Wild Child

Ayden Jane seems to be on another one of her crazy spurts of... out of control energy and determination that is completely maddening, adorable, fascinating, exhausting, remarkable, frustrating... And entirely exciting because it usually means some new developmental leap is on the other side.

You'd have to look back a good ways to find descriptions of earlier leaps. When she was younger both the tornado behavior and the spurt were even more visible but there were definitely some similarities between those days and the past few.

Let's recap. Tuesday, Jen was even weighting her down with ankle weights to get her to slow down on the moon shoes. (something proprioceptive...) Still she was a bit uncontrollable as she was moving before she was thinking and there was no stopping and redirecting her. Jen had to make some pretty great catches as AJ was going way too fast. We were trying to get her to do some static work. Yea right. It was pretty funny to watch and made me feel a little better that even the baby whisperer was having trouble with her.

Wednesday. I went running in the morning and by the time I returned Gary was done with her! Well, done with the tornado of destruction and the 2 massive wipeouts because she would not slow down. He said, "she tries to do things she can't and goes at it so fast and hard she takes out everything in her path. If she would just slow down and listen..." Yep, apparently he is Marlin too. I took Ayden Jane and Mckenna to the safest place I could think of, Leaps n Bounce. Yep, a padded play land because we both sort of needed a padded room. Mckenna would come to get a drink and AJ was right behind her saying, "come on Mckenna, lets go leaps and bounce..." After a couple of hours of that I thought she might nap in the car on the way to Mckenna's swim team practice. Wrong. When we got home, I traded her off to Gary who took her for a swim. 2 hours later and after she had learned to swim (not pretty, but effectively) across the deep end, they returned.

Thursday has come and gone. We kept busy all day including a swim this afternoon. Still, after nap, we had 2 spills and she was climbing all over me. I took her to the play ground and she did all the climbing she possibly could. Once she was done she came home and played calmly and sweetly with her toys. The need was filled for the moment. It is just so strange to watch and I am so curious what connections are being made in there! Will it be obvious? Will it be physical, speech related, cognitive? Who knows. I guess it is exciting enough to just know that, although her developmental leaps are still not always smooth, they keep happening.