She is not all tantrums and stink-eyes however. In fact, she is a very sweet, smart little toddler that happens to have gotten an early case of the Terrible Twos or "TTs" as we call them.
Somehow, she slows down enough to pick up some words and work on her language. We've dramatically reduced how much we are taking her to speech therapy. Since she was hitting all of her milestones, the speech therapist thought it was okay to go to a quarterly check-in. We just went this last week and Lisa, her therapist, was happy to see her starting to link some things together like "shoes on" or "I got it."
Her only concern was that when she tries to form some words, Vivian pulls in her bottom lip instead of pushing it out. So we need to work with her on making the "ooooo" sound like in "who" and "peek-a-boo." She suggested we do things like have her blow bubbles and try to blow a cotton ball across the table.
Here she is reading one of her favorite books while Hudson helps from the sidelines.
Vivi reading with Hudson
One of the other really big developments is that she no longer has to wear her pilot caps! She'd been doing a really good job at home of not pulling out her hearing aids. So, about a month ago we decided to try having her not wear her hat to daycare, and voila! no more hats! I love seeing her cute little curls and getting to do hair-do's.
She's on her third pair of ear molds now. In March, we decided that the current pair were getting a little loose in her ears so we went in to the audiologist. She did great getting the pink goo squirted in her ears. It took a few weeks for them to come in but now they are nice and snug in her ears. This may have been a contributing factor to her keeping them in without her hats.
At the same appointment, we tried a round of "behavioral hearing testing" where we go into this little sound-proof room and face a big mirror. The audiologist plays or says sounds into a microphone that play on either side of the room. The idea is to see if Vivi is turning her head to the sounds. Now, as I explained before, this girl does NOT like to sit still. So, sitting in a tiny little room on our laps with not much stimulation is torture for her. She only lasts about 5 minutes, so I'm not sure how good of a test result we are getting.
All-in-all, things are going well for this little lady. I am excited for her to get to the age where she can do hearing tests like dropping a ball in a box when she hears a sound. It will be nice to get a better idea of what she is actually hearing. In the meantime, we'll all try not to go deaf ourselves as she works her way through her defiant stage!
