Hyperlexia

As many of you know, either personally or through reading this blog, Hannah is a very special, smart little girl, with a few unusual quirks. Because of these particular quirks, Hannah's doctor sent her for specialized testing through the local early intervention program that serves infants and toddlers. Through this testing we have learned that what we believed (or rather had hoped) were just quirks are actually a medical syndrome called hyperlexia. Hannah's letter and number obsession, strong visual and auditory memory, sensitivities, and social difficulties with peers are the hallmarks of this particular syndrome. With early intervention this should have a very good prognosis-not a "cure" per se (I wouldn't want to change my little girl's personality anyway!), but the therapy she will receive should make her much less anxious in social settings, teach her coping skills for when she feels overwhelmed, and give her a much better chance at succeeding in school. One interesting thing we learned through this testing is that we received confirmation of what we believed was Hannah's exceptional intelligence but had always wondered if we were just being the typical parent who OF COURSE always thinks their child is brilliant. They did not do an IQ test on Hannah (they are considered unreliable on children of her age), but on the four cognitive development tests that they performed Hannah tested at a 4 or 5 year old level on each one! That's my smart little girl. Hannah will begin developmental therapy for 1 hour a week every week for the next year and at that point she will be reevaluated to see if she needs to continue. At 3 she will have aged out of the First Steps program (the early intervention agency), but if she still qualifies for services then we can start services through the school system. We haven't met her therapist yet, but I've talked to her on the phone and she seems really knowledgeable and nice. She has 2 other clients who are currently diagnosed with hyperlexia so that makes me feel like she knows what she's doing. We'll know soon enough. If we don't like her for whatever reason at all, we have the right to request a new therapist until we find someone we (and more importantly Hannah) click with. The therapist will do Hannah's therapy out in the community so that she can be around other kids to practice her skills and in August when she starts preschool the therapist will do her therapy at preschool. I'm very pleased about that because I have been pretty nervous about how Hannah will transition into preschool. At least this way I know she'll have support for at least one hour out of the 5 she'll be in preschool each week.

Another new development that actually goes along with her hyperlexia diagnosis is that Hannah has started trying to sound out words in her books. I guess now that she's mastered all her letters and their sounds she needed a new challenge. Besides writing the letter H, she has also taught herself how to write C and sometimes A. She is so proud whenever she manages to write a new letter. She's getting much better at recognizing some of the 2 digit numbers she's been learning and she's managed to learn to extend the number pattern of the 20's and 30's all by herself! She just started saying the number that came next when we were counting out loud one day and as far as we know she'd never even heard the numbers said out loud past 20 before! She's also really into to talking on the phone lately and has been having lengthy conversations with pretty much anyone who will talk to her. One day she was talking to Pap while walking around the house giving him a tour! It was so funny to hear him trying to make sense of what was going on without him having the benefit of seeing what she was pointing to!

I have LOTS more updates, but I'll save those for a new post so that you don't have to read a novel.

Recent Pictures

Here are some random pictures from May. The first set were Mother's Day weekend planting the flowers Kyle got me for Mother's Day.

































This middle group is Hannah sleeping in her car seat after a hard day hanging out with Kristie and riding Jake, Hannah visiting with Mamaw, and reading books with Daddy.





























This group is Hannah with her birthmother Tiffany and her sister Kayla at Chase and Kayla's 5th birthday party and hanging out with Becky and Aunt Heather later that day at a cookout for Aunt Myrna.

These last 2 pics were taken at SMWC when I went to visit for reunion weekend.

