Saturday, February 21, 2015

language development

I walked in the door yesterday and Iris ran toward me screaming gleefully, "Fuck and damnit!"

Sorry, grandparents.

After seeing my reaction (laughter and surprise), she said it again. And then she said, "Daddy said it." Evan had been working at the dining room table earlier that day and something hadn't been going so well. He didn't know that Iris was in the kitchen at the time...

Oops.

We're trying to completely ignore her now when she says it. Occasionally, Evan will say, "fork?" and she'll shake her head no. I think we just have to hope that she'll stop saying it after we don't respond for a while.

Iris has been parroting everything we say for a while, which is a lot of fun. It obviously has its drawbacks. One of the words she began parroting quite early on was "echo" as in echocardiogram.

We had a checkup with the cardiology team a week ago Friday. In the past she had been doing well with getting the echo. They take us into a dark room and Iris lies down on a bed and can watch cartoons while they put goop on her chest and use their ultrasound wand to get the images they need.

This time she wasn't interested in lying down and being still. I had to lie down with her in a very awkward position to have any chance of success. The first echo guy was mostly successful in getting all the images...except for the one that they really, really needed, which was the image of the dilation of the ascending aorta. So we had to try again with another echo gal. She also had a hard time getting it. Finally, a third lady came in and was able to get it very quickly. Phew.

The news is -- everything looks exactly the same. Her dilation is 21 mm, if I remember correctly. So we will go back in four months for another checkup. We were supposed to see our pulmonary specialist but she had to cancel, so the next specialist visit will be with ophtalmology in March. The pulmonary specialist will catch up with us then.

Although Iris didn't do so well with the echo, she did much better with this month's Synagis shot. We have been reading Elmo goes to the doctor a lot.




So on the day we were supposed to get the shot, I mentioned to her that we were going to go to the doctor for her shot. I haven't normally done this in the past, and I'm not sure it was the greatest idea. She sort of moaned/wailed, "No...." And then I reminded her that it would only hurt for a minute and that Elmo had to get a shot, too. I also told her we could get a sticker.

She basically objected to every part of the pre-shot stuff at the doctor's office. But she didn't cry, she just sort of whined, "No..." She finally started crying when the nurse brought the shots in.

The nurse let me hold Iris in my lap. It was awful, as always, but the thing that really saved the day was that I brought this little computer that my mom bought for Iris a long time ago. We barely ever let Iris see it much less play with it, so she was hooked right away.



I kept telling her what a good job she did and that Elmo had to get a shot, too. I taught her to say, "I got a shot." Except it comes out, "I got shot!"  

So...we're in a very awkward stage of language development. 

No comments:

Post a Comment