Holy smokes, Lila is doing new things so often that it’s almost overwhelming when I sit down to try and type it all out! How wonderful is that problem?!? I love it!

We had our first meeting with her special needs pre-K teacher (and her SLP) this week. I can’t even tell you how wonderful it was to hear someone outside our little circle to say how very smart Lila is – I mean, everyone says she’s pretty – but they don’t see the Lila we see at home, they don’t see how incredibly funny and intelligent she is, and some people seem to think that because she is non-verbal, she isn’t intelligent. Such a relief that her teacher can see what we see in her! Love having new members on board here at Team Lila.

Lila has started to play with a soft baby doll (pretends to feed and then kiss her) at school, and she after months of not wanting anything to do with the flag and swatting it away, here is our designated flag holder during circle time this week. My heart may literally explode – all of these pictures make me so emotional. I know how far she’s come – I know what a big deal these seemingly small things are. It’s just incredible. Random shout out to Janet here – she is such a huge part of the reason that Lila has made so much progress.

Lila also held a stuffed toy a few different times (for short periods of time) lately – more new things for her!

Bill started a new game with Lila to help her work on the words she has obtained so far through speech. We all do a playful back and forth with words she is gaining confidence with: “Oh No!,”, “Uh Oh”, “Yay”, “Dada/Daddy”, “Again”, “Mama”, and “Ready, Set, then she says “Gooo!”. That playful way of working on therapy with her has always worked very well for all of us, and apparently speech is no exception.

We’ve had a Halloween-themed game this week as well. I gave her a plastic pumpkin and put some of her toys in it. Bill added counting to it and she loves it – adorable video up on the Facebook page if you haven’t had a chance to see it!

She also found an Easter basket that her Memaw got for her a couple of years ago. She love, love, loves the paper Easter grass!

We use a lot of “First-Then” countdowns with Lila during transitions. A new development which I think is amazing is this: If she is tentative and has a lot of anxiety about the transition, she has me do the countdown per usual. However – IF she is comfortable with the transition we’re doing, she will go ahead and put down whatever the previous item is and come over to me for the next activity. Pretty incredible!

Speaking of incredible – we’ve been doing grocery store trips on the weekend, and we’ve had a few meltdown-free trips in a row. She’s come such a very long way – this week we even went just the two of us, and I had to return something (deviation to typical store routine) – and she handled it like a champ.

I gave her a Dora tent from last Christmas this week – she really looked that box over and decided she wanted what was in it! First time I’ve ever seen that – Christmas this year is going to be so much fun.

And now we have Play Doh – she used to have a lot of tactile defensiveness with it, but now she is totally in love with Play Doh. She requests it all the time, then she brings me some play doh tools Janet brought over, the extruders and shape cutters are her favorite. For the shape cutters she likes to sit in my lap and I say “ready, set”, then we say “go” and I help her push the shape cutter down into the play dough. Then she takes her shape and always looks so pleased with herself. Love, love, love all of this new-found play!

I think that’s it for the moment, although I’m sure I’ve forgotten tons of things. The Little Lady does something new every day now, the rest of us are just trying to keep up!