Joy's Autism Blog

I haven’t been responding to much blog wise and I have a lot of stuff to take care of (including shipping off the winners of my last book giveaway!) but it has been a crazy couple of weeks.

My husband had a car accident, everyone is ok. Nevaeh was the only one with him. Our only transportation was totaled. I was just thankful that nobody was hurt but there were some major things to plan and figure out since we have to have a car to get around. Well we got a vehicle last week and now all that’s left is to register and title and all that fun stuff. Hooray for waiting at the DMV right?

My Crunchmaster Gluten Free Crackers Giveaway ends today and I had 3 entries. I used RaffleCopter for the first time for that giveaway and I thought that was pretty cool. RaffleCopter lets you click “choose a winner” and it just randomly picks a winner. And the winner was the first comment which was Jordan!

Family and Autism-The Rollercoaster Journey of Raising Children with Autism gave me an autism blog shout out today. I’m humbled that she chose my blog to share on her first of many Autism Blog Shout Outs. All links relating to my blog or my featured posts on other blogs can also be found on my Contact Me page.

Firstly because my niece was born today! I cannot wait to meet her, if anything is going to make me homesick it’s going to be seeing sweet pictures of this baby girl but not be able to hold her! I’m so thrilled for my brother and sister in law, this is their first daughter.

Secondly today is good because Lincoln had his follow up hearing testing today. He was cooperative and the audiologist was amazing. She wants to recheck him in 4 to 6 weeks because he still has a bit of fluid in his right ear but overall she was not concerned about his hearing.

I truly think something has cleared up in his ears within the last 2 weeks because his language has blown up like crazy. Starting to talk in 2 and 3 word sentences are you kidding me? Amazing.

I wrote a guest post that was published today on Childswork Blog, and you can just click here to read the article in it’s entirety.

All of my articles or articles that link to my blog can also be found on my Contact Me page

Lincoln had a great day at school today so that’s a nice cause for celebration. I think today is the first fully positive report from his teacher.

Adrian had a rough day yesterday, lots of pinching and kicking according to his teacher. I’m hoping he had a better day today!

I’m attempting to workout on a heavy bag and have hurt the knuckles on my right hand. No pain, no gain? I’m also attempting to learn how to do web development but I don’t have a lot of free time so it’s slow going. I love learning new things though so I have a couple of new hobbies that I’m working at.

When we decided we wanted to homeschool I started looking everywhere for resources. I quickly got overwhelmed and ask some friends who homeschool for help and they had some great advice. As of yet I have gotten pretty much all of our material for free. I try to be frugal, we have four children after all and my husband is the only one bringing in an income. When I started seeing all the resources I could get for free or for very low prices I was excited to see what I could put together to use. A printer and a laminator were two things that I felt I needed to get, so we got those. I wanted to share what I’ve done so far but I am just a beginner in this homeschooling thing so I’m not an expert by any means…I mean…we’re only on day 2 of homeschooling.

Shortly before school started I was invited to check out a website that would be useful for autism and I quickly realized that it would be a great resource for homeschooling too, It’s called Lesson Pix and you can make custom learning materials there. You can definitely make your PECS from this site which have been a really important part in Adrian’s communication development. I’ve had the chance to check out the site briefly and I have used it a little bit. It’s really fun and I could spend hours on there so I’m sure I’ll have more projects to share in the future. Here is a couple things I’ve made so far:

This is a little kingdom play set I made for Nevaeh, I used cardboard and glued styrofoam to the back so it would stand up. Then I glued the characters to clothes pins so they could be attached to the cardboard either for storage or for a kind of puppet type thing, then I just glued a little scenery to the cardboard. The girls have been playing pretend with it quite a bit and they come up with all their own ideas of what to do with it too:

The other thing I made is something for Nevaeh too. We’re working on counting and these are number puzzles. They have so many images to choose from, you really could look all day. I chose some fairy pictures for Nevaeh’s puzzle because I knew she would like that:

Close-up:

I also wanted to share a few of my very favorite links:

Little Giraffe’s Teaching Ideas
Scott Foresman Science & Math
And there are tons of options for printable worksheets if you google it but this is one of my favorites Super Teacher Worksheets

And that’s about it for me because I’m crazy tired. It may take a while to adjust to this new schedule!