Celebrating developments

Shropshire, visiting my dad, April 2022

This week’s blogging question, “Have you changed the way you do anything recently?”

Yes! We have put posters up in our kitchen where we write up in pen every wonderful new development Coraline makes. They are called “Awesome April”, “Marvellous May” and “Joyful June”.

For example in June, “Preschool said that Coraline’s Physio came in and said, ‘yet more progress,’ as Coraline was lifting her own knee when she was working with her on going up steps, instead of her knee being lifted”.

Also in our June list, “Coraline is smiling loads more”, “Coraline is walking EVERWHERE in the house!”, “Coraline is now going outdoors of her own volition at preschool and playing in the water feature”, “stood on a box to get up to her drink” and “did not have her musical books in school until 2.30pm for the last half hour only” and “went to circle time of her own accord”. We feel Coraline is making quantum leaps at the moment in her development, and we want to write about it and smile!

We are in a mood these days of buzzing about what Coraline’s doing. You get what you focus on. The reason we decided to do the posters was we had got into a pattern of talking about how it’s hard Coraline doesn’t yet use a spoon so we are feeding her, or that she’s not interested in playground equipment, or of asking ourselves, ‘are we doing things right?’ So we knew we had to change what we were focusing on. We had to bring in the focus on the awesome, marvellous and joyful.

Now every night we are chatting about all the great new stuff she’s doing and are really excited about it and I realise we hardly mention what she’s not doing. Once you start looking for it, it’s all around. July is going to be pretty jubilant!

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