Joy's Autism Blog

I’ve been MIA since November…possibly my longest break from blogging since I started. Anyway I wanted to share a quick little update since a few things have happened.

First and foremost, our sweet baby girl was born on February 12, 2013. She was 7 pounds 7 ounces, beautiful and perfect. Her name is Charlotte Caroline. The kids have all adjusted wonderfully to our newest little bundle. They are so loving and gentle with her.

Here is Charlotte (or Charlie as we usually call her) on the day she was born:

This is the day we left the hospital (Valentines Day 2013):

And this one is a bit more recent, one of her first smiles:

Adrian had a first today, I heard him compliment his sister which was pretty awesome. When he got home from school he came in and told Nevaeh “nice dress.” Wow. That made me smile.

Sanura and Nevaeh are doing well, we’re still homeschooling and it’s challenging but good.

Lincoln is progressing. We have his transitional meeting for kindergarten next week. I can’t believe he’s going to kindergarten. It seems like he’s still a baby, it’s going to be tough. I’m curious to see what everyone thinks his plan should be for kindergarten. Nervous.

Glen and I are great. Same ol’ same pretty much. I’ve shared a little bit about my weight loss journey and that is still a work in progress (as it always will be for me I think). I did well with my weight during pregnancy and I have about 8 pounds to go to get to pre-pregnancy weight. Not too shabby for only being about 8 weeks postpartum. Then I will continue working and losing. I have a couple fitness goals and a weight goal in mind for myself and it’s so exciting to make these changes.

I haven’t written in a little while. I guess there hasn’t been a whole lot going on. Kind of just doing the day to day stuff lately and preparing for Christmas. We got our tree up and I’ve started to wrap gifts. I love Christmas time and of course the kids do too.

I have had a couple amazing emails this week reminding me why I blog and share about my family in the way that I do. So thank you to the people who sent me those, I treasure them and it helps me remember why I’m doing this in the first place.

Lincoln has his follow up stuff for his hearing this week. The paperwork said to have at least 2 to 3 hours to spend at the hearing clinic so I’m hoping we really find out what is going on. I think we will. Lincoln has been talking so much more lately. Sometimes I don’t understand what he is saying but he’ll keep saying it over and usually I can catch on. Today he was running full speed through the living room and I had a newspaper on the floor that he had kind of spread out across the living room like little kids like to do and he slid on the paper and fell flat on his back. He ran up to me for a hug and he was crying a little and saying “You ok?! You ok!?” which was just precious. Then when he’s leaving for school or when we’re getting ready to leave the house I’ve heard him saying “See ya! Bye!” so I’m thrilled with the direction his communication is moving. We’re gaining words! We were at Target, I think yesterday or the day before and there was a little girl getting out of the car next to us with her grandpa and Lincoln kept saying “Hi” to her. Lincoln’s struggle has been very different from Adrian’s struggles so I am praying that Lincoln’s issues are not going to be as severe as what Adrian has to deal with. I’ve said before, his development reminds me a lot of Sanura’s so if he ends up with just mild Aspergers like her I will be a happy camper!

Adrian has had good days and not so good days at school. He runs away sometimes at recess if he doesn’t want to go inside which is terrifying to me. He refuses to go to some of his classes outside of his classroom. I question how much he’s really being pushed to work hard. It’s a delicate balance I think to keep him where he’s moving forward academically but yet the teacher is trying to keep him happy and cooperative. It’s tough, I have trouble getting him to sit and listen when I try to do stuff with him at home. Adrian is talking more at home I think, when he feels like it. He is still asking for the playdoh toy that he wants for Christmas each day which I have carefully wrapped and hidden in the basement already. We would love to put the presents under the tree but I have a strong feeling that I would wake up one morning and come down to find Adrian opening all the presents so they will stay hidden until Christmas Eve.

The girls are doing really well. Nevaeh is doing addition and starting to read more and more. Sanura is excited about science recently and has told me she wants to be a surgeon when she grows up. She asked to research what types of surgeons there are so we did. It’s fun to watch her dream about the future and watch her pretend to be a surgeon.

For me, not too much new. I’m just trying to keep up with homeschooling. It’s a lot of work, I knew it would be and it is but I really love it and I’m already coming up with ideas for next year to build upon what we’re doing this year. I keep debating starting a homeschooling blog where I can share more about what we’re doing, still deciding if I want to maintain two blogs.

