Trying new things

Hailey is becoming Miss Adventurous! New places and activities are not as scary as they once were. I took Hailey miniature golfing a couple of months ago and she LOVED it! Hailey loves anything that has to do with a ball, so I was pretty sure she would like it. I showed her what to do once and she was sold. Most of the time, I was holding the club with her and helping her swing, but she did swing and hit the ball a few times on her own too!

We also went to our first Chuck E. Cheese party. I even took her on a trial run, so she could get an idea of what it was like. A weekday in the afternoon is certainly not the same as a Saturday, but it sure is loud in there even without a bunch of people! She played a couple of games, but many scared her off just by being noisy! She settled on skeeball and we played a few games of that. After ten minutes on our trial run, she signed "all done" So that was the end of that! The day of the real party, she went straight to skeeball and only stopped briefly to eat. We stayed and hour before she signed "all done!" No tears or meltdowns. I was so proud of her!

Over spring break, I took her to this wonderful place called Pretend City in Irvine. I highly recommend it to anyone with young kids. The name tells exactly what it is! Hailey had a blast, working as a cashier at Ralphs, picking apples and putting them in her basket, digging in the garden, rubbing sand between her hands at the beach (yes, my daughter touching sand and enjoying it!), sleeping in the grown up bed, answering emergency phone calls, crawling through a tunnel and more! We stayed for 2 1/2 hours! I could not believe she lasted that long! We brought her best buddy Claire from church along with us!

Hailey continues to amaze me every day. She is making such great strides! You cannot rush her into doing anything. She does things when she is ready. But when she is ready, watch out! She takes off with turbo speed!!!! We recently got a Winnie the Pooh play "computer" (very inexpensive at Target) and because we have been working so much on her name in the bathtub, Hailey can press all the letters in her name as we ask her for each letter without us showing her what they are! And in the bathtub, she finds the letters for her name amongst all the letters without help! If the bath tub is what we need in order to work with Hailey on speech and letters, let her stay in the bath all day long! :-)

Hailey has become much more open to new people and has realized that now that she can walk, she can go go go! We were visiting our friend Bev today at the Rehab hospital and she just kept walking out of the room and wandering down the hall with her mommy trailing behind her! She would peek into the other rooms and the best part was the people's faces lit up when they saw her! Some asked her to come in and say hi and she would smile and run away! That's Hailey for you, leaving smile on the faces of everyone she sees! She even let the nurse pick her up and was playing peek a boo with the nurses outside Bev's door.

We love Hailey so much and can't wait to see what she is going to do next! Til next time!