Midterm is over so let the sewing begin

Sophie getting her nails done for the first time,
 it was a really special moment. The beautician was so sweet. 

So I did practically no sewing during mid term. I decided to devote all my time to Sophie and to a lesser extent Jack. Boys of 14 don't really want their mother's around so much! I really enjoyed our time together, I even got her to help with the chores. She normally just goes no to any request for help! One sign that her comprehension level is pretty good. But she helped me make beds and so on. I am trying out a different approach to her speech development. It used to be that there were no motivating factors to encourage her to carry out any therapy tasks.

But now that she's nearly nine and likes her food and her drink of milk and has just discovered chocolate. Yep you heard right, Sophie has only in this last year tasted chocolate for the first time. So with all this in mind I decided that she had to ask for a drink properly before she got one. So the idea was that she had to say 'Can I have a drink please' Okay so maybe I should have dropped the manners aspect of this but it's too late now. You see what happens when you live day after day with a child who doesn't have fluent speech is we don't notice it so much.

She orders us all about with one word commands. These single words aren't pronounced properly either, I swore that they were to her old speech therapist but then when I came home and actually listened I realised that they weren't. So she would just say 'dink peas' and then by magic a drink of milk appears before her.

So I'm coaching her through each word and using sign language she is actually saying the sentence! Now sometimes it's 'I ave a dinkapeas' ha ha. So I refuse the drink until it's said properly. So it's not the easiest exercise. For some reason she doesn't like to say can, so our conversations go a little like this:

Sophie: I have
Me: Say can
Sophie: I
Me: Say can
Sophie: I have dinkapeas
Me: Say Can I
and on and on and on

But then a couple of weeks ago she came into the utility room and said 'Can...I...Have...A...Drink...Please'
!!!!!!!
I was so happy, but here's the thing. You can say good girl, but you can't get to excited as she gets really really upset if you praise her too much. She's a complicated little girl who can fill me with such pride I think I might actually burst, but then she turns around and does something really naughty so it all balances out.

Ooops this post was supposed to be about sewing and now I'm out of time. Never mind, I'll post later on this week about the current quilts I'm working on.

Geraldine x