I Woked Up

Hannah has been quite the precocious little girl lately (really what's new?) and has been coming up with all sorts of phrases, song lyric remixes, and stalling techniques that really keep us on our toes. One of her current favorite lines is "I woked up." She uses this when she wakes up from a nap or in the morning as well as when she's been supposed to be napping, but doesn't want to and is trying to get out of her room to do something that she's been told she can ONLY do after she naps. She's also started knocking on her door to ask to get out of her room. That is pretty funny/cute, but also awfully hard to ignore when you'd rather be sleeping! Tonight when I was putting her to bed she started singing along with me as I was singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to her and each time we got to the end of a line she would shout the last word. It was so hard for me to keep a straight face and keep singing like nothing was wrong. I knew she was just gearing up for a confrontation that would postpone bedtime, but it was funny none the less because it was clever and a new trick in her arsenal. Speaking of singing, lately Hannah has been inventing new words to songs she already knows all the lyrics too. She's not accidentally misquoting the lyrics, she's deliberately singing something different because she thinks it's funny. For example, she knows all the words to the ABC song and recently she started inserting random words/names of people into the middle of the song. The song goes something like this, "ABCDEF Daddy HIJKLMNO Mommy QRSTU tree WXY and Kevin. Sometimes she uses the same word for all the interludes, sometimes it's a different word every time, sometimes she starts back up with the next letter and sometimes the missing letter is actually replaced by the inserted word like in the example above. It amazes me that she can think up a word to insert, remember what letter or line of a song she left off with, and pick back up with the correct letter/line of the song after the new word all without missing a beat or pausing in the tempo of the song at all. My favorite of them all was Twinkle Twinkle little Mommy :) My little girl makes me smile so much!

A new academic skill that Hannah is beginning to pick up is identifying the letter a word begins with just by it's sound. I bet I quizzed her with 30 words the other day while she was sitting on the potty (I tried to mix it up and use words we have used as examples of starting with a certain letter, words we've never mentioned in conjunction with letters before, and words that I thought she might never have even heard before) and she correctly identified the beginning letter of at least 20 of them. A few words she missed she had the right sound but wrong letter. Sun and jelly for example she said started with c and g respectively. Another new thing I found her doing the other day was playing with her Little People A-Z Learning Zoo all by herself. Don't get me wrong, she plays with it all the time by herself, but this time I came in to find her to have correctly placed about a dozen of the 26 animals on their corresponding alphabet circles on the zoo mat.

Up until now, Hannah has had no interest in naming any of her stuffed animals, toys, dolls, etc, but all of a sudden she decided to name her 3 Breyer horses that Aunt Heather gave her. I've tried to trick her to see if the names are set in stone or if they would change every time, but so far she's been resolute and doesn't like to be questioned much about her decision! She named one of them Mia and the other two are both named Jack-o. She has been playing with them constantly and always makes me be the same one of the Jack-o's even if I ask to be a different one.

One exciting milestone Hannah had was her first nap that she woke up dry from. That particular day she went the entire day without a single accident even while sleeping. I was so proud of her, but she didn't seem to be all that concerned one way or the other. She's getting much better about telling us when she needs to pee, but she's still far from telling us every time and we still have a lot of accidents after about 2:00pm or so. I'm not sure if she's just tired and doesn't notice or if she's just fed up with paying attention! Either way, our track record for staying dry while awake after say about noon is drastically worse than before noon.

Asthma

Sorry it has been such a long time since I last posted. I thought things would calm down a bit, but really they didn't! The biggest news (although not happy news) since I last posted is that Hannah has been diagnosed with asthma. We weren't completely surprised since Tiffany has pretty severe asthma and Chase also has some breathing trouble too. Hannah's had frequent pneumonia and her colds always seem to linger on well past when they should so we kinda figured it might be a possibility someday. She has what's called cold induced asthma (not cold weather, but the virus) which is sometimes also called cough variant asthma. This basically means that she only shows her symptoms when she has some sort of respiratory infection or is having trouble with allergies. The doctor said it could develop into classic asthma as she gets older, but we hope that doesn't happen. Right now she's on an inhaler and she does pretty good with it. She knows exactly what she's supposed to do although we do have obedience issues with it just like we are having in every other area of her life right now!

As far as more fun updates, Kyle introduced Hannah to running through the sprinkler yesterday and she had a blast. I got some awesome pictures! I love our camera. Hannah kept calling the sprinkler rain which I thought was funny. She'd run up to it and touch it, but then run away quickly as it started to come towards her. Last weekend we took Hannah to the Indianapolis Zoo. We decided to buy a zoo membership for Hannah's birthday gift since she loves zoos so much. She really enjoyed our trip and we had great weather for it. It was crowded since it was a holiday, but not nearly as bad as it could have been.

