Taking the Scenic Route

I think Zora is getting ready for that big language explosion that is supposed to happen about now.  She spent the day today on a fact gathering mission, pointing to everything and asking “uts at?”  (what’s that?).  It is so weird and cute.  She is also eating constantly.  She never eats terribly much at once, but every 20-30 minutes she wants something new to eat. She won’t eat much of any one thing either.  If she had cheese 15 minutes ago, she looks like you like you are a lunatic if you offer her more cheese.  She wants fruit (or pretzels, or cereal, or yogurt) but not if she has been offered that thing within the last few hours.  Variety is the name of the game with her right now.  lol.

One thing that was particularly funny was when I gave her a pickle.  She asked “uts at?” and when I told her “pickle”, she giggled and giggled and giggled.  She kept asking me what it was like she couldn’t believe something could be named “pickle”.  She looked over my shoulder to daddy to see if I was kidding her.  I don’t think she believed me.  lol

The thing that is really weird is that as incredibly demanding and tiring and high needs Zora is at times, it is so easy.  I understand now why people can have these huge families if none of them have some of the challenges Zane has.  Zora just picks stuff up by watching and listening, even the subtle things.  I can tell her to put something down from across the room and she knows I am talking to her and what I expect.  (whether she puts it down or not is a matter of behavior choices, not because she doesn’t understand)  Zane has to be shown every single thing very explicitly and hand over hand, over and over.  He has to be taught the same concept in multiple ways to make sure he is getting it the way others will assume he is getting it, to make sure he is generalizing concepts appropriately and not attributing things incorrectly.  (like kids that only speak when sitting because all their ST was done sitting down…they learned an unintended rule that wasn’t supposed to be that way)

This next little bit is going to sound weird, but here it is:  Zane is starting to have actual, honest-to-goodness temper tantrums.  Not meltdowns, but temper tantrums.  We are having to totally shift gears with him and move from comforters to disciplinarians.  I mean we have always been disciplinarians, and he has had tantrums before, but nothing compared to the frequency and intensity he is having now.  He is also doing ’sneaky’ things like holding things behind his back so ‘we don’t see it;  (it is cute because he doesn’t quite get the idea of how to really hide things yet…if he can’t see it, it can’t be seen as far as he is concerned.).  He is wanting something that he knows we will say no to, he holds it behind his back…and he even did a point and ‘look over there’ type thing the other day to distract our attention so he could put something sugary in the cart.  When we say no to something, he will run to the spot where he picked it up and physically block us from returning it to the spot.  He sat on a spot on the grocery store shelf trying to get us to buy him a blow up pool a few days ago.  (I wish we could have, but we didn’t really have the money to right now with the oral surgery coming up,)  Any inkling of possibly getting it went away because we had to shift gears to make sure he understands ‘no’ means ‘no’.  It is really a different experience to just be dealing mostly with discipline issues instead of first dealing with communication issues, then discipline issues.  There are still a lot of communication difficulties, but it is shifting.  It is a good shift and I am happy to see it, but a kid his size going through ‘terrible two’ type tantrums is difficult at best. 

The other thing that is really good, but taking some getting used to is his level of eye contact.  He has the most penetrating eyes, and we didn’t realize how fleeting eye contact during regular daily activity actually was until recently.  (we had that kind of eye contact at bedtime, or when there was something specific going on, but not for things like “I want chocolate milk please”.) It is a little startling to have him come up to us and look us straight in the eyes to ask for something, and then keep looking waiting for us to answer.  I love it, but I am not used to it yet. 

Both of them are just growing and changing so fast it is dizzying.  I just want time to stand still for a minute so I can get a breath in here and there.  lol.