My Friend the Potty Seat

As Olivia approaches her Second Birthday, we have been thinking about potty training one day.  Of course, Olivia is not yet walking, so that puts a wrench in the plans, but we feel that it is not too soon to explore the idea of potty seats with Olivia.  So we have brought this small seat out of the closet and let Olivia start sitting on it.  She enjoys sitting on it fully clothed and looking at her books.  Next step will be to see what she thinks of sitting on it with nothing on her tush.   But we certainly have time.  We are also getting ready to have her in cloth diapers (at least sometimes) so that she really gets a chance to feel wet.  I think the Tushies disposables give her that WET feel. But I believe that cloth would give even more WET feel.  Olivia already tells me when she has poop in her diaper.  I see that is a good sign.  She signs diaper and then looks at me and says POO.   (At first I thought she meant Winnie the Pooh, but I learned differently.)  She also looks at the bear on her potty seat and make her bear sound (her sort of growling sound that she imitates us doing).

Olivia is not in Speech Therapy, but when we are at therapy she always seeks out the speech therapist who once did a swallow study on Olivia. We decided that Olivia is the stray cat. Once you feed her she will always follow you.  The nice thing is that Olivia keeps interacting with the ST and we keep hearing from the ST how well Olivia is doing.

The other thing that is neat at therapy these days is that Olivia has taken to a little 8 year old non-verbal girl confined to a wheel chair.  Olivia will always crawl into the room where this girl is having ST.  Olivia greets the little girl, and the two girls smile lovingly at each other. It is so heartwarming to see Olivia always put a big smile on this girl's face.  There have been times when this little girl is doing really demanding physical therapy and Olivia goes up to her and gets her to smile and take her mind off of her therapy and do better.  These are the moments that strengthen us through the tough times!