What Maren Really Thinks

The other day Maren had a comprehensive language assessment with her speech therapist. I was happy with how well she did overall, but she did struggle a bit with the pictures. Renee had a flip chart with 3 or 4 pictures printed on each page. She'd hold it up and then ask a question to see if Maren could isolate a single image. It seemed like whenever a new page popped up, Maren would zero in on something she was really interested in, like a baby, and that's all she could think about. So, if she was asked a question and the baby was the right answer, she did awesome. Otherwise, she failed.

She does the same thing with everyday stuff. Here's an example:

We have a collage of pictures from the short time that we lived in New Mexico hanging up on the wall in our kitchen. A few of the pictures are of the horses that would come up and graze on the grass in our small little fenced in yard, as well as any flowers or plants that had been recently planted-- grr. Here's one of them:



A little background: Maren is completely enthralled by animals as long as they are two dimensional. I still can't walk up mom's driveway without Maren smacking me in the face at the sight of Pinto-- the three legged feral cat I brought home from the animal hospital that one summer. (Smacking people in the face is what Maren does when she gets freaked out. Yes, it's annoying as hell, and yes I've tried everything I can think of to make her stop. So far the the only thing that works is pinning her fat little arms down so she physically can't hit me, but sometimes she catches me off guard. Oh, and Pinto didn't have three legs when I first brought her home and I didn't know she was a feral biatch, but that's a story for another time.)

Back to my original story-- so Randy walks in the door from work and scooped up Maren. He was showing Maren the collage and asking her to point out the people in the pictures: "Where's Mommy? Where's Henry?" Maren picked out me and Henry without much trouble. Randy continued and asked, "Where's Daddy?" Maren stuck her chubby little finger in the air and planted it right on the backside of the horse. Randy laughed, turned around and said, "She pointed to the horse's ass!"

Well, depending on the day, perhaps she wasn't too far off.