In the span of one day, without any coaching or prompting, Lyra has figured out how to:
1. Take her pants off…followed by her diaper(before today, had only taken her diaper off).
2. Take everything out of a laundry basket, flip it over, and then climb on top of it and stand up….and then fall off.
3. Climb out of her pack-n-play bed (first ever attempt)
…but she still can’t point at anything.
This is one of the few fine motor skills Lyra has not been able to master. She is supposed to be able to point at pictures in a book, and point to something she wants, and point to her body parts upon request. I’ve been really creative in my ideas to try and get her to point or poke at things. We read “The Grouchy Ladybug” and tried to get her to poke her finger in the holes. I bought one of those old fashion toy telephones that you have to actually put your finger in to “dial” the numbers. I even dropped cheerios inside of a “pop bead” so she’d stick her finger in it to get it out. Nothing has worked. She doesn’t point at things, she just pats. I haven’t been this frustrated and stressed out about a milestone since the fisher price star stackers. I thought she would never be able to put the star stacker rings on the stand. It seemed like it took forever.
As far as pointing to things she needs…well that is NOT a need as far as SHE is concerned. Lyra has figured out all sorts of ways to get what she wants, or in some cases, what she DEMANDS. She grunts or screams when she wants us to give her something. Then she shakes her head “no” while we play a guessing game trying to find out what she wants. Other times she just takes the “I’ll do it myself” approach. If she can’t reach a toy in her toy box, she’ll just climb in or if we won’t lift her up over the gate into the kitchen, she’ll just bust THROUGH the gate. When we used to have a gate at the bottom of our stairs, and Lyra learned how to just open the gate.
Maybe we just need better gates.
Obviously her gross motor skills are not a problem. She’s a pretty smart little turkey. I just don’t understand, considering her creativity and all of the things she’s managed to figure out, why she can’t just POINT her finger. I don’t even care if she points AT anything. I’d be happy if she just held one finger up in the air. She just needs to get that one finger isolated…preferably her index finger…not her middle finger.
Maybe I’ll just teach her to pick her nose…kind of hard to do that without isolating one finger…Ha Ha
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