Tears and triumphs

You know you're in for it when you get the "silent cry". Parents, you all know what I'm talking about- those few moments post-incident when your kid's eyes fill with tears and his or her mouth opens wide enough to possibly swallow the family pet. The longer the silence, the greater the eruption to come. Then the comes the deafening cry as your kid lets it all out. Ugh.

Now ordinarily these occurrences can be resolved fairly easily. But when your kid cannot entirely convey to you what hurts or happened, it can be heartbreaking and incredibly frustrating. So as Sophia sobbed on the couch, I knelt in front of her asking her countless questions: "What happened? What hurts? Is it your tummy? Did you bite your tongue? Does your ear/eye/mouth/elbow/left knee/big toe hurt? What? What is it? Please tell me..." As if pleading with her would get her to tell me. The only word she managed to utter amidst the sobs was, "hurts". So I ran through the body parts again. And she just cried and said, "hurts".

This went on for nearly ten minutes. Really makes you feel helpless as a parent when you can't take away your screaming daughter's pain. All you can do is continue your game of charades and hope whatever it is resolves itself quickly. Those ten minutes can feel like an eternity though.

Sophie has made tremendous progress though. She has been using a lot of the phrases she has repeated echolalically, now independently and appropriately. And with attitude too. The other night I was trying to get her to tell her sister Emerson good night; after the second request, Sophie looked at me with one raised eyebrow and said, "I know". Even her "no" replies are getting stretched to two syllables as she injects some attitude. It's hard not to laugh sometimes.

We've also seen some great imaginative play as well. Santa brought our girls the Barbie Dream Townhouse, complete with sound effects and elevator. Sophia confiscated Emerson's Barbie and added it to her arsenal of Barbie dolls to play with. I absolutely love listening to her narrative of what's going on at the Townhouse. For example, Barbie 1 enters through the door and says,"Hello, it's nice to see you" to Barbies 2 through 4. I try to be as quiet as possible to avoid disrupting her play. I love every second of it. It's moments like these that make you forget about the frustrating or upsetting times. Just listening to her sweet little voice talking amongst her toys or singing her own improvised versions of songs is simply wonderful.