I’m sure I’ll have an update about Lincoln’s hearing in the coming week.

Did you see this video yet? My friend shared this on facebook:

I had Lincoln’s meeting this morning. I was a wreck last night, these meetings can really take an emotional toll. I was scared they were going to see more “wrong” with him then what I see. I was just scared I was going to disagree with them about something or that the plan wasn’t going to be up to the standards I was used to in Iowa.

All the memories of Adrian’s past IEPs came up. Don’t get me wrong, our IEP meetings overall have been great but it always takes an emotional toll. I usually describe as a slap in the face as to how far he was behind. Something that was said in a meeting was ringing in my ears too. One time, before our meeting, one of the ladies at the meeting was talking to another lady and in regards to people with autism she said “well usually they can talk” and it rubbed me wrong the way because Adrian was completely nonverbal at the point. It made me feel terrible and I just kept thinking about that event.

This morning Nevaeh asked me why I was crying last night. I had to explain that sometimes I have hard time because Adrian has autism and Lincoln is not talking yet. That is not an easy thing to explain to a five year old. I will hear Nevaeh making the excuse for Adrian that “well he has autism”, it’s sweet in a way but a bit sad to me too.

I was very happy with Lincoln’s IEP meeting. I’m very happy with the goals and we are all on the same page in regards to what he needs to work on. Lincoln is very delayed in communication and socialization. He is behind in some other areas but honestly I don’t think they’ve seen all his great skills yet. I noticed he was talking quite a bit more today and sat with me for a long time tonight looking at books. I’m lovesick with that little boy. I love sitting and rocking him and cuddling with him. He helped me bake a cake today and we had some good quality time.

The ultimate plan for Lincoln is to figure out this hearing situation. Our appointment is fast approaching. As soon as that is figured out, and if there is something that needs fixing with the hearing then we will see if that helps him in the areas he’s having trouble in. I see an autism evaluation in his future but since he’s already receiving all the interventions he needs I’m not concerned with a formal diagnosis at this point.

Adrian had an awesome (!!!!!!!!!!!!!) day at school today. Can you tell I’m excited? He had all smiley faces on his report, something I think we’ve only seen maybe one other day so far this year. He got extra computer time today for a reward and he was very happy.

Happy Halloween everyone! Here are the pics of our family:

Ironman (Adrian)

Whoopie Cushion (Lincoln)

Super Girl (Sanura)

The Cat (Nevaeh)

All the kids together:

I can say autism makes it a little more difficult to trick or treat. Adrian does not understand when people just hold out the bowl of candy for him to take one. He tries to take a huge handful. He doesn’t say thank you or trick or treat even though we’ve worked on it so I try to say it for him.

The kids had a good time. We just went to a church down the road and did trunk or treat there. We usually go visit family so they can see the kids costumes but this year with the move we don’t know anyone so it made me a bit homesick.

Since I’m homeschooling the girls this year the library has become a really important resource. I thought it might be fun for the girls and for myself to choose our favorite books from the week and share on Fridays. Friday is always library day in our house now.

I am not one to buy books for the most part. If it is a book I really want to read and don’t want to wait for availability at the library I might buy it or if it’s a favorite for one of the kids (Pinkalicious for Nevaeh) then I might buy it but other then that it’s to the library we go.

I read aloud to the girls each day for 15 minutes out of a chapter book. We just finished a book called Indigo Blue and Sanura especially liked it, it was a little grown up for Nevaeh but I let her color or practice cutting while I do the chapter book read aloud if she needs to. It’s a bit of a tear jerker but we really enjoyed the book.

Nevaeh picked Posey Plans a Party, this is the second Posey book she has read and these are the cutest books for little girls. The pictures are fun and girly and she loved the Posey books we read.

Nevaeh picked a nursery tale thick book that had lots of stories in it. I have been disappointed by many of these thick books claiming classic tales. Either they aren’t how I remember them or they don’t contain the classics that I consider the classics. We loved Mary Engelbreit’s Nursery Tales: A Treasury of Children’s Classics It has all the classic tales I remember and the drawings were sweet, stories weren’t too long, and the stories all went the way I remember them going as a kid.

Sanura is studying Christopher Columbus and the events up to and after the colonization of America and Spanish Colonies in America was a good edition to our study and brought about some good discussion.

Those were our favorites this week…on to our new stack of books!

