Come on Sophie, dance!

This post is really more for me than anyone. I want to get some stuff written down about Franny's progress, so feel free to skip this if you don't have time! We've had Franny on the GFCF (gluten-free casein-free) diet for 2 weeks now and I've noticed a few changes in her, both positive and negative. The positive changes seem subtle to me, but I'm no expert, so they could indeed be very big changes. Several weeks ago Bobby and I were talking and he commented that as proud as he is of all of Franny's huge improvements in the past 9 months (since we started Franny's intervention), it seemed odd to him that he had never had a conversation with his 3 1/2 year old daughter. (At the time she wasn't asking or answering questions. She could use language to make requests or label objects or actions, but no real conversations were happening.) I had never really thought of that until he mentioned it. Well, this morning at the gym when I was picking her up from babysitting, there was a little boy there who was upset about something and he was crying a little bit. I looked at Franny and her little eyebrows furrowed deeply (she gets that from me) and then she looked at me and we had our first conversation. Here's what was said:

Franny: "What's wrong?"
Me: "Oh, he's just sad."
Franny: "Is hurt?" (He is hurt?)
Me: "I don't think so, just sad."

Kind of cool. I should mention that earlier this morning Sophie was upset that I put her down and walked out of the room and I prompted Franny to ask her, "what's wrong?" Even so, she came up with that question spontaneously this morning, without any help from me, and I think that's some good progress.

Franny's first and only sentence for a long time was "I want ______ (rice cakes, chips, Shrek, diaper change.)" In the past couple of weeks since we started the diet, Franny has been starting that sentence with "Mom" or "Dad." We didn't prompt that at all- she just started doing it. We think it's pretty cool. I should add that she's gotten pretty lazy with the "I want" part of it and it sounds more like this:
"Mom, a sicko sicko go diaper change." She's so funny. For a long time "sicko sicko sicko" was all we ever heard come out of that child's mouth!

Later this morning Franny asked if she could watch Shrek 2. I've been trying to get video of her dancing to the beginning of the movie when Counting Crows is singing, "Accidentally in Love." She knows most of the words and does this really adorable dance. I tried to catch it on video yesterday and when she saw the camera she froze and hid behind Bobby. Today when the song came on, she pushed me out of the room. I tried to peek in at her from the living room, but even while she was dancing she kept an eye on me and cried or said "Stop" until I gave her some privacy. She was embarassed and didn't want me to watch her dance! I thought that was funny. At another point in the movie when there was music, Franny said, "Come on, Sophie, dance!"

We've seen a little bit of a regression with her behavior since we implemented the diet- not sure what that's about. Some thoughts I've had is she's not really happy about such a huge change in her diet and we're seeing some negative behavior due to withdrawals. I could make a case for that. Also she seems to have some sort of infraction (somehow gets a bit of food with dairy/gluten), every other day or so, so we're still trying to get the hang of it and maybe her little tummy is already reacting to the foods. Maybe it has nothing at all to do with diet and she is just frustrated that her whole routine is off this week because school is out. Who really knows, but I have noticed that she's getting agitated easier and a few of the negative behaviors we hadn't seen for a long time are coming back. I think we'll pull through just fine, though. This isn't the first time I've seen her negative behaviors increase and I'm sure it won't be the last.

Another thing I wanted to share is Franny's word for swimming is "shrimpin." It's pretty cute. In fact, I actually have to get going now, because the four of us are going to go do some "shrimpin."