Adele is 3!

Today is Adele's 3rd birthday. The last three years have flown by and she has really changed and learned a lot in the last year. It's been wonderful to watch her learn and grow. Here's an epic look back over her last year.

One year ago in December she had just been given a walker by her physical therapist and was practicing walking with that. She was not taking any steps alone at all.

She was just starting to talk more and was a happy, easygoing little girl, who didn't really like to sleep.

By January though, she was starting to insist on having her own way in decisions involving clothing...

February came with a visit from my Mum and Adele took her first unassisted steps!



And discovered that she liked to make art...

In March she read books and rode on her tricycle for the first time.

Her legs were too short for the pedals but she did a great job balancing on there while I pushed her around.

In April she finally started earning her keep...

And in May lots of fun things happened!

Fiona and Adele started becoming friends who could do fun stuff together...

And Fiona taught Adele about the wonderful world of all things creepy crawly.

Adele practiced building with duplo and making more art...

And in the same day she learned how to walk across the wobbly bridge and walked all the way home from our local restaurant holding my hand (more videos here). 

Adele also started speech therapy every two weeks to help her with some sounds she was having trouble with.

In June we enjoyed the warm summer days and Adele got over her fear of carousels. After this photo was taken ;-)

In July we hung out with friends and family, and met cousin Virginia...

And she generally exhausted herself with fun!

In August we went corn picking and Adele ate the freshest corn ever...

And became obsessed with hugging animals.

Both girls started at a wonderful new preschool that has 1/3 special needs kids and 2/3 regularly developing, so she can have some extra help where she needs it but also gets to hang out and do everything the other preschoolers are doing. So far she absolutely loves it, and is very happy there.

In September my parents visited and while they were here Adele figured out how to stand up in the middle of the floor. This has been (and still is) a big challenge for her.



We also all went to the zoo to visit the dinosaurs and in this video you can see how well she is doing with her (new, shiny, 4 wheel) walker, and the improvement in her speech!



In October she had a blast celebrating Halloween - decorating cookies, carving pumpkins and trick or treating with her cousins.

And of course we spent some time raking, throwing, and jumping in leaves.

Adele began to insist on walking longer distances without holding a hand or using her walker. On one occasion she just stopped and toddled off, leaving her walker behind. She has been doing this in bare feet too, which is tricky. Once she gets going she has a hard time stopping and she falls a lot but is undeterred. She still has a hard time getting up on her own but during the last week she's been getting up unassisted more and more when she doesn't have her braces on. Ben tells me that she managed to do this with her braces and shoes on for the first time yesterday so she's making great progress! Here's a video of her walking around in Best Buy.



As if that wasn't enough, October was the month that Adele was day-time potty trained!! We took a long weekend when the girls were off school for conferences and just went for it. The first day was messy but the rest of the weekend was awesome, and she has not looked back. I can't even begin to tell you how happy I am to be almost diaper free!!

November was another month of fun. In November she went from walking to dancing!

Here she is doing some dancing. The girls heard this song on the radio and loved it. They both sing along. Don't blame me :-/



At Thanksgiving dinner she graduated from the high chair to a big girl stool at Grandma's house. She hasn't fallen off yet :-)

And that brings us to December. So far she has had a birthday! We celebrated on Sunday with Ben's family and my friend Emily (who brought a delicious cake!).

She got a Dora doll and backpack from Grandma and Grandpa and a doll stroller from the Tennants, and the obvious next step was to put Zak the rat in the backpack and then take him for a ride...

Today she took cupcakes to school to share with her friends and then we picked up Daddy from work and went to the mall for some dinner and fun. Her favourite foods are rice and broccoli so we found somewhere that had those foods, menus you could colour on, and happy hour beers, and everyone was had a great time. The tropical paradise theme was just an added bonus.

After that the girls each chose one ride and we headed for the carousel and the Diego rescue bus. 

And then home for cupcakes. 

