Something to celebrate

So, we've been working with Rachel on her speech, both structure and pronunciation. Yesterday, I realized in doing her pronunciation work that she has moved from one level (isolated sound) to another (syllables with sound).

This is only one sound ("K") and there are many, many more we'll be working on in the future, but still it shows progress.

As a side note, she has been asking "why" a LOT more often than before. Usually it appears when she's asked me to do something and I either say, "No," or "In a minute." And she stays and listens to the answers. :)

Goal for this week: work on eye contact. It will really help her pronunciation.

Is the illness over?

So, yesterday we got our order from LifeBalm: two Kid-e-Mins, one Kid-e-Mune, one bottle of echinacea extract for Rob and I (just in case) and one bottle of Dr. Christopher's lower bowel formula (again for Rob and I).

As soon as we got the package, I broke out some orange juice I'd been waiting to pass out once the tummies were all settled (it seemed like they never were) and we gave the kids appropriate doses hidden inside, with the youngest getting theirs first.

Our firstborn son, the one we've had the most trouble with lately, laid down on the couch for the rest of the evening and didn't move unless he had to. Our youngest boy fell asleep early. The girls all stayed awake but were much more quiet than usual. Meanwhile, I kept waiting for someone to throw everything up.

This morning was the first morning we've had in a week where no one threw up. There are no sniffles now and our boys are (as of this writing) back at full YEAH strength. Now, it has happened before that the kids seemed to be all right and they weren't, but for the past month or two there has always been someone with the sniffles or a low-grade fever, even when they seemed to be okay in all other respects. For there to be no sniffles whatsoever in our house is, in my opinion, a miracle. I hope it lasts. :)

So, we're back to school and the full schedule of before.

The Explosive Child

I got this from the library the other day. I'd been looking for something to help with Sarah's meltdowns. She doesn't have them as often, but I was wondering if there was something the SR program didn't cover that maybe this book might help address. Or maybe some insight that will make it easier to do what I already need to do.

I'm thinking it will because already in the first chapter they've described Sarah's outbursts and anxiety. Rachel has come a long way from her rigidity but Sarah still has a deep need for security in structure that has very little to do with schedules as we define them. It's more a matter of sequence and order. For example, we still cannot sing a church song called I Am a Child of God without first singing Sing from Sesame Street and following it with another church song Families Can Be Together Forever. When she was two, that was the sequence I used to use to get her used to the songs from our church. My original plan was to switch out songs so she would have a wide variety of songs she had heard. Instead, we have a sequence that, six years later, cannot be altered without a meltdown.

So, we'll see what this book has to say about all this. I'll post a review as soon as I finish it. Considering it's a library book, that means sometime within the next three weeks. :)

Too close to reality

I laughed so hard when I read this. This is what my day is like, and it's nice to know that someone else has the same experience.

From Heavenly Homemakers: Hellooooo! Is ANYBODY Listening?!

A new blog and more herbs

Okay, I don't have my initial blog idea up and running yet. But I do have the secondary one going. It's focus is on frugality and is called Homemaking Cents. I'm working on the layout bit by bit as time goes on. It's not a blog I want to spend a whole lot of time on, but it does give me a chance to talk about some things that I don't think will fit on the other blog.

Good gosh, now I have two active blogs. Will I be able to post on them as often as I like? We shall see.

As for the kids, Rachel and Sarah (along with most of their brothers and sisters) have been dealing with the stomach flu. It turns out, there's a lot of people we know here that can't seem to shake this thing, whether it appears as strep throat, a stomach virus, a bronchial infection or just a common cold. One member of our church has been fighting this for several weeks.

So, we decided we've had enough and are going to bump this up a notch. We'd been putting off getting our cold and flu herbs for various reasons, mostly because every other bug we've been able to battle off using food alone (not to mention the intense cleaning this house has gotten). This one seems to be pretty stout so we've gotten some of Dr. Christopher's herbal remedies that we discovered knock this thing back, but that we're very low on. Hopefully they'll arrive during the weekend and we'll finally get over this illness and back to work.

So, yeah, because we've been sick, we have done next to nothing in the way of school or therapy. Oh, well. I've always said one of the beauties of homeschooling is schedule flexibility.

(On a completely unrelated topic, we ended up giving the dog to our city's animal shelter. That has helped my husband more than either of us realized it would... within minutes actually and within an hour almost all of his symptoms were gone. Most of what he's been fighting off, it turns out, has been his allergies to the dog. Sad, but true.)

Goodbye pooch?

Bad news. We found out my husband is allergic to our dog. And we can't have him outside for reasons that I don't think I should mention. Suffice it to say, we have an indoor dog or none.

Which leaves the option... none. So, we're looking for a home for our dog. If you happen to know of anyone who wants one, please let us know and soon. There's a deadline looming on this. For sure, he's got to be out of the house within the month... that's how long my husband thinks he can take it. Personally, for the sake of my husband's health, I want Buddy gone within a week.

So, any takers?

Potty training

Toast on the Ceiling posted about potty training, and as I read about her struggles, I remembered my own with my kids. So, I've decided today to blog about those times.

Warning: get some healthy snack before reading... this is going to take a while.

Rachel wasn't potty trained until she was four, and then it was very much a literal hit or miss. We started potty training simply because I was getting tired of changing three sets of diapers. Cloth diapers at that. So, I got a book that seemed to be in line with our philosophy regarding training our kids and got Rachel a small potty that could be moved around the house. She was three at the time.