This is a printable activity from Child Care Land and it is an ABC recognition activity. Nevaeh has her ABCs down but every now and again she mixes up J’s and I’s and also Q’s and U’s so we’re just working away on ABCs still each day. Here is one of the things she did today, you call out each letter kind of like BINGO but every letter in the alphabet is on there and they place their little marker on the correct letter:

This next activity I used some of the art from Lesson Pix and I used the tree we already had that we used for one of the activities that I talked about on this post. So we just printed our 5 monkeys and Mr. Alligator and we sang the 5 Little Monkeys Swinging in a Tree song. Here are the lyrics in case you don’t know the song:

Five little monkeys swinging in the tree
teasing Mr. Alligator can’t catch me….can’t catch me
along came Mr. Alligator quiet as can be
and snapped that monkey out that tree

Four little monkeys swinging in the tree
teasing Mr. Alligator can’t catch me….can’t catch me
along came Mr. Alligator quiet as can be
and snapped that monkey out that tree

Three little monkeys swinging in the tree
teasing Mr. Alligator can’t catch me….can’t catch me
along came Mr. Alligator quiet as can be
and snapped that monkey out that tree

Two little monkeys swinging in the tree
teasing Mr. Alligator can’t catch me….can’t catch me
along came Mr. Alligator quiet as can be
and snapped that monkey out that tree

One little monkeys swinging in the tree
teasing Mr. Alligator can’t catch me….can’t catch me
along came Mr. Alligator quiet as can be
and snapped that monkey out that tree

No more monkeys swinging in the tree!

Here is the pictures (sorry my lighting is bad for the photo but you get the idea) we printed out and one by one Nevaeh removed the monkeys from the tree, she really enjoyed it:

And…Lincoln rode the bus for the first time today. I was so nervous and when they dropped him off at home they drove right by me and all the way down the road and I had to go chase it down…yikes.

Anyway, here he is waiting for the bus:

And here he is with the bus driver and the helper on the bus:

So cute I could just eat him up!

First I have to update about Lincoln and our school situation. I went in this past Wednesday to drop off his enrollment packet and the lady in the office said she’d call me to let me know about when I can come tour the school and meet the teacher before he starts school this Monday. Of course nobody called me. I have never dealt with a school that tells you time and time and time again that they will call you back and only one time out of the half dozen times they said they’d call me have they done so. I’m almost speechless about it because it’s so absurd. There is no way I would send my kid on a bus to a place that #1 has been terrible to deal with #2 that I’ve only seen the front office and none of the other areas in the school and #3 to people I’ve never met.

I’ve heard great things about the school from Adrian’s current teacher and the lady from Parents as Teachers so I’m hoping it will all work out but I have my doubts. I guess I’m going to show up with Lincoln at the usual time he’s supposed to go to school on Monday and see if I feel comfortable leaving him there or not. *INSERT HUGE EYE ROLL HERE* Can you tell I’m frustrated?

I went to the store today and picked up all of his supplies he needs. He’s not diggin’ the new shoes or the bike helmet I got him. I’m hoping he’ll adjust to them.

On to the number recognition activities that I wanted to share. Nevaeh can count to 100 with minimal help but I noticed if I pointed to a number and asked her what it was she didn’t know so I started to think about ways I could teach her how to recognize numbers without sitting in front of worksheets all day. Here is what I found:

Who doesn’t like a good ol’ game of BINGO? I made the board myself…made a few different ones and some squares with the call numbers. The circle discs I printed from Childcareland.com which has to be one of the most useful sites I’ve ever come across for homeschooling:

And this game has a little tooth fairy towards the bottom and teeth up above, the child counts the number of teeth and pins the clothes pin on the correct number (this activity is also from childcareland.com):

So along with our other math work we’re going to be adding in these this week for Neveah, hopefully it will be fun and she can learn number recognition at the same time.

My mom came to visit for a couple days this week. It was good to see her and the kids loved it. She got a little lost when she got here because she hasn’t been here before so I went to get her. When we got back to my house I hopped out of the van excited to see my mom and spend some time with her but I stopped short when I heard a hissing sound and looked down to see my rear drivers side tire going flat. I’m just thankful I made it home and didn’t break down on the side of the road. Glen put on the donut tire and we loaded up and went to the zoo. My mom was only staying for a day and a half so we wanted to spend the time with her. I did go and get it changed the next morning and it took forever but I’m just relieved that it’s done! Adrian was so so upset when he realized that his grandma had gone home. He cried for about an hour and not much I tried would comfort him at all. He seems ok now.

