Progress... noticed and unnoticed

This morning R. followed me out to the barn, which she often does, to watch while G. and I turn out horses and muck stalls. R. likes to watch the horses and stay close to me. Today was a little different, though. While I was working in a stall, R. started wandering around looking at the signs we have on the front of each stall. Out of the blue, she announces to me that the sign she was looking at said 'Emmy'. And she was looking at Emmy's stall. She then proceeded to go around and tell me what each of the other signs said. 

I was kind of ecstatic on the inside.

Why, since she wasn't reading them? Because this is the very first instance I have seen where she has shown that she understands that letters make words and that those words convey meaning. It is the very first instance where she has shown that she understands that letters actually mean something, that reading is something you do with those letters, that you can find information from reading. It is the very first step on the ladder of literacy. Without that basic understanding, a child cannot hope to make sense of the squiggles we routinely put in front of their face. R. has known about letters for a while, but it has always seemed to be just a random piece of information that neither had purpose or applied to her in any way. 

Names are usually the first thing that a child starts to understand letters and words with. Usually that name is their own name and their initial letter is the very first letter that they can recognized. If R. wants to focus on learning the horses' names, then I'm good with that. I truly never thought we would reach even this level of understanding, the world was such a baffling place for R. for so very long. 

I also realize that I missed paying attention to another significant milestone in R.'s development. It just occurred to me the other day as I was thinking about something else. In this case it was a behavior that wasn't there. It is so easy to miss what is missing, isn't it? (I could write an entire blog post about how this applies to the church, but I'll spare you all that right now.)

A few weeks ago, we had our co-op family picnic to kick-off the new school year. It was a lot of people, many of them new to the group. There were lots and lots of very nice mother-types which is just the target audience that has been so challenging with R. in the past. 

[If you are new here, I should briefly explain. R. came home with some significant attachment issues. Right at the top of those was an extremely challenging pattern of indiscriminate affection. For years, R. would much rather go up to a total stranger, climb in their lap, tell them she loved them, and then act incredibly fearful whenever her actual parents came near. Years. As you can imagine, we have needed to keep eyes on R. at all times because she just isn't safe to let out of our sight.]

Back to my story... I had a lot of children there, so had put R. in their charge knowing that one of them would come and get me if there was a problem. What I didn't even realize at the time was, instead of R. wandering around deciding which mother she would rather have, she stuck close to me for the entire time except when she was eating her lunch. I didn't tell her to, this was her choice. Can I just repeat that? R. stuck close to me voluntarily! And what is more, at the time I didn't think anything of it,  which means it felt normal, so this has obviously been happening for some time. 

This is the child who felt so little connection to me that once when we were on a walk, I realized that she had moved ahead without realizing I wasn't with her. As an experiment, I stopped and waiting to see how far she would go. Forever it turned out. She got far enough ahead that I wasn't comfortable with her being so far away and went and got her. Instead of a typical toddler reaction of relief, hers was much more along the lines of, "Oh, are you still here? Darn."

Progress can be so slow with this child, but two huge events within the span of a few weeks feels like more progress at one time than we have ever seen. With H., we learned that once she started making progress, it was like an avalanche all of a sudden and more and more pieces clicked together. Could this be the very beginnings of a similar avalanche for R.? It would actually be on about the time frame as H. I am guardedly hopeful.