involves sitting in a circle and taking turns putting part of a mini parachute over one of the kid's heads while saying the "Where oh where?" chant, followed by the chosen kid pulling the material down to reveal him/herself while everyone else (read: playgroup leader and parents) exclaims, "Peekaboo!" Sylvie will play the "standard" way at home, hiding behind her bib/shirt/skirt while saying "way oo way" and then grinning hugely when she reveals herself to our peekaboo! chorus, but she has also extended the game to objects, handing us a ball or toy while saying "way oo way", indicating that we are to hide it so she can find it. Last week, I heard her saying her "way oo way" to her EI therapist during a session and when they were looking at a book with characters hidden behind panels that opened up on each page. Standing up, falling down She's VERY close to walking and is standing independently of longer and longer lengths of time. Ok, so those 'lengths of time' are less than a minute...but she IS getting better at it. She's finally gotten big enough to ride her little car from G'ma & G'pa Johnson, although she has yet to master turning corners with it. She loves to climb up slides and stairs. She also thinks she can go down stairs head first...as I found out about a week ago much to my horror. Theron volunteered to look after our friend's Sean & Amanda's pets while they are away on their honeymoon. We've got Sadie the dog at our place but stop by S& A's house every other day to check on their cats and fish tanks. Sylvie started off after one of the cats who decided to flee up stairs. I allowed Sylvie to follow with me close behind, making sure she was safe. Ha. We'd reached the top and the cat had disappeared into a room and Sylvie was gesturing after it and signing/ saying kitty over and over. Thinking she wanted to continue the chase, I started after the cat saying the "Where oh where is the kitty?" chant...thus committing the ultimate act of stupidity by NO LONGER BEING BETWEEN SYLVIE AND THE STAIRS. Of course, Sylvie decided it would be much more fun to go back downstairs and I wasn't able to catch her before she fell. I cannot even begin to say how horrifying it is to see your tiny baby fall end over end down stairs. I shrieked something like, "SYLVIE! OHMYGOD!" and Sylvie just shrieked. I ran down to Sylvie and scooped her up in my arms and I just held her...too frozen with shock and terror and guilt to check her for injury. Theron had come running having heard the thuds and the shrieking seeing us rocking halfway down the stairs immediately knew what had happened and very gently took our crying baby from me to see if she was hurt since I was clearly not in the any state to do so. Nothing appeared to be broken. In fact, she had not one bump, bruise or scrape from the fall. She was fine. She was fine. She was fine. My self confidence as a parent, however, will probably be in a full body cast for quite some time. I know it's one of those things that can happen on occasion, even to good parents, but that doesn't make it ok that I was careless. Thank-any-and-all-deities she wasn't hurt. So there you have it folks I came, I blogged, I confessed. Hopefully you will have seen that aside from the horrible-falling-down-stairs incident, things have been going exceedingly well with our wee girl in every respect. She continues to be of angelic demeanor about 99% of the time with only rare and brief flare-ups of temper, mostly due to frustration. She does get a little grumpy when we tell her no sometimes but so far we've not had any real tantrums. I am under no delusions that we'll be able to avoid them completely...I'm sure Tantrum Sylvie is there, lurking in the shadows, waiting to go all Vesuvius on us in the middle of a restaurant or mall or--heaven forbid--an airplane. But I'm getting ahead of things. Right now she is our little curly-headed-sweetheart-genius-baby. July pictures coming soon!