Adrian has been doing good in school. No issues. I’m so happy that his teacher seems so nice and that things are going well…huge relief for me.

The girls have been doing awesome with homeschool. It’s so much fun. It’s a lot of work to prepare everything but it’s a lot of fun too. Here are a couple things we’ve done:

This is our behavior tracker-green=good behavior, yellow=so so behavior, red= not good behavior:

There are clothes pins with their names written on them and you just clip it to the plate that corresponds with the behavior. It’s a little babyish for Sanura but she played along since I was going to be using it for Nevaeh. If they stay on green all week then we but something new for art class on Fridays, last week they picked out a bead set to make necklaces.

Yesterday we did a little science project. I took the girls outside and had them think about how birds make nests and how hard they must have to work to do that. Nevaeh has been studying habitats so this was more for her but I figured Sanura would have fun getting her hands dirty too. So the girls made their own bird nest and it is holding up really well:

And this is the inside of the nest:

As for Lincoln, I finally have an update. I dropped off his enrollment packet on Tuesday and he’s going to be starting school on Monday. I need to take a tour of the school and meet the teacher before I’ll let him start. The lady was supposed to call me back and I haven’t heard anything. The communication with parents by the office at this school is absolutely rotten. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. The good thing is I have only heard good things about the teachers at this school so we will see how it goes. I’m not going to hesitate pulling him out if I’m not comfortable with anything because the experience has not been good at all so far for our family.

There is a program here called parents as teachers and they come to your house monthly to give you ideas on how to work with your kids and hook you up with resources you may need and I had an appointment with the lady from there today. She gave me some names of doctors in the area which I was grateful for because I don’t know any and she gave me some handouts about how Lincoln is supposed to be developing at his age. She also played with him some and he was such a good boy while she was here.

So that’s my update, there’s been so much going on around here lately. I’m looking forward to another busy day tomorrow!

This is how Adrian’s first four days of school went.

Well I shouldn’t say that two of them were “bad”…he just had a couple frowny faces on some of his activities on two days. On his first day and today he had all smiley faces.

So far I’m really happy with how everything is going so far with Adrian’s schooling.

I haven’t heard anything from Lincoln’s preschool yet unfortunately. I’ll probably call them sometime this week and see if I can find anything out.

Homeschooling is going well. The day just flew by today and I’m find that I tend to plan more then we can fit in. I think Sanura is adjusting to the school day better then Nevaeh is but Sanura has a lot more experience with school then Nevaeh does. I think she thought it was going to be funner then it actually is. Hey we’ve got to practice handwriting and counting and such. I think she’ll get used to it in time.

I have a bit of an obsession right now with homeschooling and planning for homeschooling so I can’t resist sharing a few more things that Nevaeh and I have done this week.

Nevaeh has been working on the letter A this week and I came across an idea of making an alligator and feeding the alligator A words. Well when we got our printer last week I came across some hard cardboard tubes,used as packing material, harder and smaller then paper towel rolls and I saved them thinking they would come in handy for something. So the other day during art class I got two of the tubes I asked Nevaeh to make a “telescope” so we can look out the window and check the weather in the mornings and I asked Sanura to make me an alligator with her tube. She was up to the challenge, here is what she came up with:

I told Nevaeh that it was Ally the Alligator and that she would only eat A words. So I had Nevaeh name off some A words and we wrote them on little strips of paper and fed them to Ally the Alligator. She really had fun with this little activity.

Another big hit from this week was a little activity that I also printed from Lesson Pix that I shared about yesterday. I printed off a sheet of apples, we went with just the outline of the apples so that she could color them in herself. We’ve been counting the apples and making patterns with the apples. The other activity that we did was with a tree that we also printed out:

I had Nevaeh count out 5 of the apples that she had colored red and she put them on the tree and we sang this little song:

5 red apples hanging on a tree,
the juiciest apples you ever did see!
The wind came by and game an angry frown,
and one little apple came tumbling down.
4 red apples….

And one by one she takes the apples off the tree. She is really grasping subtraction from doing this and she loves it. After we did the red apples she wanted to do the green and then the yellow. I’d say it’s probably her favorite thing that we’ve done so far.

Homeschooling is just fun, we’re loving it so far. I am glad for the weekend though, it’s a pretty intense change.