A night in, and a video

Last night Jessica wasn’t feeling very well, so after dinner I turned off the lights in the living room so she could sleep on the couch, and played with Namine in her room.

Actually, I turned off the lights before giving Namine her bath. I just love giving Namine a bath. It’s perfect for some just-me-and-Namine time, and of course she loves being able to play in the bathtub. I’ve used the time to work on Namine’s arm rotation (but don’t ever tell her that).

Namine’s right arm proves ever difficult, and she still cannot raise it straight up. But thanks to her love of baths and her independence, she can now reach up a lot higher. Namine likes to prove that she can wash herself, and that includes her hair. So I put the shampoo in her hair, suds it up a little, and let her do the rest. (I still scrub her hair after her arms are tired, but I let her go at it for as long as she likes.) We’ve even gotten to the point where Namine can put both hands behind her head to wash at the base of her skull and the back of her neck.

Speaking of, sometimes Namine likes to touch her neck at the scar where her stoma used to be. I know she remembers the trach, because sometimes she pinches her fingers together, like she’s gripping something small, and makes motorboat sounds while pressing her fingers lightly to her stoma scar. Do you know what she’s doing? She’s pretending to suction out a trach.

After Namine’s bath, I got her dressed and closed us into her room. I told her that since Mama wasn’t feeling well, we’d stay in the bedroom. That was fine with her; she proceeded to remove all the books off the shelves – the ones she could reach, anyway. She was very methodical, though. She didn’t just reach up and grab as many as she could, though. Instead, she picked one at a time off the shelves. And each book that had a dust jacket was stripped. She kept the books in a pile around her, but she wanted nothing to do with the jackets, so she handed them to me.

When it came time to pick up before bedtime, Namine was very well-behaved. She was perfectly willing to put her books away, and she was even able to put the majority of the second shelf books back all by herself. (Really, that should come as no surprise, given her upper body and arm strength.) But she refused, absolutely refused to put any of the dust jackets back on the books. So there they lay, on the floor next to the book shelf.

Jessica had gotten a package in the mail, and of course Namine loves to pop the packing bubbles. This is a video Jessica took of Namine and I popping some of them.

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