School continues to go well. We will be starting week 12 tomorrow. I can't believe we have been at it for 3 months. Hannah now knows all of the alphabet and all but a few sounds. She knows about half of the lowercase letters and is getting really interested in learning how to write the letters. Every now and then when she is scribbling away she accidentally makes something that resembles a letter and she gets all excited and says, "I wrote a _____" Last night she was really having fun with that. We've finally made it past the 13 hump in counting and she can now go all the way to 20. She really likes it when I pretend to get stuck while I'm counting and she tells me what number I forgot. :) One of her new things is that she has taught herself to count in Spanish. I've had people ask me if she watches Dora or Diego or any of the other kids shows that teach other languages but she doesn't. She has some maracas that count in Spanish, but that is pretty much it. She just learns things on her own. It's pretty amazing. She can go up to 7 (siete) consistently by herself and up to 10 with a little bit of prompting. I thought she was just memorizing the pattern, but didn't really know what it all meant until one day she just started counting shoes as she was moving them from the treadmill back to the entry way (vacuuming day again!) and she was doing it in Spanish instead of English. She was moving one shoe at a time and each time she would go back for a new shoe she would pick back up with the correct Spanish number. She made it to 7 before she started back over with 3 again! I was shocked. Sometimes I'll just hear her counting to herself in Spanish when no one else is around. She just really likes to practice things and has always been obsessed with numbers. I guess I'm going to have to learn the Spanish numbers past 10 so I can keep up with her once she masters 1-10!

Busy Busy

We have been incredibly busy lately and I am finally looking forward to a weekend with NOTHING on the calendar! Because of all of our busyness, Hannah has been a bit cranky lately, but hopefully that will work itself out now that we are calming our schedule down a bit.

The gymnastics show a few weeks ago was a big success. Hannah had a great time and Kyle and Grandpa got some awesome photos. I used photoshop and made composite images for every kid in the show. It was a lot of work, but I had fun doing it and those parents that I got to talk to really liked their pics. Last weekend Tiffany's twins had their 5th birthday so Hannah got to see them and she had a blast at the party. She especially loved playing on Kayla and Chase's swing set. The same weekend Hannah had her gymnastics meet we also did the March of Dimes March for Babies (formerly known as Walk America). This year Hannah was one of Lilly's poster kids because the antiviral that cured Hannah's herpes and saved her from serious neurological damage was developed using a grant from the March of Dimes. Hannah had fun on the walk and loved seeing all the dogs the people had with them.

Hannah's language skills continue to grow by leaps and bounds. She is now praying on her own and will often incorporate the day's events into her prayers and not just recite a standard memorized prayer. We had no idea she could pray like that until one night when we bowed our heads to say our bedtime prayers she just started praying! Here is what she said, "Dear Jesus, Thank you for the day. Fun with Grandpa, fun with Daddy, fun with Mommy. Amen" This was the night of her gymnastics show and she had had a very fun day and seen Grandpa. Kyle and I were both shocked. The other day we were sitting at a stop sign and a bus pulled up beside us and Hannah said. "I see a bus. I see an octagon." The bus started to pull forward and she said, "I see another octagon. Two octagons." She was pointing at the stop signs on the arms of the school bus! Then, tonight she got in trouble for chewing on one of the letters on her play mat and Kyle put her in time out. She started to cry and then called out, "I'm sorry Daddy for chewing the M." On Monday she had a doctor's appointment and when the doctor came in she looked at him and said, "Leave the door open please Dr. Hendrick." I thought the doctor was going to keel over. He turned to me and said, "What 2 year old talks like that!?!" I replied, "but she's not even 2!"

She now knows all of her alphabet except for X, V, and N. She often calls X K, V Y and N Z. She can identify several lower case letters now and knows basically all of her letter sounds. She's still pretty much stuck at 13 in the counting department, but if you get her past 13 and break the 13, 7-13, 7-13 cycle she can sometimes get to 20.

