Proving my crystal ball is broken

R. has been doing a lot of drawing recently. I haven't paid too much attention because her drawing consists of little circular squiggles with which she covers pages and pages of paper. She will often show them too me saying what they are supposed to be, but I'll be honest that while I'm encouraging of her effort, they all pretty much look exactly the same and not very like the thing she says it is. 

This evening while we were fixing dinner, R. was showing J. her drawings. Instead of the usual script, J. says, "E., have you looked at these?" I admitted I hadn't really looked at her three pages of drawing from today. So J. shows them to me and I actually gasped in astonishment. A few of her drawings were completely unexpected. 

Here, I'll show you. First, we have some ducks.

They actually look like ducks. If you were forced to guess, you could have a chance of guessing correctly. But here is the one that made me gasp.

Completely on her own, she drew a person with recognizable facial features, a body, and the correct number of limbs. Previously she would get close-ish... a sort of face attached to a sort of body, but with far too many limbs. It was guessable as being a person, but not terribly accurate. This is astonishing. 

I've been thinking about this time last year. Even though I have a fair bit to do, I'm feeling ridiculously relaxed, knowing that I have enough time to get it all done. I realize that I must have carried the stress of last Christmas with me. And it was stressful trying to get the basics of Christmas covered while simultaneously trying to keep R. from moving into psychosis, arguing with the psychiatrist in order to get medication refilled, and also doing all the Christmas shopping for 16 people. I had no room to hope that one year later life would be calm much less that we would see cognitive gains. No wonder this year feels so relaxed and easy, and we have our own little Christmas miracle to boot.