Picka Park

On Friday we went to visit G.G. in Nampa again. Always have a fun time there!

Saturday we went to visit Lizzie and Bruce and Rory.

For Father's Day I made some peppermint patties that Guy really enjoyed. I used this recipe. That evening we went to a park we hadn't been to in a very long time. We asked Nico to pick a park, and he started saying "guhba guhba". Turns out he was saying "pick a park", thinking that Picka was an actual Park. That was quite endearing. So we chose to go to a park that we hadn't been to in a while (a VERY long while). It's now called Picka Park, the actual name of it is Baggley, which sounds very similar to guhba guhba. See video for the Picka Park/guhba guhba dilemma.

While there, Nico started playing with a little girl a little older than him (4 or 5 maybe?) This girl adapted really quickly to Nico's lack of words. She heard his "dah dah" and started communicating back to Nico by saying "dah dah" just like he was. They had a lot of fun. When she would want to go to a new area of the park, she'd point and say "dah dah". Nico would do the same. She would also talk to him, and seemed to understand and act on his yeses and nos. It was so much fun to watch Nico interact with her. Guy and I are excited for this fall when Nico will get to be around a lot more children every day in preschool!

Today we went to the Botanical Garden with Allicia and Evie. We saw a lot of the garden this time and stayed for about an hour. Nico kept cracking up when Allicia would use her silly voice to say "Uh oh!"

This afternoon Nico had another speech therapy appointment. Last week Marcia and I were talking about activities that I can do with Nico to help strengthen the language part of his brain. One of the things is to play pattie-cake type hand clap games which require Nico to cross his left arm to the right and his right arm to the left. Also when we dance to music, to hold his hands and cross them. When I put a diaper on him, to cross his legs back and forth for him (he wears a diaper at night and at nap still). This apparently helps the left brain talk to the right brain. So I started incorporating movements like this into our play.

Last week Nico and I sat down at the table and put together some speech tools. We are working on B, M, N and P. The letter goes in the middle of the page and each vowel sound goes around the letter in a circle. We practice saying the letter with each of the vowels following it, and we put a small pink gem on each vowel after he says it. We also covered each page with stickers of words that start with that letter, and we practice saying each of the words. He puts a gem on each sticker as he says them. He can't say the whole word, so we work on the letter with the vowel sound following. For example, for "monkey" I have him say "muh". For "bat" I have him say "bah". He's been doing really well and knows the routine now. We only do two letters a day so as not to get them jumbled up too much in his head.

And yesterday, our walk in the rain. The sun came out right after I took this picture but Nico walked the whole way with the umbrella open and over his head :)

Video time..

p.s. As seen in video: New bike seat (new to us) is from Grandma Salisbury. Tried it out once, will have to update more about it later!