The night owl has night vision

Cathy, Manolis and I have each noticed that Maria seems to see better in the dark than in the light. By "dark" I mean, for example, in the car while driving at night. If we hold something in front of her in a dimly lit room she sees it and grabs it immediately. In a normally lit room, it takes her a while to focus on it and she gropes randomly about until she happens to touch it. My guess is that her brain gets overwhelmed by all the other objects she can see in the background, and in the dark she can focus on one thing at a time.

There are a lot of skills that are coming along. She's getting better and better at holding her own bottle. The PT saw her in the crawler yesterday for the first time in a long while and was shocked by how well Maria is doing. Maria's biggest obstacle is *ahem* us. We are so quick to jump in and "help" that we don't give her the chance to figure stuff out herself. We keep having to remind ourselves that it's OK to let her struggle.

The dual-impairment specialist was talking to Cathy the other day and telling her all these things we need to be doing with Maria to help hone in on her subtle cues and learn Maria's way of communicating. What she was saying made sense, but it's another case of someone taking their tiny view of Maria and telling us we have to spend every moment on that particular aspect of it. Instead, we'll add it to the list of the other few hundred things we are supposed to be doing every day and it will get occasional attention when we can.

Maria was running a bit of a fever yesterday. We're hoping that it isn't yet another cold.