Some Highlights

Last night shortly after arriving home from daycare Gwen had a meltdown about something. I was in the middle of something and didn't jump to attend to her right away. She went to her room and cried for a few minutes, then calmed herself down. When I arrived, she was quietly paging through a book. I sat down with her and said, "Why were you upset?" She responded, "I wanted two cookies and you only gave me one." "I'm sorry, I didn't know you wanted two," I told her.

She said, "You didn't know because I didn't tell you."

This was HUGE. She melts down all the time about stuff and we don't even know why, and by that point she is enraged/devastated enough that she can't clearly tell us. Then in the calming-down stage she will blame it on us; "You made me angry," or "You made me sad." I've told her about a million times that I can't read her mind and that if she doesn't tell me what she wants, I don't know. This is the first time she seemed to recognize that concept. Naturally, I praised her to the skies, both for that and for calming herself down.

She had another meltdown a few minutes later about something completely different, but whatever. One step at a time.

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This morning when I went to drop Gwen off at preschool, another car pulled up at the same time as ours. This is always fun because the kids are always excited to see who is in the other car. Well today it was Matthew, whom Gwen has always been quite fond of. A couple of weeks ago we ran into him and his Mom at the grocery store and Matthew was SO excited, like it just BLEW HIS MIND to see a preschool friend somewhere other than preschool. Ever since then he and Gwen have been pretty inseparable at school, and when I come to pick her up he always comes to say hi to me too. Anyway, Matthew’s mom and I said good morning to each other and Matthew got out of the car and came straight over to Gwen, and without a word the two of them joined hands and started leading the way into school. It was the most adorable thing ever. Needless to say when we got inside the school we exchanged contact info and promised to arrange a playdate soon.