I’m learning to read!

From day one, we have read books to Gracie almost every day of her life and the NICU program certainly helped plant this seed for us. As a result, Gracie LOVES books! To help with speech intelligibility, one of her therapist started teaching Gracie sight letters and words with flash cards. Her preschool has also been working on reading and spelling 3 letter words. One evening last week, we got out a home made book from one of her speech therapist. It was the most darling and exciting thing to watch and hear her read the whole page with only 2 mistakes in her sweet little voice! You can go to my face book page Joy Marie Ricardi Clark to see this video. Saturday while walking around at the mall, she surprised me while we were at the Mountain Mudd in the mall. She looked at the sign and said M-O-U-N-T-A-I-N…Mountain. I was astonished and afirmed her correct recognition of the word since it was much longer than the 3 letter words we’ve been practicing. Yesterday (Sunday) Mike, Gracie and I were at Costco after church. As we were coming in to return something, she looked up at the big sign above the door and said EXIT! We both looked up and sure enough she was right! I couldn’t believe she knew how to read a word with the letter X in it! As my daughter is learning how to read, and her intelligence is coming to light more and more through language, I cannot help but think how much we as a society underestimate children with Down Syndrome’s intelligence simply because they cannot communicate with words like you and I. IQ tests are developed assuming one can talk. Even before Gracie could talk or showed us she can learn to read, we as her parents knew she was smart because we live with her everyday and noticed it in her non verbal interactions, but it was hard to convince people who did not see her frequently or those who have had little interactions with people that have Down syndrome that this could be true. I’ve talked with other parents who have their own child with Down Syndrome and many will say how smart their child is. And it is not a false statement at all. Now that Gracie is talking, her tests cognitively show she is right where she should be for a 5 year old. Gracie is talking even in spite of her injury because she is hearing! More of that journey in my next post the BABAHAHA (BAHA) :). We are so incredibly grateful for all the continued support and prayers! Thank you 😊