Getting to know the Gorillas. Taken at the Toledo Zoo, last week.

  • Ashwini's talking has been the focus of her monthly progress reports past few months. This month is going to be the same. Her vocabulary, making long sentences and use of proper grammar has increased by leaps and bounds. Here are a few examples:

    She is getting the hang of using past tense. Along with the correct use of verbs, she comes up with lines like “I throwed a ball”, “I tripped and falled in the playground”, “The birdie flied away”, etc.

    Same is the case with using plural forms of words: mouses, racoonses, ballses, etc.

    She remembers the words by their sounds. For the longest time, she couldn’t remember “Toledo zoo”. She used to call it tomato zoo, burrito zoo. Finally, after a week or two, now she remembers the word, toledo.

    Ashwini is starting to use “I” correctly. Earlier she used to say “my” when she meant “I”. There is still some confusion with gender-appropriate use of “him” and “her” when she is very excited and talking fast.

  • She knows the whole alphabet and tries to identify the letters when she sees something written. She can count to 10 and with some help, can go upto 20.
  • Ashwini likes to listen to music and songs. She demads music while she is in the car. When we watch "Thomas the engine" DVDs, she wants to fast forward the sotries and watch just the songs. While singing nursery rhymes or other songs, she is pretty good with getting the correct tune and tempo.
  • TV is slowly working its way into Ashwini's life. Along with Thomas, her current favorite TV show is "Blue's clues". Thankfully, her short attention span limits her TV watching to 15-20 minutes.
  • Her love for books continues. She can read out complete books without knowing how to read a single word. New books get memorized in a day or two.
  • It is becoming hard to distract her from whatever she is doing. If she is crying for something and I try to make her laugh, she would laugh with me but, switches back to crying in half a second. Old tricks don't work anymore. Have to come up with new ones.
  • On the food front, she still likes fruits and eats her vegetables without any problems. Lately, she has been ODing on mangoes. Also, these days, she wants to eat from our plate and wants to try whatever we are eating.
  • Ashwini can hop like a bunny from one end of the room to the other. Just a couple of months ago, it was a struggle for her to lift both her legs together while jumping. She also wants to do physical tricks like balancing on one leg and walking on the lines in a parking lot, etc.
  • No big news on potty-training yet. She can make some peepee in the potty, but, it doesn't always work. We still need to do a lot of work with this.
Here is one more photo with the Gorillas at the zoo...