Zoe is Good: May 2011

Well, the Easter Bunny has come and gone and as April ends, I'm ready for my May flowers. Zoe actually got a jump on the flowers and took some really good Easter photos in field of wild flowers, more on those soon. But it's been a little over two weeks since we did our feeding study and Brooke and I felt like we were starting over from square one. Turns out, starting at the beginning is a very good place to start and we took a fresh approach to stuffing Zoe's face. Her feeding schedule now resembles that of a professional body builder, it seems like she's eating almost all the time, but she's doing well with it. The smaller bites approach just means we have to be more entertaining during meal time, but we're pretty entertaining people, just ask us. Also, Zoe's snacking pretty regularly and drinking A LOT more, she's getting the hang of her "coffee mug," I hesitate to call it a sippy cup since it much more resembles Mommy's travel coffee cups. Zoe's doing really well with more texture in her food, and all in all just not such an, "we suck at this" vibe in the house anymore. We've pretty much settled it in our minds that we'll need to move, when, where, and how are all up in the air. I'm starting to like the idea of finding a house currently under construction, with a floor plan we like, and then adding our own changes and needs to that. But I think it's too early to say how this will all end up. For our part, we've begun going through the house and examining what things need to be done in each room in order to sell. We even reorganized the kitchen today and got some things ready for what will promise to be a HUGE garage sale this summer.

Since I know no one here comes to read about me, I'll get back to our star. Zoe's really getting the hang of her stander and is using her hands to roll the stander around. She doesn't have it all down yet, and there's still some work to be done, but it's cool to see her moving like that. The stander, and movement in general will help her with both physical and mental development so this is a great thing. We recently saw a video of a young boy, Zach, with spina bifida who's great uncle had built a very small, very effective "wheelchair" out of bumbo. Anyway, I found Zach's Mom on facebook and we now have the contact info to see about getting Zoe one of these. I've included the link to the news story we saw, very uplifting to see things like this.

http://www.kcci.com/r-video/27036410/detail.html

Zoe's also working on a new trick. Her PT, Lynn, has Zoe working on sitting up from laying on her back. It takes a little work, but again, I'd challenge anyone to sit up from a laying position without using your legs... not so easy. She basically anchors her at the hip and Zoe will "walk" herself up using her arm as support. It's a lot of work for Zoe right now, but that's how she'll get stronger, so she does it. Two things are guaranteed when Lynn comes to visit, the first, Zoe will nap and sleep very well that night. The second, anything that needs to "work itself out" will and a diaper change will surely follow. Lynn is so lucky to experience that EVERY time she's here. We're lucky to have Lynn coming to the house once a week to work out lil stink bomb.

One last thing about Zoe, she's learned what can only be described as "The Look." We don't know where she got it from, but it's a chin tuck and look up thing that is super cute, but she knows it.... oh she is gonna be a handful!!!!