Samantha Updates

Samantha is amazing! She knows all her colors and counted to 19 yesterday in the car. She is so in tune with music. She'll hear a song a couple times and begin singing it the next time she hears it. She's also started making up her own songs typically to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. If she's paying or sitting in her car seat she may spontaneously start singing at the top of her voice! She's really into jumping and does a fantastic job at the dojo. She has her 1 and 2 blocks, a great kick, great horse stance and some pretty awesome push ups! It's really amazing how articulate she is and I admit that sometimes I forget she's only 2.

She has peed on the potty once but that has pretty much been the only interest in potty training. Oh, well, she'll get there! She loves Dominic and mimics every thing he does. She is incredibly strong willed. Some days that is very difficult! She loves picking out her own clothes.

We had her doctor appointment and it's official, she's still a peanut. She weighs in at 23 pounds (5%) and measures in at 33"(45%). Her height has gone up in percentile so that's great. If she follows her curve she should be around 5'4" which I think is perfectly respectable since that happens to be my height. LOL!

We also got a referral to an ophthalmologist. We've been bringing up her right eye at her 15 and 18 month appointments. You can see in the pictures that her right eye doesn't always follow her left eye. So yesterday we had our appointment and it went well. Her right eye is healthy which is great news. What's going on is that at some point her right eye started losing vision. The development of vision is based on equality. If vision is bad in both eyes your vision will still develop normally. Samantha's vision is unequal so it's not developing normally which is bad news for depth perception. So according to the doc, her left eye is farsighted to about a 2 which is normal for a kid her age, her right eye though is farsighted to a 6. So since your brain will only focus to one point, it's focusing to the 2 which is plenty for her left eye but not nearly enough for her right eye. So at some point she stopped using it. The doc says she's really not getting much of anything in her right eye. I didn't realize quite how bad it was until we did a tracking check and the doc had me cover her right eye. When I did that she followed the object with her left eye. When I covered her left eye though, it was like the object wasn't even there. She didn't even try to look at it. So we have glasses on order and they should be in next week. They are going to correct the vision in both eyes and she thinks that will start getting the eyes to work together again. If that doesn't correct it then we will also be patching the good eye to force her to use her bad eye. I really hope we don't get to that because it seems to cruel but I know it's for the best. The doc said at this age we can recover the vision in her right eye so hopefully by the time she's 9 or so she won't need glasses at all. Unless of course she follows our family at which point we'll get her over the farsightedness just in time to be nearsighted. LOL!

So wish us luck in keeping her glasses on. The doc wants at least 70% of the time with glasses on. I'm hoping her love of accessories will get us through it!