My Franny

Just an update on Franny. She has become our little opera singer. She gets very carried away with her Disney princess soundtrack (yes, Jill- the same one you gave us so long ago!) When she's singing "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid, she even gets down and the floor and acts out the scene just like she's Ariel. Bobby and I beam with pride everytime she belts out the lyrics. Bobby says she gets her singing voice from me, which I choose to take as a compliment (knowing full well it is SO NOT.)

We see her verbal skills and her vocabulary increasing all the time. The other day she came in and said, "Sophie, I like your jammies!" Or she'll be talking about her dress and say, "It's SO PRETTY!"

I enjoyed seeing Jenny McCarthy on Oprah a while back. (BTW, Jenny McCarthy was so annoying when I was in high school. I couldn't stand her, now I think she's a rockstar for taking such a huge interest in her son's recovery and staying so upbeat about it.) I think it's great that Oprah is taking such a big interest- she's had several shows focusing on autism lately- and I love that someone with so much notoriety like Jenny McCarthy has a son. All this attention has to be good and I think it will eventually lead to more time, more research, and more mysteries unraveled.

Jenny McCarthy mentioned that when her son was very young and before he received his diagnosis, she would notice that he would never play with the toys in his playroom. We had always noticed that when Franny played with toys, she'd become fixated on one or two of them and wasn't very interested in the others. When we moved into our new house, we decided to put the girls in one room and use the third bedroom as a playroom. When we first had Sophie, I thought about having more kids and how we would probably always need to make sure that Franny had her own space and her own bedroom. I've talked to other mothers who have said that was really important for their child, so they could go have a quiet place where they could stim and just have some quiet time. I started to realize however that Franny was never using her bedroom for alone time, so we started to think a playroom might be a good idea. It's made a huge difference with her toy play at home. Who knew? But often she'll come up to Bobby or me and say, "I want to go room." We both know that means that she is ready to play!