Three year and six month baby update!

How time flies.

The biggest news is that Laila is half potty trained! I say half because while she'll ask us to go to the potty, sit on the potty just fine and use it generally, she's a bit constipated because she's holding it in. I've read that this is pretty normal, that toddlers especially don't really understand and can feel like they're losing a part of their body. Laila doesn't seem scared--she didn't have any of the problems that show up sometimes like being scared of the toilet flushing or not wanting to sit because she's worried she'll fall in--she's just hesitant. She's always been an observer, someone who makes absolutely sure what's going to happen before she takes any action. It took her four months from standing up to walking, and after a couple months she put only the smallest amount of pressure on any surface she was holding on to. But it still took her a while afterwards until she would take a full step. I suspect this will be the same.

At her gymnastics class, sashagee ran into a nanny who said the kid she looked after was in that situation for a year! Hopefully it doesn't take Laila that long.

I've talked a lot about my worries about Laila's language development--speaking only, she understands us just fine--but she's been speaking a lot more. After she said "bread please" at dinner and I said, "Can you use a full sentence Laila please?" she said, "Can I have some bread please!" without any hesitation, so I gave her some bread. We can have more back and forth conversations now, and while she still only uses a few words at a time, we an have full exchanges of information. She'll say "Abba do" and hand me a pen, I'll ask, "What do you want me to draw Laila?" and she'll say, "Heart. All the hearts" and then I'll say, "I'll draw one, Laila, then you can draw another one, okay?" she'll say "mmhmm" and try to draw after I draw a heart. She'll follow along with multi-stage instructions. I can ask her what she wants for breakfast and get a reply. And sure, she's a kid and sometimes she'll say she wants eggs and do an excited dance in the kitchen when I start making eggs and then when I put the eggs down in front of her she refuses to eat them, but that's just being a kid. The important part is that she's starting to give us insight into her mind.

Speaking of her gymnastics class, she's still doing that and having a great time. As time as gone on, she's gotten more used to being in a situation where there's no family member around and a strange grown-up is telling her what to do. She's started doing somersaults herself around the house!

Since it's fall, sashagee has been dressing Laila in extremely fall clothing. This is probably the most obviously fall outfit she's been in, and one of the ones she likes the best because of the skirt:

She's slowly losing her baby face. Soon she'll be totally a little girl. This is why they say treasure every moment, because time only flows one way.

The one sad piece of news I have to report is that her seizures are more frequent now. She had a medicine change and it doesn't seem to be working, though part (most?) of it is also the potty training--apparently that's a seizure trigger in a majority of people. They don't know why, but it's definitely difficult for us to explain to her how important it is not to hold it in. She doesn't know she has epilepsy, she just "wakes up" confused sometimes to see abba and mama there holding her hand and being happy to see her. We have another appointment soon with the doctors to see if we can figure this out, and hopefully it's just a rough period at the moment. Until recently she didn't have a seizure for almost a year at home, only at the grandparents' house, and holding it in was the cause. If we can get past that, maybe we'll be in the clear.

What other ways will she grow and change?