I had several concerns right from the start. First, Rachel at the time had a fascination with smearing poop on the walls. In fact, one of the beauties of cloth diapers was that she couldn't take off her diaper whenever she pooped so that she could cover the wall with it. And when I say cover, I'm not talking about a couple of streaks on the wall. I mean cover. Kids work surprisingly fast when they decide on a course of action and by the time I got to her, I rarely found anything smaller than a 2 foot square area that had to be cleaned off. One part of the wall had a definite smell, she had covered it so often. I think we finally managed to get rid of the smell by using something with orange oil in it. Not sure on that because I was only starting to phase out the chemicals we used for cleaning.

Second, communication was almost impossible at this point. She had some basic comprehension and could obey very simple one-step commands but we still struggled with the idea of a series of steps that had to be accomplished in a certain order.

And finally, there was, as always, my time or the lack thereof. I had two younger children to take care of, one of whom was starting to show signs of speech delay as well (Sarah). This was on top of what felt at the time like an enormous amount of work trying to keep the house together, meals on the table, and research into decent avenues for therapy now that Rachel no longer qualified for ECI (early childhood intervention).

It took several months just to get to the point where I was able to slide the potty under her just as she was peeing. I went over the top with my enthusiasm and I to this day remember the look Rachel gave me: You mean that's what you've been wanting me to do? After this, it took a few more months for her to use it on a somewhat consistent basis. Even then, she preferred (I discovered... don't ask how) using toy boxes and organizing bins.

We switched to mesh bags for holding toys, kept any other boxes out of reach, and made sure we cleaned up any and all accidents. Looking back, that was the most difficult period I think we've ever gone through with our kids.

By this time, Rachel was four. I took an honest look at her development and realized that it would probably be several years before she would have the muscle control necessary to hold it all through the night. That helped me be patient as we cleaned up mattresses, and eventually put a plastic cover on the bed though I still felt frustrated at times that there was one more item that she was behind on.

Rachel is now almost ten, and we still have a plastic sheet on her bed, though I haven't had to clean up any accidents for a while now. We still have struggles with her and using the potty on occasion, but nothing like before.

Sarah was similar in many ways to Rachel, though she never had the fascination with poop that Rachel did. She also loves being clean so once she figured out what she needed to do she did it pretty consistently. Like Rachel, though, she had trouble wetting the bed at night.

By this point, I was so sick of potty training that I dreaded training the next child, though I knew it would be easier because Becky is not normal in her speech either: she is a genius when it comes to articulating her thoughts. But I didn't have to do anything. She watched her sisters and figured it out on her own. The next thing I know she's telling me she's not going to use diapers anymore. And she didn't.

She also took training the next child out of my hands by showing her as well when she saw I had started the process. I've had to do next to nothing in the way of potty training since beyond buying underwear and pull-ups for nighttime.

Rachel's letters

We found out over the past few days that Rachel has been using the newspaper to practice copying letters. She has no idea why they're important, at least from what we can figure out, but she knows Becky and Sarah write letters and it's something they practice a lot. She doesn't want to be left out, I guess. What's neat is that we now have all these disaster-related words in her handwriting. /sarcasm.

Okay, it's not that bad. But it is incentive to work even harder with her speech/comprehension so that we can start teaching her how to read. She's still not quite there but she's getting closer each day.

School begins!

Today is our first day of school. I cannot begin to tell y'all how nice this change of focus is for all the kids and me. I won't do this every day, but just to give you a glimpse of how things have changed, I'll give a quick run down of my day so far:

• Did the morning chores, including feeding and walking the dog.
• Mowed one fifth of the lawn.
• Took care of various sundries around the house.
• Made sure Rachel and Sarah did their Morning Routine (this is part of their IEPs).
  
• Read "Where the Wild Things Are" (language arts and social skills).
• Printed out the math and language arts worksheets for the day (Sarah and Becky's language arts is a journal entry and will be done in the late afternoon).
• Started cooking lunch.
• Had Sarah and Becky's math lesson while lunch cooked, modified from the way Saxon does their lessons.

This afternoon I'm going to do a little bit of academics with Rachel and the next daughter in line for school (let's call her Deb for the sake of my fingers) which means some work on the alphabet and really basic math, then a little speech therapy followed by the Afternoon Routine and some finger knitting (fine motor skills).

In the past, I would have been very upset by this point because we would probably still be having math right now. Why? Because I would be "having school". I'm learning that the most important thing I can teach these kids is how everything they're learning in school applies to the rest of the world. Now, not every curriculum is going to be like that and I really don't think it should be like that. For example, math is always going to have a linear chronology and this is very good for that particular subject. Saxon also does a great job of building incrementally and uses a lot of manipulatives (the majority of which are found around the home) that build a really great foundation for the more abstract ideas later. But that doesn't mean I have to use the intense amount of drill all the time that Saxon uses or that I have to devote one and a half hours (which was our average last year) when I can break it up into smaller portions throughout the day.

And that's math... the other subjects are even easier to integrate into the day, either by reading to the kids for a few minutes at a time, or using every day objects/events to the teach the concept. Because of this, I feel less rushed and when I feel less rushed the kids get more involved and interested. As you can see from the list earlier, we read Sendak's classic book. Because I wasn't feeling rushed, each of the kids got a chance to hear the story and then look at the book themselves while I worked on other things. Becky read it to Deb, and Sarah read it to herself.

And later in the day, when we do our language arts lesson, writing in their journals are going to not only fill the language arts requirement but also social skills and get Sarah used to the idea of going back over the events of the day... strengthening the concept of The Past (time is a very difficult concept for kids in the spectrum to understand).

Lastly, I'm very glad this is how things are working out for therapy. Integrating their therapy into the rest of the day with a brief "session" is working out much, much, much better than I had ever hoped. We're doing therapy more often and we're accomplishing more.

I'm hoping the rest of the school year goes just as happily as today has so far.

(I've edited this to take out some stuff about a person who would probably rather remain anonymous.)