What we've been up to

It's been a crazy few weeks, as day care kept postponing its reopen date, sometimes on very short notice. Blaise is also in full swing on her vocabulary expansion, logging as many as 6 new words in a single day (today: "nice", "monkey", "lion", "giraffe", "rock" and "cupcake"). We're trying to maintain a list, but by the time we get to the end of the day, we're so exhausted that we can't remember most of them. Bad language development researcher!

Last week, we made a short trip to Pittsburgh to see Ben's family. Blaise ate tons of watermelon and chased a lot of bubbles. The FisherPrice parking garage, which has a cool ramp for cars to roll down, was a huge hit. She enjoyed seeing family she already knew and also met a few new extended family members, including, best of all her COUSINS! They're big enough to read books and help her do lots of things (young teenage), but much, much more fun than grown-ups. Thank you, Colin and Brendan, for being so great with her.

Also last week, we ended our time with Early Intervention. We had already decided to reduce our visits from weekly to monthly, but in the first month between visits, Blaise knocked out almost all of her 6 month goals. Her therapist, Leslie, basically said "Well, you qualify for services because of her diagnosis, but, really, I have no idea what we should work on." She's in a giant developmental burst: running, eating with utensils, talking up a storm and driving us crazy. Go, Blaise, go! We'll miss Leslie. She's awesome to the millionth degree. She now joins the ranks of people who have done their jobs so well that we no longer need their help. We will never be able to thank her enough.