Hiatus over?

Wow.

What has happened during those short four months?

Our only real 2012 family photo.

We left our tiny two bedroom unit close to the city and moved to a large three bedroom house half an hour from the city. Best move ever. Our house is awesome as long as you ignore the leaking roof and the little plumbing issue.

Our old unit block and our new house.

Little miss started walking around ten months old. Running and climbing at eleven months.

Climbing on my favourite chair

Her teeth have been giving her hell and she'll chew on anything, eat everything.

The kids love biltong, perfect teething snack.

She can say 'dada', 'mama', 'hi', 'icky', 'ta' and a lot of garble. She is a lot of hard work and if she were our first child, she'd be an only child. A very loved only child.

Couch cuddles.

The baby boy is almost gone.

Rock on!

He's going to daycare three days a week with soccer on one day. He loves soccer and is good at it too. His speech is better but still needs some work. He has a handful of extremely clear words which is so exciting. Speech therapy is starting back up soon so hopefully his speech improves in time for prep next year.

Dinosaur hair.

He is still obsessed with dinosaurs and cars. His room is a shrine to both. Sometimes the lounge room too.

Some of his dinosaur toys.

I got some lovely new skates (thanks dad). They are beautiful Riedell 495 boots, Roll Line Mistral plate with my 88 Atom Jukes. So pretty and skating is so much easier.

New skate love.

I gots me a derby wife at Rollecon AU. She's amazing and so talented.

Ginger Paws and Miss Maims sweaty after a Quadzilla jam skating session.

Rollercon was awesome. Learning from such talented skaters was such an honour. Smarty Pants is amazing and I love her coaching style, she includes everyone and explains every drill so well.

Being a total fan girl with Smarty.

The mister is amazing at skating. He's fearless and I'm highly jealous.

Air!

Sesame is turning one. Sorta. As she is a leap year baby we have decided to celebrate her birthday on the 1st March.
The mister and I will celebrate our five year anniversary with a week away in Melbourne for Formula One. So excited!
Lufflump is turning four. Too soon.

Speech Therapy

Lufflump has been going to speech therapy once a week for a few months now and has definitely benefited not only his life but everyone around him too.

He started only being able to say gobbly-goo that kind of sounded like proper words and is now talking in sentences with either proper words or very close to it. His personality really shines now and he is even more cheeky.

Making exaggerated sounds

Currently his favourite sentences are;
'your turn' and he gets extremely angry if you don't have a turn at whatever he wants you too.
'no, I don't like it' or 'no, I don't want to', he seems to say this more and more.

Our lovely speech therapist teaches lufflump to sign for certain words and also to say the word. He's on fire with them. 'More' is definitely his favourite, 'finish' is used appropriately and 'milk' is his newest one which we are all still trying to remember to use.

I've noticed his tantrums are less now that he can tell us what he wants, what is wrong or right. It's fantastic how quickly he's cottoned on. He still has a lot of work to do and I think he needs to slow down as when he does the sounds are correct but when he rushes they get mixed up or missed.

I wish we'd done this sooner but now is better than never and maybe earlier wasn't the best time for lufflump like now seems to be.

Check out those lips!

Let's Talk Speech

Lufflump had his speech therapy assessment this morning.

Since I made the appointment last week I've been nervous and dreading it. Last night I wasn't going to go, just the mister and lufflump. This morning I decided I had to go, it wasn't about me at all. I had to suck it up and get over my anxiety and go for lufflump. And I did.

Lufflump doesn't talk clearly or in English. He has his own language, says the same 'word' over and over again for the same thing. It was cute when he was younger and we thought he'd grow out of it. He's three next month and we've stopped being in denial that he needs help.

This morning we all bundled into the car and drove in peek hour to the therapists' office. Neither the mister or I knew what to expect.

I was worried that lufflump wouldn't interact or listen to them. I didn't need to worry, he interacted with them I say 'them' because we had two therapists as one was learning straight away. They had some animal finger puppets that he played with straight away. He matched them, got the animal they asked him to and made all the correct animal noises. He couldn't properly say what they were but tried his hardest.

He did get bored with pointing at pictures and playing with cups and spoons. There were cars, a monster and a cool bouncing bee to play with instead. We did have a meltdown when he couldn't take the bouncing bee or Ben 10 monster home but as soon as we dropped him off at daycare that was all forgotten.

We haven't received the assessment yet but we are going back on Monday for weekly visits. They said he has obvious speech delays but it's good that he can make the sounds he needs to, he just needs to learn how to connect those sounds to form words. Other than that he's more than fine.

Tonight, after daycare, I've been making sure to ask him more open questions and sound words out. He tries. He tries so hard and sometimes he says the word perfectly (it was 'star' tonight) but then reverts back to saying it his way.

Over the weekend, he has daycare tomorrow, we'll make sure to sit down and try and do what they did this morning. Sit down and make certain sounds. Say the ABCs over and over again. Bring out the flash cards. Watch TV and talk about what's happening. Ask open questions. Hopefully on Monday we'll be armed with some homework to try and get him forming proper words.

Such a boy