Potty training is still pretty much holding steady. We've had no major breakthroughs lately. She definitely gets great joy out of picking out her big girl underwear each day and gets very excited each time we check them and they are dry.

Obedience is currently a hot topic in the Spontak household. As Hannah grows more and more independent she becomes ever more willful. She will push the limits on the same issue dozens of times a day even if it means getting multiple time outs in a row! There are days when I feel like she spends ALL day in time out. Hitting is another unruly behavior that has reared it's ugly head and I am none too pleased with it. It seems like whenever she gets frustrated, bored, or the whim just strikes her she will haul off and hit us. She gets time outs for this so often that many times when asked why she got a time out she will default answer for hitting even if that's not why she was in time out! Time outs or a stern "NO!" don't seem to be making much difference. I am hoping that this is a phase that she will soon grow out of because it is really trying my patience.

Physically she can now jump and get both feet off the ground all the time, but she still hasn't grasped the concept of jumping off of things yet which is actually good in my opinion! She climbs like a crazy woman. She goes up ladders, steps, cargo netting, rock walls, etc. She can sit by herself in big kid swings and go down pretty much any slide by herself. She's working on walking on the balance beam by herself and is very motivated to learn how to do it. She can really run now (not just a fast walk) and loves to do it any chance she gets. She can usually walk up and down steps alone as long as she has a railing or something else to hold onto and she is starting to want to go up and down without holding onto anything which makes me nervous.

Some people have asked me what Hannah wants for her birthday. She doesn't NEED anything really except for some clothes for the next season, but when I said last year that she didn't need gifts I had people asking me anyway for ideas. So, here are some ideas if you feel like you really want to get her a gift. She's currently wearing size 3T and 4T dresses and shirts. For pants she needs size 3T, preferably elastic waist without zippers or buttons that she can pull up and down herself for easy potty training! For shorts she needs 2T or 3T. If you want to get ahead for the fall, she could really use some 3T (or to be safer 4T) long sleeve shirts, light weight jackets and sweaters or sweatshirts. She's currently wearing size 8 shoes. She doesn't have any sandals or dress shoes that fit. She could also use size 4T/5T ( I think they only come in two size increments and the size she is wearing now is 2T/3T) big girl underwear because some of the pairs she has now are already getting tight. Socks for shoe size 8 or bigger would be great because she has very few pairs that still fit (thank heavens it's almost summer and hopefully I can get her into some sandals soon!). I'm always looking for cute hair bows and clips to tame her wild hair. I love the curly ones from Gymboree(she wearing ones from there in almost every picture in this post!). They work great in her hair because they seem to be just the right size/stretchiness.

Besides clothes she LOVES books. She can read books with regular paper pages just fine now and rarely (if ever) tears pages anymore, but board books are still fine too. New alphabet and counting books are always big hits. Those seem to be her favorites from the library these days. Also, any books about adoption would be good. Some of the best ones I've found from the library are Megan's Birthday Tree by Laurie Lears, The Red Thread, An Adoption Fairytale by Grace Lin, Over the Moon by Karen Katz, and A Mother for Choco by Keiko Kasza. She likes all of these books and I feel they portray adoption in a realistic or favorable light. I would say her favorite of all of these (and the only one I've ever seen in a bookstore, I kicked myself for not buying it then, but I didn't know she would like it so much!) is A Mother for Choco. Other favorite books that we have checked out from the library recently that we don't have are DW Flips, I Love You Stinky Face, Hop on Pop, and DK My First Phonics Board Book.
As far as other interests go, she loves animals, puzzles (she could stand to have some new ones since she's completely mastered the 3 she has), Diego, anything Sesame Street,-especially Grover, The Backyardigans, Fisher Price Little People toys (she has the barn, ark, and A-Z Learning Zoo) the computer (we've thought about getting her the Leap Frog Click Start My First Computer, but it's kinda expensive), swing sets, toy kitchens/food, art supplies (stickers, stamps, scissors, etc) and anything that teaches numbers or letters. She is NOT very into stuffed animals or dolls.
I think that is all the updates I have for now. I'll try to get some more videos uploaded as soon as I can.