And that's it! A year of Adele. She has worked so hard this year and is doing so well. She is a lovely little girl who continues to be happy and smiley and although she has to work extra hard in many physical ways, she never gives up, she just keeps going. When she manages something new, or difficult she looks at us with a big smile on her face and Ben, Fiona and I cheer for her like crazy. She loves animals, both furry and buggy, and is very creative. She has also found her voice in the last year and talks much more in conversation, and in standing up to Fiona which is a good thing! She has opinions and she wants to share them. She cares about Fiona very much and sticks up for her and worries about her if she is upset. She is quick to share, and has a large, kind heart. 

I re-discovered this song a few weeks ago and in the past it's been a nice song, but now when I hear it I can't help but think of Adele. So if you've made it this far, here you go :-)

We are so very lucky to have this sweet little love in our lives and could not be more proud of her. Happy 3rd Birthday Dell!

Now please stop waking up at night. Seriously. You're three now! You can do this!!

Halloween 2012

So most of you (or those of you who do the facebook anyway) are probably aware that Adele had a scary (for me) issue on Sunday and had to go to the emergency room. She had a rectal prolapse which basically means that the inside of her butt fell out. Yeah, really. It was not fun.  Luckily it seems that it was most likely caused by constipation and having general muscle weakness anyway, and by treating the constipation it should hopefully not happen again, but we're still waiting for the blood test results to rule out a variety of much worse possibilities. She seems to have recovered from the experience though I'm still anxious every time she goes to the bathroom! In more positive news she has been working on potty training and is doing a really incredible job! She's a superstar.

So after that was this week which contained today - the most wondrous of all days - Halloween. Fiona has been extremely excited for Halloween and wanted to decorate and carve pumpkins and watch scary stuff on TV and anything else halloween-y. So we did. On Monday we made cookies, and on Tuesday we frosted them...

And decorated them...

 

And then we carved some pumpkins... the girls made some delightful faces as they scooped out the guts!

 (Adele is refusing to let me remove her hospital bracelet and I don't care enough to fight her on it)

Fiona designed the face and I wielded the tools. The girls were pretty happy with their creation!

Spoooooooooooky!

Then today was the big day! The girls got to wear their costumes to preschool and that was very exciting. Then this evening we headed down to Apple Valley to trick or treat with the cousins.

On the way there is this house... we pass it a couple of times most days and the girls are fascinated by it. They call it the spooky house. After preschool we stopped and got out of the car to have a closer look at all the spooky stuff. Fiona was nervous but Adele reassured her and told her there was no monster. This guy has been setting up for weeks and goes all out with the creepy decorations including tableaus of real flattened roadkill squirrels being pecked at by real taxidermied birds. I would not be in the least surprised if he has the corpse of his mother in his basement. We didn't linger long as Fiona was becoming increasingly agitated, but the amount of scary stuff packed in there was impressive!

The sun set while we were driving and I took this picture from the bridge over the Minnesota river on 77. 

Then... trick or treating time!!

The whole gang...

Adele waked the entire way, including up a large hill. At one of the houses there was a guy in a really impressive home made robot costume handing out candy and as soon as Adele spotted him she froze and refused to go any further. She squeaked out a "no, thank you"  when he took off the head and offered her a treat and backed away immediately. She's still talking about the "scary robot that was too scary".

Fiona somehow remembered that I love almond joy (bountys with a nut on top for the Brits) and she specifically picked one out to share with me. As soon as she got it at the house she was at she showed me and told me about it. She's awesome. 

Happy girls!

In the end Fiona changed her mind about the mermaid costume and wore her cat costume from last year. She really loves that cat costume!

We had a great time! Happy Halloween everyone!

Visitors, Dinos and Adele's latest trick!

My parents are visiting this week and we've been doing all kinds of fun things. Today we went to the Zoo to check out the DINOSAURS! I thought the girls might be a little freaked out by the moving and the roaring etc., but they thought it was great. I didn't bring my camera because I had enough to carry but here's a picture of Fiona sitting on the one in the playground area...

