Clare Bear

Clare has one week left of her preschool summer session. She loves school (can I say it enough?). We had one day where she was reluctant to go in, and that was Auntie Erin's first day with us. (She was afraid she was going to miss out on a whole lot of fun while in school!) Her vocabulary and sentence formation continues to explode. When we wrote her IEP for the 2008-2009 school year, one of Clare's goals was to make 4-5 word sentences. Even though this goal was written for September's IEP, Clare has not only started coming out with sentences that long, but she strings sentences together and has even started having little conversations with us. She stills slurs her consonants together, though, so a good portion of her speech remains unintelligible. Every day, we pick up more and more of what she is saying, but an outsider would probably still have a tough time. Right now, she only receives group speech therapy at school, but if we do not see any improvement in her enunciation, then we are going to look into getting some one-on-one speech as well.

Clare's teacher told me this morning that "Clare is becoming comfortable in school" to the point that she is very "chatty" in circle time. Her teacher laughed about it and said it was so cute, but, being the parent, I was more concerned that Clare was behaving herself! I was assured that Clare did listen when she was told to stop talking or given other directions. Of course, I think it's cute that Clare is chatty, but I don't want her to be a disruption either! All the teachers in Clare's classroom just love her. (What's not to love, right?)

In medical news, Clare has her next echo scheduled in September. When that appointment comes, it will have been six months since her last echo! We think she's doing fine because her energy level has been great, her eating is going well, and she looks beautiful, but I still have trouble waiting to find out what's going on in her heart. Clare's eating has been going so well that we cut out her appetite stimulant a couple months ago and have noticed no change in the quantity that she eats. We also cancelled our next appointment with the feeding team since skill-wise, she can eat almost anything (except meat - she still has a tough time chewing meat). Her biggest challenge remains her pickiness. Top foods on Clare's list - toaster strudels, poptarts, cheese puffs, and cheese and crackers. She has made strides in school with eating creamy textures, such as yogurt and pudding. But no luck when it comes to fruit or vegetables. Bananas remain her fruit of choice. We notice that she definitely still leans towards foods that do not require much chewing. And she has graduated from M&M's to the finer chocolate - mainly Dove. She is not satisfied when we offer her M&M's anymore - she tells us sternly, "No, chocolate. I want chocolate." A chocolate connoisseur at the age of three.

Other than a bad double ear infection a month ago, Clare has been doctor-free this summer. It has been so nice! With fall, comes a slew of appointments, but for now, we are gearing up to enjoy the last month of summer. I cannot believe it is almost August. Wow!