Wampum

Eight years ago today, the birth and then the sudden change of plan -- to the NICU, where we learned how to change a shirt and diaper through the ports of an incubator without dislodging the distal oxygen monitor (foot) or the electro-cardiogram leads (chest), watched the millennium bug (Y2K bug) fail to crash the world while sipping sparkling non-alcoholic cider, and moved each day from the attention-hot center of high-risk babies towards the calm wall of safe babies and the car seat home.

A year and a month later and he and MB were back at Maine Med for a week that turned into five weeks and several near misses with death.

Jonah didn't want his cheeseburger yesterday as much as he wanted some of his sister's chicken tenders.

Jonah: Chicken tenders.

Gracie: You have to ask a question.

Jonah: I want a chicken tender for me please Gracie-wah with a fish on my head.

It was about three years ago that Sam's language really took off. He's still a dinosaur except when he's an elephant or anything else that might make a noise as large as a boy, but he is completely conversational and in the present, though no matter what the Singapore maths page reads (he's at 2A), he does every problem as addition -- correctly.

If Jonah gets to where Sam is today in three years, or more, we shall be very happy, but we've many, many big wins already -- still alive (rinse and repeat), self-{feeding, bathing, dressing, toileting, ...}, fine and gross motor, reading, writing, counting, rudimentary arithmetic, singing, place memory, thousand word vocabulary ... and we're working on expressing disapointment as an alternative to howling. Transitions are still a bitch.