(This was a special one, the animatronic ones were definitely not for sitting on!)

And the girls posing as a dino-riding, club waving cave-person... totally historically accurate!

Than later we went to Grandma and Grandpa's house for swimming and picnic dinner. The swimming was wonderful because it was a HOT, HOT day. And the dinner was great because it involved Grandma's potato salad. YUM.

Later, Adele decided she was ready to start standing up on her own! Last week when her physical therapist was over she was super happy with the progress Adele had made over the last month with walking and we made a plan to work on teaching her to stand up in the middle of the room so if she is walking and falls over she doesn't need to crawl to something to pull up on. Well I guess Adele was paying attention because today she did it!! She doesn't have her braces on (and that makes it easier because she can move her ankles more freely without them) but this is a really great achievement nonetheless! She was so excited about it that she did it a bunch of times and it's fun to watch it get easier and easier the more she tries. Here's a video!!

Look at that big smile on her face! 

I guess she waits for Granny to be here to hit the major milestones we're waiting for because she was here for the first unassisted steps last time :-)

My parents are here until Sunday so maybe by then Adele will be hopping and dancing a jig ;-) Who knows what else she could do with that kind of motivation!

Adele's latest achievements

Recently Adele has been more insistent on using her walker or walking and holding my hand to get around rather than crawling. She will hang onto my leg and yell "want to walk!". This weekend we went to the park and she walked all the way across the wobbly bridge a bunch of times even though she was scared to at first and Fiona was not making her task any easier!



Later that evening we went to a restaurant near our house for some fries and she decided that she wanted to walk home instead of riding in the stroller and walked almost .4 miles. It was amazing!



She is so determined and proud of herself!

December Events

I'm sure you'll all agree that December was a busy month! Well it flew past here and now it's January already. Happy New Year everyone!

We had a lovely month - my awesome cousin Catriona and equally awesome sister Ali both visited and Ali stayed for Christmas.

Gingerbread houses were constructed by Ali and Fiona...

Christmas photos in cute matching dresses were attempted, with partial success, but they never made it into christmas cards...

We performed a dramatic enactment of How the Grinch Stole Christmas in the annual Hamer talent show. There were many other spectacular talents on show this year too... here's 10 minutes of the most impressive talent showing you've seen.

Santa Claus stopped by and brought Fiona the backpack she wrote to him to ask for. She had what she described as "the best day ever" opening presents from all the kind and generous friends and family we have. Adele had fun too but was a little overwhelmed.

Adele had a big assessment at Shriners, which is an amazing hospital for children specializing in (among other things) orthopaedics. We are lucky enough to live very close by and they provide services for free to people who do not have insurance or whose insurance doesn't cover the treatment they need. She's been diagnosed as having mild cerebral palsy which almost exclusively affects her left leg, and we're going to be doing physical therapy there two times a week in addition to the PT we do once every 2 weeks through the Minneapolis schools early intervention program. There's no reason she won't learn to walk, it'll just take a while, but all the extra PT will be great.

We headed to the U.P. for New Year and stayed in a log cabin in the woods with some friends.

Minneapolis has been eerily warm and almost totally snow-less so far this winter, so Fiona was very excited to stomp around in the snow up there.

Adele doesn't like to wear her mittens so didn't last long but enjoyed rolling around in it and observing for a while.

We had a great time hanging out with friends, and Fiona and Adele loved making two new friends of their own.

Today (and I did initially plan to just write about this before feeling a need to summarize the whole month) Fiona requested that I paint her fingernails (for the first time). She noticed a girl in her class at daycare had hers painted and asked me to do hers for her. She asked for red, which, luckily, is one of the two nail polish colours I own (the other being clear) so I painted them for her. I'm guessing that this is only the beginning of many requests for things she'd like because her friends have them...

She was so happy she kept bouncing around and it was very hard to get a picture in focus!

So that's the excitement for today. And who knows what tomorrow might bring!