Party Pictures

Here are some pictures from Lily's birthday!

Her birthday outfit:

Birthday dinner at Olive Garden--She ate breadsticks for the first time!

Yummy cake:

Lily "blew" out her candle by putting her hand on the flame. No, I'm not kidding. Her hand is fine.

First taste of cake (please ignore my funny faces):

This is her typical reaction to new food:

She got excited when she saw the spoon with ice cream...

Little did she know how cold it would be...

BRR!!

All in all, it was a great birthday. Happy Birthday Lily, we love you!

Happy 3rd Birthday, Lily!!

Today our sweet Lily turns three years old!! I am both excited and a little sad--but mostly excited :). Mostly I am sad because I am really going to miss her Early Intervention therapists. I'm not going to miss all the therapies, but I will miss seeing them every week! Right now the plan for her future therapies is to have most of them done at daycare, and about once/month have them at home so I can see her progress. I will continue to take her to Physical Therapy and we will start outpatient feeding therapy, both every other week. I was also able to get her a one-on-one aide for while she is in preschool next year! The school system is going to do their best to provide an aide for daycare, too, but it's the end of the year and budgets/staff are in low supply. Still, I am happy with the results and I feel they are doing the best they can with what they have to work with.

I just finished baking Lily's cake for her little party later, and it smells yummy! I will post pictures of her first bites of cake and ice cream tonight :).

Bye, Bye, E. I.

It's hard to believe that Lily will turn three in less than a week! Her birthday is March 14 (next Wed). This means that she is aging out of Early Intervention (E.I. for short) and her services are being taken over by the county school system. I am really going to miss seeing her E.I. therapists, especially Ms. Susan! I don't know what her new therapy schedule will look like yet, but hopefully we can tone it down a bit.

I have a low-key birthday planned: basically just dinner and cake/ice cream with family. Lily doesn't understand what a birthday is yet, so we'll wait until she's a little older to have a "real" party :). Hopefully she will eat some cake! I am looking forward to giving her her first taste of ice cream, too :).

Just a quick post today, and I'll end with a few pictures:

It's kind of hard to see here, but she is wearing her Skidders with her SureSteps:

Yesterday she figured out how to climb onto the couch:

Eight Months Home!

Today marks exactly eight months since we arrived home with Lily! She is doing really well. Since she is about to turn three (March 14!) she will be leaving Early Intervention and will start receiving services from our local school system. Because of this she got re-evaluated last week and I thought I'd post the results here to see how far she's come!

Self-Care: 12 months
Social-Adult Interaction: 8 months
Social-Peer Interaction: < 24 months
Social-Self-Concept and Social Role: 11 months
Receptive Communication: 5 months
Expressive Communication: 10 months
Gross Motor: 11 months
Fine Motor: 10 months
Cognitive-Attention and Memory: 11 months
Cognitive-Perception and Concepts: 13 months

The only one I'm not sure I agree with is the receptive communication. I was pleased to see that her fine motor skills have caught up to her gross motor, and all her social/communication skills are at least at the eight-month level, which is appropriate since she's been home eight months. Go Lily!