Mia's ever-expanding vocabulary

We've mentioned more than once that we want Mia to recover more on the mental side than on the physical side. Yes, it would be nice if she could be mobile on her own, but we really want her to be able to function on a mental level, because there are a lot more devices to help on the physical side. So we've been trying very hard to get her to speak more, and she's making some good progress.

She has recently gotten a tiny bit better with colors. She was holding a blue crayon a while back and said "blue." Krys gave her a yellow crayon, and after she said it was purple (her default color; we're not sure why), she successfully identified it. Her occupational therapist is working with her matching colors, and she's gotten much better at that. Which is nice.

She's getting better at identifying more things. She has Sesame Street characters on her diapers, and she is able to tell me which one is Elmo pretty regularly and which ones are Ernie and Big Bird with less frequency, but still pretty well. Elmo is the first one she says all the time, but if I correct her and she looks more closely, she can usually get the character the second time. She also said Elmo was red the other day, which was nice.

Although Krys reads her the same books over and over, it's still nice to see her memorize parts of them. She knows Fox in Sox very well, and loves it. In most of her favorite books, she's able to anticipate what's coming up, and is telling Krys what's going to happen.

Her speech therapist has been working with books, too, and her favorite is probably a book she has that explains how your body works. If you ask Mia what her heart does, she pats herself on the chest and says "Buh-BUH!" and if you ask her what her lungs do, she will breathe very deeply.

She's also starting to repeat the last word or two of sentences we say. If I say something like "Do you need to be changed?" she'll say "change." Some of the words are unusual and she hasn't attempted them very often, so she mangles the pronunciation, but it's pretty clear that she's trying to say them. That's nice to hear, because it will help her build a vocabulary.

We still have a lot of work to do with her, but she's getting much better at communicating what she wants. She even said "poop" not long ago and then actually did so, which was nice. We're hoping that as she gets more into school next year, she can communicate even better. She has a lot on her mind, and she wants to be heard!