Happy New Year!

We had a nice quiet New Year's Eve--except for Maria's not sleeping. She had several good sleep nights, but the past 3 (and tonight looks like another one), instead of sleeping, she fusses, pants, and kicks her legs. It's like she's uncomfortable, but nothing seems to help. Sometimes she calms down with food, other times she pushes it away. Same with juice, milk, leaving her alone, being with her, nothing works consistently. I'm not aggressive enough with the melatonin, I don't like to give it to her after about 9pm; even so, one night I gave it to her at about 8, it took more than an hour for her to go to sleep, then she only slept until 1:30am and was up until 5am. As my sister and I often say, it's a good thing Maria was born to me and not someone else who requires more sleep than I do (although even I will admit that this is ridiculous). But like many problems in the world, I wonder how much we create our own mess. Manolis isn't ready for Maria to sleep in her own room yet, and we keep oscillating between having a small light and no light in the room, and we go in and try to comfort her too much, which at times entails picking her up and putting her in bed with me or if I'm desperate for sleep then Manolis takes her into the other room. I think we just need to leave her alone... but it's so hard.

2007 will be the year that Maria goes to school. Although it's 8 or 9 months away, I'm already anxious about it. She won't get nearly the attention she does now, and she seems to get out of sorts when she's away from home without mom &/or dad. The good part about school, though, will be that she'll be around other kids. The speech therapist was talking about how good it is for special needs kids to be with typical kids, not just with other special needs kids. Maria's probably going to be just with other special needs kids the first couple years at least, but something to think about. We're supposed to have a transition meeting soon, so I can meet someone from the school district and find out our options - oh joy!

Although we have agreed that I'm somewhat out of denial, it still gets me when the therapists and doctors say things like "I don't think you'll ever have a conversation with her like we're having, but you'll probably be able to talk about simple things." or "I'm not convinced that she'll be non-verbal. She might string a couple words together, like 'more food'". or "She probably won't be able to walk across the parking lot, but she will probably be able to walk from the chair to the table." Do they mean in the next couple years? Are they talking full potential? It's like a sledgehammer to various body parts when they say that stuff -- and although they say it with much kindness, in the words of Peter Boyle: "holy crap".

Maria is doing better at standing, she seems to enjoy it. We stand her against a plastic fence thing we have in the living room, so she can hang her arms over the top for more support. Sometimes she even stands w/o us holding her for a couple seconds. Not a whole lot of progress on sitting, some progress on the crawling position, and she's been rolling a lot--mostly to lick the tiles (nice, huh?), but hey whatever it takes!

I know I'm her mother and of course I think she's the greatest thing EVER, but I swear, even w/o my biased eyes, she gets more beautiful every day. It's astounding. When she's an adult, I think even Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Anniston, and all the other beautiful people will pale next to her; she might even hurt people's eyes if they're not strong enough to experience that much beauty at once. Plus she always wakes up in a happy mood, and stays that way for a good part of the day -- you can't beat that!