Full Sentences

Hannah is now speaking in mostly full sentences. Usually her sentences are 4-5 words long and often grammatically correct, but every now and then she comes up with a doosey that really catches me off guard. For example, last week we were playing outside and she looked up at me and then pointed to the sidewalk behind me and said, "I see a girl riding on a bike." I turned around and sure enough there WAS a girl riding on a bike. One of her favorite new phrases to use is "I want some. . . ." She uses this A LOT now. In the beginning it was cute and actually very helpful, but she can get VERY sassy and bossy about it when she thinks we aren't moving fast enough or when we tell her that she can't have some. Along with the sassing using "I want some" Hannah has also started to just generally sass back if she's in a bad mood, tired, or not happy with the outcome of the situation. Consequently we've been spending lots of time in time out for not talking to mommy nicely.

Hannah had a good weekend with Mamaw and Papaw. I don't think she wanted to go home. She'd much rather be spoiled by them than obey us! While there she got to help feed the horses and feed Zeke and visit with her Great Grandma Frye. Grandma Frye had this really cool Lion that sang "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" that Hannah got a big kick out of.

Potty training continues to go well. Hannah is now totally bowl trained. I haven't had to change a poopy diaper in almost 3 weeks which I LOVE! She is pooping in the toilet 2-3 times every day and always holds it until she is on the potty. Urine training is taking a little bit longer. Either it's harder to hold because her bladder is so small or she just doesn't always slow down enough to listen to her body telling her that she needs to pee. If we take her to the potty she always pees in the toilet and sometimes she will tell us that she needs to go pee in the potty. BUT if you ask her if she needs to pee she will always answer no even if I know she needs to go. She does really well staying dry in the the morning and we usually have very few if any accidents until after her nap. Once she starts to get wore out in the afternoon and once Daddy gets home she seems to have more accidents. The good thing is that she HATES having accidents and will usually tell me either as soon as she has wet her pants or often even while she is peeing. Hopefully this is a step in the right direction and we will be able to give up diapers for good soon. Last week Hannah peed in a public toilet for the first time and she hasn't looked back since. I was a bit worried about how it would work and if she would be scared of the big hole and the automatic flushes, but she did really well. We were playing at the play place at the mall and she told me she needed to go so I took her in and she was still dry and she went on the toilet. She asked to go 3 times that trip and each time she was dry and went on the potty. She has since used lots of different public toilets and did great. After two scary incidents of falling into the potty (once with Kyle and once with Mamaw) I am really surprised that she's doing as well as she is with toilets that aren't hers, but it hasn't seemed to have affected her much at all, though she does mention the incidents from time to time.

Further evidence that we have a very clever little girl is the fact that the other night in the bathtub she spelled her name for Kyle! I haven't witnessed this feat yet, but he said he wrote the letter H on the tub with her tub crayons and said, "H for Hannah" and she said, "A N N A H" He immediately screamed for me to come into the bathroom to tell me about it and see if she would do it again, but she wouldn't do it for me. Another thing she did the other day was while she was in time out while Grandpa was here. I knew she would want to talk to Grandpa if she could see him so I moved her timeout mat to another room so she couldn't see him. She got up from her mat so she got a spank and I told her to not get off of her mat otherwise she would get another spank. SOOOO, she instead pushed her mat (while keeping her bottom firmly planted on it) all the way across the room until she could poke her head around the doorway and say, "Hi Grandpa!"

I'm finally caught up on uploading videos to Google. You will actually be seeing some videos that where shot in the month I posted them!

