Eating More; Clicking a Mouse

Typically, Demi has a strong aversion to fruit. She'll eat a sliced green pepper in a heartbeat; but she'll have a conniption if confronted by an apple slice or an orange wedge.

Dana (3yo) has taken to eating a small cup of pineapple wedges as a snack. I've offered them to Demi many times. "No, tank oo," she replies.

Today, she surprised me by stealing the pineapple wedges away from her sister. I made them share and she readily took as many as I gave her. After that, I asked her if she still wanted a banana like she had last night (again, unheard of). "Yeah," she says.

"Well, OK!" I think. Two bonus foods in one day! :)

After the pineapples and banana, Dana wanted to play a Dora game on the computer. Neither Dana nor Demi has shown great skill at maneuvering a mouse enough to play a game. But we tried again, with me planning to hand-over-hand the mouse movements to gradually show them how it's done.

Early on, Dana actually got the hang of moving the mouse to where she wanted, but she had difficulty clicking. Then Demi wanted to try. Demi couldn't move the mouse correctly to save her life, but she could readily click it correctly.

So, as we played the game, we came across Dora's Buggabugga Baby friends and the girls wanted to play that over and over again, particularly Demi. Not wanting to impede this unusual desire to do something with her hands, I readily helped Demi play the game over and over again. She never wanted to try moving the mouse, but she got pretty good at clicking at the right time to get the Buggabugga babies back in their carriage. This was a first for persistence!

Demi also seems to be more social, as well as socially aware. Rather than spending so much time in her own world, where she doesn't care what other people are doing, she's aware of where other people are and what they're doing, usually wanting to go and join them. Daddy was in the garage working out this morning; Demi readily wanted to go with Dana to see what Daddy was doing.

While she was out there, she started riding her bike! Bonus! Demi has been doing pretty well on her trike for a while, so we got her a small bike (with training wheels, of course), which she refused to ride ... until we got rid of her trike. Now she'll ride her bike, although she still needs a lot of practice. Dana is well ahead of Demi in the bike-riding department, but hopefully not for too long!

Demi is now on 3 drops, 3x/day, Natural Cellular Defense (cellular zeolite), fish oil (10-15ml, 2x/day), and Juice Plus+. She's had no therapy for the last two weeks, but we'll back at it full blast this week, probably adding some new stuff to the mix to help stimulate her blossoming brain. I'm looking forward to good progress!