Little Miss Smartypants

Sophie is still having some major breathing/coughing issues and we are having a hard time figuring it out. She has been dealing with this for too long now and I feel so awful for her. We have not seen stridor like this in a very long time and she can't go longer than 4 hours without her ventolin neb treatments. She has hyperventolated a bunch of times now and it is very scary for us to see, and scary for her to experience. She turns purple and can't break the breathing rhythym until we change her position for her. On Monday night she also had a 5 minute seizure, we weren't terribly surprised, she is exhausted from dealing with all of this.

We are also thinking she is dealing with some brutal allergies that may be making everything worse. She is done her prednisone and not much has changed so we are going to start her on a liquid allergy medicine that we can give via her tube. Hopefully it will reduce her massive amounts of secretions. She is soaking every receiving blanket and then some that we have. I can barely keep up with the laundry, it is like her reflux days again. But I definitely prefer the clear saliva vs. barf. We are going to take her for allergy testing but can't get in for a few weeks.

Add to this 2 emergency vet visits with the dog which has included sedation, x-rays, enemas (ick), pain meds, prednisone and muscle relaxers, I am pretty much done. Insert sympathy music here.. lol.

In amongst all of this illness we have had some brilliance. My girl has been kickin butt with the Ipad. Not only that, but she showed us that she totally gets what is going on around her. Sophie's speech language pathologist came to the house for an appointment on Monday. We talked about her recent gains with the Ipad, but also how we feel that we are letting her down. We are not keeping pace with her learning and we need to do some big time catch up.

Sophie showed off a bit and it was awesome. I let Kim know that Sophie knows her body parts. We have been practicing head and shoulders, knees and toes. After the song I ask Sophie to touch my head, eyes, ears, shoulders, etc. and she gets every. one. right. She gets that arm up and hits me in the nose with a precision that is so full of effort by her that it brings me to tears.

Then we pulled out the photos. We challenged Sophie and she would not fall for our fake outs. She knew the names of every person we showed her a photo of. If we put a picture of Lucas in front of her and called him Zoe, she looked away, didn't smile and didn't touch the photo. When we used the right name she was all smiles and touched the photo while looking at it. She was able to do this with 2 choices in front of her as well. She got every. one. right.

We have a consult next month with Augmentative Communication services next month, 2 years ago they wouldn't even refer her to the program. Let's just say that we aren't going to take no for an answer this time.

Sophie knows her stuff and I can't wait to do some braggin'.