Here is Hannah sleeping in a pile of books. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1700261361283996005

Hannah riding her rocking horse. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6352894557630971711

Yet more singing of Jesus Loves Me. Can you tell that it's one of her favorite songs? http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3103739513243965899

Hannah loves to put on shoes and walk around the house in them even if they aren't her shoes. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4991832622610802384

Hannah pretending to be an elephant. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-620977543241417026

Hannah still enjoys playing her harmonica. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9039278633584431556

Here's Hannah being the tickler this time. She's tickling her sister Kayla. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4709846652047116653

Gotta Go

Potty training is going very well for Hannah. In fact, she is almost potty training herself. The past 2 days she has been telling me when she has to pee and hasn't had a single BM in her diaper and very few pee accidents. Almost all of the times she has peed in her diaper have been either at night or early morning before I wake up and she's just hanging out in her room reading or while she's sleeping during her nap. Today she didn't have a single accident and even held it 3 different times when I told her that I couldn't take her to the bathroom right then (we were driving back from gymnastics, at the park, and jogging with Kyle). She only went through 2 diapers the entire day and the only one that was wet enough for me to tell it was wet before I took it off was the one I changed after her nap. I probably didn't even need to change the second one when we put her to bed, but it had been taken off and on so many times that day that I thought the Velcro might not be in a good enough shape to last the night so we put on a fresh one. She didn't wear big girl underwear today because we were out and about away from bathrooms so much today, but tomorrow we plan to get back into them. She's been wearing them pretty much all the time now unless we are away from home. The poor thing really DOES NOT want to have an accident and gets practically frantic if she thinks that she's going to have one. I rush her to the bathroom thinking she's already peed, but then she's dry as a bone and then goes a ton in the toilet. If she really does have an accident she starts to cry and says "change the diaper, change the diaper" in a hysterical voice. I've never scolded her for having an accident, but somehow she gets that it's not a good thing. She has so much pride each time she goes to the potty and her big girl underwear is dry. She sings a little song (which she made up herself that is a variation on the song I sing to her when she pees or poops in the potty) each time she's dry that goes like this, "Hannah's dry, Hannah's dry, Hannah's pants are dry! YEAH!" and then claps her hands. It makes me smile so big!

Hannah has a big occasion coming up this weekend. She's spending the night at Mamaw and Papaw's house and she's seriously pumped about it. She's positive they are going to take her outside to play in the woods with Zeke (their dog) and she keeps telling me this every chance she gets. Today she asked me over and over if she was going to sleep at Mamaw's tonight. She's not quite got a grasp on the passage of time and the future yet so I guess we'll have to just keep going through this dialogue until Saturday rolls around and she actually DOES get to sleep at Mamaw's. Hopefully all will go well and she actually WILL sleep.

Here's a head's up for all of you planners out there like me who like to "save the date" for things. Hannah's party this year will be the weekend before her birthday because her birthday falls on 4th of July weekend (I'm sure this will happen often) and I know that would be hectic for everyone. The party will be on Saturday June 28th from 2-3:30. We are having it at the gym where she takes gymnastics this year and I think it will be a lot of fun. The best part is that I won't have to do ANY clean up or set up at all. They will take care of all of that and they even provide an hour's worth of gymnastics instruction and games for the kids. I'll get everyone directions and stuff when it gets closer to time. Interestingly enough, Hannah has become keenly interested in birthdays lately. Our neighbor is having his 5th birthday party this weekend and he's been talking about it for weeks. Every time he sees us he tells us about the Sponge Bob party he's going to have and that he will be five. Hannah has just randomly been saying that Zach's 5 and Hannah's 1 and Evelyn's 1 ever since the first time Zach told us about his party. Then today at gymnastics it was one of her classmates' birthday and we sang her Happy Birthday and Hannah loved the song. She kept wanting to tell Sam Happy Birthday and then tonight at dinner she just randomly blurted out, "Happy Birthday Sam!" Her party should be really fun because she'll get it this year and she will have just gone to a party a few weeks before for her friend Addie so the idea of a birthday party should be fresh in her mind.

Today we took Hannah for a walk with the dogs for the very first time. Neither of our dogs are great on the leash (Abby lags behind and often has to be drug along and Ella sprints ahead choking herself!) so it's not a huge shock that we weren't keen to try to handle them with a toddler on the lose or even with a stroller. Tonight both dogs were in usual walk mode, but we put an extra leash on Abby for Hannah to hold and decided to give it a try. She had a blast and so did we. It was funny to see her getting pulled back by the leash as she wandered off course completely clueless about what was holding her back!

