Expressive catches up with receptive

I know, I know, it's been over a week again since my last post. Dom's been having sleep issues lately--it's always something--which have made me even more tired, so I haven't had the energy to keep up with his blog.

This morning, we had speech, which was our last scheduled activity for the week. During last week's session, Erin did a Rosetti evaluation, which involved asking me lots of questions about things Dominick is and isn't doing or saying. Today she told me that, after looking over the results, she found that his expressive language is in the 33-36 month range. Yay! When we started a few months ago, back when Dom's only word was "uh-oh," his expressive language was in the seventh percentile. Different evaluation, different scoring system, but no matter--the improvement is striking. Now he's at his age level. Erin said that really the only area we need to work on is in getting Dominick to use full sentences. Everything else he's doing quite well. So, for example, when he says "help, help," I ask him to say "I need help, please." Usually he does.

One of the questions on the evaluation had to do with gender. I wasn't sure if Dom knew the difference between boys and girls, and he wouldn't answer when we asked him. (He was too distracted by a toy.) Later, I asked him if he was a boy or a girl, and he said "Mommy's a girl." Then I repeated the question, and he said "a boy." I figured he had to know, but it was nice to hear him say it. He's gotten really good with names, too. He can say Mike, Michael and Kelly when asked about our names, and he'll repeat the names of his playgroup buddies. The proper use of pronouns will come later, since now he refers to himself as Dominick and me (sometimes) as it. How sweet.

Here's something else sweet: I have a bruise on my forehead from two or three days ago, when Dom threw a wooden block from his stacking train at me from about a foot away. It came with absolutely no warning and really hurt, as one might imagine. He did feel bad about it and said "kiss it...all better." So it's good that he showed some empathy, but what did he think he was doing by throwing the block at me in the first place? I really hope he cuts down on the violent acts in, oh, about three weeks.