Creative Communicator and P**p on the Potty!

Shawn and I have been so impressed with Zoya's communication lately! She has such a hard time verbalizing what she wants/needs, but she very creatively makes her point known! She uses sign language quite a bit and we understand what she wants 95% of the time. Tonight we were taking a walk and she was in her little push car. She kept saying mama and moving her hands up and down in front of her-alternating arms up and down. I didn't know what she was saying. She kept doing it and I said, baby I just don't know what you're telling me. She then pointed to her foot and then pointed at the pavement. I said OOHHHH, you are signing WALK (and she was doing the correct sign for walk, but I had just never seen her do it before)! I said, you want to get out and walk? And she smiled huge and said YAH! and giggled. She is so proud of herself when she is able to communicate what she wants to us and even giggles with glee when we repeat back to her what she was trying to communicate! Zoya often makes up her own signs for things such as "upstairs" and then we have to play a guessing game trying to figure it out, but when we do, boy is it worth it...she gets so very excited! Zoya's expressive speech has been her biggest area of difficulty since coming home. I was pleasantly surprised to find out she tested around a 22 month level expressively in her recent evaluation. A lot of that has to do with how many signs she knows...that counts toward expressive language skills I guess. I feel so bad when she tries so hard to tell us something verbally and we just can't understand her...but thankfully she doesn't get too frustrated and finds another way to tell us! Although she continues to have difficulty with her speech, she has had a burst of words lately.  Some of her recent favorite words are "later" (pronounced laaay-llllurh), "dog" (sounds like duck), "up" (says uppa), yellow (llll-ehl-llll-ahhhh), purple (pur-bah), NO (changed from nah-nah to a very strong NO!), M & M (nem-en-em-en-em). I love hearing her little voice!

And onto the second part of the title....P**p on the potty!!! She was terrified to go on the potty and only ever went one other time a long time ago which I think was a pure accident....every time since, when I know she has to go I put her on the potty and she refuses to go. Then she will hide (or wait until nap time and go in her crib) and poop in her pull up. Tonight I knew she had to go so I put her on and bribed her with Signing Time-School and a cookie....nothing. So I took her off and she started going in her pull up, we ran to the potty and she refused to go more. Off the potty once more and she started going again, back to the potty and she starts crying and grabbing me looking terrified. I hugged her and comforted her (by the way why are kids scared to poop on the potty? LOL). She finally finished her business on the potty!!! She jumped up and grabbed me tight and then she looked in the potty and said "pah-pah" (for p**p) and started clapping!! We called daddy in to celebrate and you woulda thought we just won a million bucks! Oh the little accomplishments that are such big milestones. And to think at this time last year we were wide awake in the middle of the night stressing about our second court hearing a year ago tomorrow praying the judge would name us as Zoya's parents!! Who would have guessed a year later we'd be having a p**p celebration!!!

And to celebrate the day we were legally named Zoya's Mama and Daddy (a year ago tomorrow)...we are going to see ELMO LIVE!!! Oh boy! I hope she loves him as much in real life as she does on TV!!