Here are some more videos that I finally got uploaded to Google.

Hannah is so ticklish! http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3620203422170354640&hl=en

Hannah and Addie coloring. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3412103643176809925&hl=en

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7612057443526193488&hl=en

Hannah is reading a book when she is supposed to be sleeping. If you listen closely you can hear her saying, "How many kisses do you want tonight? Mommy kiss. ~smack~ How many kisses do you want tonight? Just one. ~smack~" http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-224267902175712086&hl=en

In this video Hannah is singing Old McDonald instead of sleeping. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6412166977236602850&hl=en

Numbers

My little girl just blows my mind. Tonight I about fell into the bathtub as I was washing her hair. She was playing with the water and I wasn't paying much attention until I heard her say, "I see a number 4." Before I could even process what she had said she pointed at it on the measuring cup she was holding. Then she said, "I see a number 2." Then she pointed to it on the cup. I ended up asking her if she could find other numbers and she pointed to 0-6, and 8 on the measuring cup (there wasn't a 7 or a 9) all in random order. At first I thought maybe she was somehow counting them and she was guessing the numerals that way, but then I realized that the side she was looking at was counting the ounces by 2s. Then I flipped the cup over and started asking her the numbers 0-5 in random order from the (100-500) ml side of the cup. The reason I'm so amazed by this newest feat of hers is that I HAVEN'T taught her or worked with her on numerals except for 0-2 from her home preschool program. She has either learned them from her Baby Einstein/Sesame Street DVDs or from her counting books. I'm not sure which did it, but it's certain that any of the learning was simply soaked up and not directly taught. I think it's just crazy how easy numbers come to her. They don't come easy to me. If Hannah wasn't adopted I'd say she got her number smarts from her daddy the engineer, but Kyle's gene's had nothing to do with it! :) My little girl's just smart.

Yesterday we had a nice visit with Tiffany, Hannah's birthmother, and her twins and Tiffany's mom. We had Easter pictures taken with all of the kids again like we did last year and it went much better this time. Last year was a complete and utter disaster as far as the pictures were concerned. Chase was so excited to see Hannah that he was invading her personal space which is never a good idea with Hannah, we had a male photographer who wasn't good with any of the kids, and Hannah was experiencing severe stranger and separation anxiety. The combination was not good. We didn't get a single good picture of the 3 of them. This year we had a much more successful time. Tiffany and I were laughing as we were looking at the proofs because the pics we were immediately dismissing this year were as good as or better than the one we eventually ended up buying last year! Hannah had a blast running around chasing Chase and tickling Kayla. She even warmed up quickly to Tiffany and let her hold her and gave spontaneous hugs, kisses, and "I Love You"s as we were leaving. I was so proud of my little girl for making her birthfamily feel so happy.

Potty training is going fairly well. Hannah pees every single time I sit her on the potty almost as soon as I get her up there. She definitely knows how to pee at will. We got her some big girl underwear and plastic covers and have had two full days (not in a row though!) wearing them. The first day we started out strong and then quickly fell apart. We went through every single pair of underwear before it was even 2:00pm! We also went through almost all of her pants! Part of the problem was that I wasn't very organized and I really had no idea exactly how often she really needed to pee since diapers are so absorbent that you can't really tell they are wet until they are very wet. Consequently, I had no way of knowing if she peed a lot all at once or a little bit at a time until it all added up to a wet diaper. I found out it was the latter that fist day. Today I had a better plan of action and set a timer to take her to the bathroom every 30 minutes. She actually peed every single time a significant amount. We had only had one accident by 4:00pm! Then as she started to get tired and cranky things went down hill and we had 3 more accidents before it was time for bed at 7:00pm, but I still think that it was a successful day considering it was only her second time ever wearing big girl underwear. She even managed to poop in the potty 2 separate times today too!
Another sign that my little girl is growing up is that she has officially ditched her highchair. We got her this really cool thing that boosts her chair at the table up. Instead of a booster seat that sits on top of the chair and then Hannah sits in the booster, this is a device that the chair sits on top of and lifts the chair up so that Hannah actually sits on the dining room table chair just like Kyle and I do. It's called a Kaboost and it's really cool. Kudos to Kyle for finding it on the Internet.

