Day 17: My First Q&A! (Part I)

I'm so excited to be posting my first Q&A!  Thank you to everyone who left questions for me on Friday's post.  I had to do some serious thinking about some of them, too.  I'm going to have to break this into two posts, seeing as I'm rather long-winded in my answers... 

It was a little bit of a problem that I'd disabled the right-click function in Blogger, though, as I couldn't then copy the questions directly into this post, but eh, I'll get over it.  Gotta love alt-tab. 

Q. How did you grow out Sammi's hair so gorgeously?  Were you ever tempted to cut it?  Did she resist the clips and holders and stuff?

A.  Sammi's hair is really a story of how my resistance to a preconceived notion of mine about Ds just got out of control.  I had wondered, when she was born, if kids with Ds had to have that institutional bowl cut that it seemed I saw in my memory bank of old photos.  I thought if I could have her hair long and natural, I could smash that particular stereotype and ensure she'd have a more "normal" childhood or something.  So I just never cut it.  Ever.  Not even a trim.  Actually, when she was born, some of the OB's first words were, "Wow, I've never seen a white baby with that much hair!"  I was never really tempted to cut it, although I do receive some pressure from time to time from other family members (thanks for the haircut scissors you brought over two weeks ago, Mom...I get the hint...LOL).  Correction...I am now tempted to cut it a little bit to bring it back to her waistline.  I asked her last week if she wanted me to cut her hair, and she said no and got upset.  Oops!  What have I done?  Oh, about the clips and stuff...at about 3 months I had to use a single clip to keep her hair back off her forehead.  Once she discovered that she could pull the clips out, which was a brief phase, I just had to be persistent and keep putting them back in.  Eventually she was resigned to the idea that she had to live with them.  I can only use very specific hairbands and clips in her hair because so many others get tangled or caught, and trust me, I have tried them all.  It's just been a lot of trial and error.  Sammi doesn't love having her hair done, but she's pretty good with it unless I'm trying to pull a hairband out of her hair from too close to her head.  Ugh, I'd hate that, too!  I usually do her hair while she's eating breakfast and watching TV in the living room in the mornings.  I do miss being able to have her hair in pigtails or a pony tail instead of braids (having her hair down poses certain, uh, logistical issues when it comes to sitting on the toilet, and it also gets pretty tangled), but I also just love the braids, too!  I think the day is coming, though, when I need to bite the bullet and take it all up a bit...

Q.  When did Sammi start talking and did you start sight words (etc.) before she started talking?  I think I've waited too long, %^&* linear thinking.  I think we're just going to navigate around the speech & dive in visually.  Your experience?

A.  This is a great question, and I'll answer this before I get into the reading questions (next post).   Sammi actually started talking (relatively) early, with her first spoken word @11 months (more).  By 15 months she had about 15 spoken words and no signs (we'd never introduced them at that point), but then, while she kept those words, she stopped learning new ones.  At 18 months we realized we needed to do something to bridge the gap until she started learning new words again, so we introduced a few signs, which really helped.  At 21 months, when she started walking, her language began to take off again and we eventually dropped the signs soon afterwards.  (Btw, this phenomenon is fairly typical of our kids with Ds...they lose traction in one developmental area while concentrating on mastering another, then explode with new skills once that other goal is met, like walking.)  We didn't actually introduce sight words, other than the ones that accompanied the pictures on some baby-sign-language flashcards we had, until this past year (also to be discussed in my next post about reading).  Please keep in mind that children don't need to be able to speak to be able to read.  I saw some videos last year of children with Ds who were learning to read and using signs to communicate what they were reading.  So sight words can be introduced at any time, with or without verbal skills.  And it's never too late, either.  Learning is an ongoing process.  When asked by parents when they will know what their young child with Ds will be capable of, Samantha's geneticist tells them, "at the end of their life."  You can never know what they'll be capable of - there is no time/age when learning new things just stops.  They will always learn new things, provided the opportunities and tools.

Q. Have you thought on having another daughter/son???  :)

A.  Omg, this was probably the hardest question of all!!!!  Wow.  We had only ever wanted one child to begin with.  And when Sammi was born and for the first 3 years of her life, I felt like there was no way I could ever love another child as much as I love her, and I couldn't ever ask her to have to share love with another child.  As she grew older and more mature, I knew that actually, she could handle that, and would probably love to have another child in the house, but financially, we're not in a position to have another child (through adoption), from the standpoints of having one of us stay home from work again, daycare costs, future costs, etc.  Also, perhaps a bit selfishly, we're not prepared to have another child.  Sammi's at a really easy age right now, and is just so much fun to do things with.  We're enjoying so much the ages and stages she keeps growing into, and love not having to be distracted from any of it!  Hope that made sense...

Q.  hmmm.  do you mind if I steal this idea?

A.  Oh, of course!!  I stole it from someone else, so hey, go for it!  Maybe someone should write some sort of Blogger Code one day, something that outlines all the (previously) unwritten rules of blogging, including the one about it being perfectly fine to steal post ideas.  Eh, nothing's sacred...

Okay, I've written quite enough for now.  The rest of the questions will be answered in my next post (or the one after that), as I feel that they'll require a lot more room and time to answer.

2BContinued...