Just about every year for Thanksgiving, sashagee and I head out for our parents' houses for Thanksgiving, usually doing dinner at one and lunch at the other's the next day, but this year was different. To help give sashagee time to clean the house and get some chores done, Laila went out to the grandparents last Saturday and stayed there until Friday afternoon, when all the grandparents assembled at our home for our first family hosted Thanksgiving!

It went very well. My parents still had a dinner with Laila, with turkey and their traditional sides--rolls, potatoes, A Vegetable, and jello--and they brought the turkey, stuffing, and jello with them when they came. sashagee's parents brought two pies, one pumpkin and one apple. sashagee made steamed broccoli, honey-glazed carrots, and whipped feta pumpkin dip. We sat as many people as would fit around our table, my parents sat on the couch with tv trays in front of them, and we ate a delicious meal. Except Laila, but you know, she's a four-year-old so when she only ate some bread and a bit of carrot and then said she was done, well, that's just being a four-year-old. It's no comment on the actual food.

Everyone told sashagee that they had a great time and maybe we'll be doing it next year. And I'm not surprised, honestly, since we did all the cleaning and prep work. And sashagee got to be hostess! Just hopefully next year Laila will eat dinner.

Where does the time go?

The first and most important news I have is that Laila still loves school. She still runs to the door every single day, trying to be the first in line to get inside when the doors open, she still talks excitedly about going to school, and she still runs ahead to get there, when she doesn't want me to carry her while we're walking, anyway. We have a hard time getting any information about what happens at school out of her, but we've heard similar concerns from other parents who have children with normal language skills--despite repeated questioning their kid just doesn't want to talk about what happened. We can occasionally get some snippets out of her, and once I freaked her out because I started singing a goodbye song that I'd heard her sing under her breath and with a big smile she held out her palm to me and said, "Okay stop!"

She says that a lot if you try to sing to her in the wrong context (e.g. not at bedtime) lately.

Her favorite activity lately is playing in the sandbox. At poppa and nana's when the weather was warm--the neighbors have a trampoline and sandbox setup for their kids that they've gracefully allowed Laila to use. She doesn't have those at home, but she does have some kinetic sand playsets--one beach-themed, the other dinosaur-themed--that she loves. She doesn't really use the dinosaur playset as it's designed, she doesn't hide the bones and use the pickaxe and brush to dig them up, and when we do it she wants us to do the digging for her, but she does take all the bones and assemble them in the dinosaur skeleton with no prompting.

Her independence is one of the big things the teachers have suggested we work on with her. She can do a lot of things by herself, more than she believes, but she gives up very fast or doesn't even try, instead just saying "Abba do it" or "Mama do it." So sashagee and I have had to institute a deliberate policy of not helping, just being calm and encouraging, reminding her that she can put her clothes on all by herself, she's done it plenty of times before, and also not stopping her when she tries to be helpful in ways that might turn into a disaster (like carrying her plates, or our plates, from the dining table to the kitchen counter). We're also trying to find a more effective method of dissuading her from bad behavior--following some advice we've read, we switched from timeouts for a specific length of time until behavior based timeouts, like, "You can get up when you've taken a moment and calmed down" or "you can get up when you're ready to sit on the potty and brush your teeth before bed properly instead of trying to climb in the tub and throwing all the towels on the floor."

And continuing from that, the latest Laila update picture is why we can't use "go to your room" as a punishment anymore:


Her shelves have a series of supports on the side of her shelves that function very similar to a ladder and she's figured it out. I talked to my father and he just got rid of all of his plywood, so we might just staple some cardboard panels to the side to prevent her from climbing up there. I'm worried about her falling (of course), but also she doesn't know the non-personal consequences of being up there. She threw down a container of her hairties a couple days ago and we're lucky that it didn't shatter, and she pushed the wifi center off the ledge and only the cables prevented it from breaking on the floor--and boy would she have been unhappy if I tried to explain to her that the reason she couldn't watch TV at all for a week is because of her actions. Stopping her from going up the ladder should do a lot to keep her safe, at least when it comes to her room.

Her language has exploded since starting school. I wrote a month ago about some of the remnants of her baby talk but even in the month since then, she's been using a lot more sentences, using "I" to refer to herself, remembers sashagee's and my names--though sometimes she'll swap us to troll us--she'll say things like, "I like it a lot!" and "No, mama, wait!" things that definitely didn't really happen before she started school. I'm sure as time goes on she'll get more talkative. In her speech therapy, her speech therapist came and told us that she suspects Laila is a "gestalt language learner", which basically means that instead of going sounds->words->phrases->sentences, she goes sounds->words->set phrases and then later deconstructs those set phrases to build new sentences out of. That's why she has so many things she repeats verbatim like "Mama not feeling well" or "Not a baby anymore" or the classic "Hold you" that's stuck around even though I only need to reply with "Hold..." and she immediately responds "hold me." Being told that really made sashagee feel more hopeful about Laila and now the speech therapist has a plan moving forward. I was more skeptical, though I am more hopeful too now that I see how much her speech has improved in just a few months.

Still hard to get straight answers to questions out of her, but that's not so different than a lot of other four year olds.

What other ways will she grow and change?