School continues to go well. Tomorrow will be the end of our 4th week. The theme this week was eyes and Hannah as usual got really into it. The theme for next week is lighthouses which I'm not super excited about so I'll be interested to see how much Hannah likes it. I can't imagine lighthouses will be very interesting for an extremely active 21 month old girl. Maybe I'll be surprised. Today when we worked on our alphabet the only letters Hannah failed to identify (in random order) on the first try were N, U, and X. She called N "z" and X "y" I thought that was really pretty good. The sounds she currently knows are A, B, C, D, E, I, H, J, M, P, R, S, T, W, and Z. She has A-D, M, W, and R mastered. The other ones can be hit or miss sometimes.
Here are some videos from the last few months that I finally got uploaded onto Google. Enjoy.

Hannah reading books. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4767920472411038267&hl=en

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6115836828758160927&hl=en

Hannah and I playing Super Grover. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5298892368292382119&hl=en

Hannah splashing in her first puddle. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6569501497617515300&hl=en
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7218410685235990009&hl=en

First Ear Infection

The cold I mentioned that Hannah was getting in my last post turned into her first ear infection. She's now on a 10 day course of antibiotics that she has to take 3 times a day. I'm extremely glad that she is good about taking medicine because I don't even want to think about having to give her meds multiple times a day by myself if she didn't cooperate. The fact that Hannah is so good about taking medicine is probably partly just her personality, but I'm sure the fact that she sees me take so many meds has something to do with it too. I didn't know quite how in tune she was to my physical health and my meds until one day when we were in the grocery store and I put a bottle of vitamins in the cart and Hannah tried to take it from me and said, "Hannah hold medicine." She will also try to diagnose me whenever I deny her requests to pick her up, dance with her, or play the "get you game" (chase her). The first thing she will say is "Mommy hurt" and then once I confirm that she is right she will then try to decide what hurts. She will guess my back, head, or legs. It makes me sad that she is not even 2 years old, yet she already has a good grasp on my pain and it's limitations. If I say that I am hurting she will usually give me a hug or kiss and say, "feel better Mommy."

Potty training is going fairly well given that we aren't very serious about it. I try to take her to the bathroom at least a couple of times a day, but that doesn't always happen. She's not asking to go sit on the potty yet, but she has been telling us when she pees every now and then and she pees almost every time I sit her on the toilet now. She's also pooped four times. Today I took her in to sit on the potty when she had a dry diaper and then she peed as soon as she sat down. I'm not sure if she was actually holding it or not, but I'll take it as a good sign. She's also asking to stay on the potty for longer and longer periods of time ever since that first time she pooped. Even though she's not asking to go in and sit on the potty, I wonder if these other things are a sign that I need to get a little more serious about the potty training. I don't want to push her too quickly, but if she's ready to be rid of diapers then I certainly don't want to prolong the process! I'd love to have that money we spend on diapers to use for other things.

Today we took Hannah to the gym where she takes her gymnastics class for their Saturday open play program. She had an absolute blast and completely wore herself out. By the end of the hour she could barely haul herself up onto the trampoline or even walk straight! She was so cute running down the room long trampoline bouncing all the way. Speaking of gymnastics, next month Hannah will be performing in her first gymnastics meet. The gym has a preschool gymnastics show to raise money for St. Jude Hospital every year and this year Hannah will be participating. I can't wait to see her show off for everyone.

Recently we got a pleasant surprise. Mike, Hannah's birthfather, was in town for work and he called to ask if he could drop by. We hadn't seen him for awhile so it was nice for Hannah to get the chance to spend some time with him and get to know him better. Next week we also have date set up to see Tiffany and the twins so we can get Easter pictures taken of the kids again like we did last year. We haven't seem them since before Christmas so I'm anxious to see how the twins have grown and for Tiffany to see how much Hannah has changed.