Cruise Control

I was reading recent posts, and realised that its only been 3 weeks since Sheena learnt to get into standing on her own. She now cruises around the furniture, and stands up like she's been doing it for months. Hubby even found her at full stretch holding onto the edge of the big table for sheer life. We can only assume that she navigated her way there via a chair, but from where we were it didn't look easy.

Sheena has succumbed to conjunctivitis. She often gets watery eyes, that resolves itself within a few hours, as she's got a blocked tear duct that causes that from time to time, but this was something different. She is now on antibiotic eye drops, which should quickly do the trick.

We've been thinking about speech lately, and we're not having a lot of progress on that front. She will repeat things like coo-wee, or ohhh-dear, nana, dada, doe-doe, but that is about it. Her 'ta', is not consistent, and if she does it, it comes out as 'agh'. We were thinking how different life would be if she did chat away. Speech apraxia can be a factor both with Down Syndrome and Infantile Spasms. Its a speech disorder that interferes with a child's ability to correctly pronounce sounds, syllables and words. It is the loss of ability to consistently position the articulators (face, tongue, lips, jaw) for the production of speech sounds and for sequencing those sounds into syllables or words. The child does not have difficulty with non-speech activities performed with the muscles such as coughing, chewing or swallowing. However, the area of the brain that tells the muscles how to move and what to do make a particular sound or series of sounds is damaged or not fully developed. This make retrieving the 'motor plan' for saying a work difficult. We shall see. To me, it seems consistent with her so far.