March photos

On my birthday we went up on the hill and grilled some chicken then had a picnic. Heidi found this stick and was pretending to be an old woman.

Ann Marie was being cute.

Kevin was busy running around, but I did get this picture of him after we came in. Kevin doesn't like other people to clip his fingernails, so we've started letting him do it himself. He does a pretty good job, although he does need us to check and make sure he gets all the dirt out.

This is the mournful look we get to see if Heidi can't get to sleep at night.

But she does actually smile sometimes too.

Here are some short videos of Ann Marie.

http://youtu.be/wLUXvIHIEM0


http://youtu.be/oI6jmNEDy4o

Snow Day Feb. 26

On February 26 we got a big snow storm. We got about eight inches of snow. Not surprisingly, school was cancelled. We were able to get outside around 10:00 and play for a long time in the snow. The kids had a lot of fun. It was the perfect kind of snow for playing. I also got some pretty good pictures, which was good because I forgot to bring out the camera the other two times it snowed. As hard as it was to have Kevin miss so much school because of the snow, I was grateful that my kids got the chance to enjoy playing in the snow. It was a fun day.

Kevin kept stealing carrots from snowmen and eating them.

These young pine trees bent over to the ground from the weight of the snow.

Kevin learned how to roll snowballs around to make a big snowball.

Heidi enjoyed seeing all of the snowmen that other people had created.

After we were done playing in the snow we spent some time with some of the neighbor kids who go to Kevin's school. I think they normally go to after school programs because their parents are students, so I had never had a chance to meet most of them before.

February pictures

I just saw this one. I think Kevin was doing selfies with Ann Marie.

January photos

So here's the story behind this picture. When Heidi started going to Primary in January she had a hard time the first day. (We had also just dropped Ryan off to go to Seattle that morning, so I was flying solo at church.) The Primary leaders were prepared for wiggly/sad Sunbeams, so to help her feel better and go sit in her seat they gave her a little paper oval and said it was her egg to sit on, and if it was warm at the end of Primary (from her sitting on it) then her egg would hatch and she would get a little chick. So when I picked her up at the end of church she still had her little chick and thought it was the best thing ever. Then when we got home Kevin wanted to make a mother hen for the chick, so he traced his hand and made a chicken all by himself.

Ann Marie is enjoying playing with her brother and sister now that she can do more things.

organizing our files

A conversation with some friends about blogging and making photobooks got me motivated to pull out the external hard drive and sort through the files I've backed up from both of my dead laptops, and unfortunately it was an even bigger mess than I thought. This is partly because backing up many of the files on my second laptop involved Ryan holding the laptop on its side and pushing the power cable in (because every time it moved the computer would turn off) while I was lying down on my side transferring files. I had already backed up most of the stuff on the computer, but since this was possibly my last chance of realistically getting everything off I was a little panicked and I wanted to make sure I didn't accidentally miss something, so a lot of files were backed up a second time. Also, some of the stuff from my first laptop got re-saved on my second laptop and may have been backed up one or two extra times, and of course not all of it was even worth backing up. I also have a couple of flash drives and I'm not completely certain of what is on those anymore.

I started working through all the files on Thursday afternoon. It was rough at first, but once I got going it got easier and was kind of fun. I was able to come up with a way to break my files into groups so that they'll be easier to find in the future. By the end of the day I had finished going through all of my files (I left Ryan's files alone) except for all of our pictures. When I started going through those I about had a panic attack because the pictures were worse than everything else. Up until 2012 we had no system and there were so many duplicates. Fortunately the files had the date they were taken saved in the details, so I was able to use the date to get things sorted out. I broke everything down by year, and then for the files after 2012 I made subfolders for each month. It's a lot better now and I feel like I can find whatever I need to on there now, which is really important.

In 2011 I made a photobook of our wedding using Blurb.com, but I never got around to having it printed. Unfortunately the software I used is out of date and I think I may be out of luck for that because it won't open. I still have all of the information because I have all the pictures and I used my journal for the text, but if I can't get the book to open I will have to make the book all over again.

It really didn't take that much time for our computer files to become a mess. I think it mainly happened in the process of backing up files from old computers. We moved the files over to an external hard drive and figured that was good enough, but then when you do that a few times from different devices it doesn't look so organized anymore.

Today I looked through my blog and realized I haven't shared any pictures for a long time, and since all of our pictures are organized it was pretty easy to make some blog posts about the things we've done. So to all five of my adoring fans, it's your lucky day!

Kevin's ear tubes

On Monday, March 2nd, Kevin had his ear tube surgery. It went well. We talked to him about it quite a bit the night before so he would know what to expect. I was a little worried about him not being able to eat anything in the morning, but when Heidi asked for breakfast he said, "No breakfast for me! Not until after my surgery." So we didn't really have to deal with keeping him from eating food. We decided it would work better for Ryan to take him since Ann Marie is still nursing and I thought it might be better for me to stay home with her. So Ryan and Kevin took the bus to the hospital and arrived at the children's hospital at 8:15 (which was when they told us Kevin had to arrive, even though the procedure was scheduled for 9:45). Ryan said they could have arrived at 9:15 and it would have been fine because they didn't do anything until a little bit before the surgery.

Apparently there were about ten other kids there for the same procedure. It's a really common procedure for little kids, although usually it's for younger kids.

After waiting in the waiting room for an hour and a half a nurse took Kevin and Ryan to a prep room. They waited there for a while and were visited by two nurses, one doctor, one surgeon (with med school student in tow), the ear, nose and throat specialist who would actually do the procedure, and two anesthesiologists. They all explained what they were going to do and then the anesthesiologists took Kevin to the operating room.

The surgery was pretty quick. Kevin was probably only under general anesthesia for about 20 minutes. Fifteen minutes after they took Kevin back, the doctor came back out to tell Ryan that it went well. Then soon after that someone came to tell him that Kevin was awake and he could go back and see him. The doctor said there was a lot of fluid and goop in Kevin's ears.

Kevin had some apple juice and a graham cracker and was ready to go home soon after he woke up. They took him down to the doors in a wheelchair. The nurse asked where they were parked, and she was pretty surprised when Ryan said they were just going to ride the bus because we live nearby. Apparently that never happens. Ryan carried Kevin down to the bus stop and they rode home.

When he got home Kevin was a little more subdued than usual, but he looked just fine. Apparently the nurse told him not to take the cotton out of his ears until he got home, so as soon as he walked in the door he took them out and plopped them in my hand . . . so kind of him. :) He had a couple of pieces of lasagna and several cups of juice. He did rest some more on the couch after that, but by the evening he was his usual self and you would never have guessed that he had surgery that morning.

My visiting teachers were kind enough to bring us dinner and a pinwheel for Kevin, which was a big help to me because Ryan had to work late that day. It was nice to be able to focus on taking care of Kevin without worrying about getting dinner made.

It does seem like Kevin is hearing better. At OT his therapist saw a big difference in just the first few minutes. He doesn't ask us to repeat ourselves as much as he was before. We still need to work on his auditory processing, but at least now he can actually hear us, which makes a difference. He's still getting used to the way it feels when he sniffs since the tubes allow air to come into his ears, but other than that he doesn't even notice they're there. I'm really glad we went through with the surgery and I think this will really help him with school and everything else he needs to do. In retrospect he's probably been dealing with mild hearing loss for most of the school year.

I do feel like hearing better has caused Kevin to struggle a little with regulating himself. I think he's still figuring out how to process the extra noise. He's been bumping into things on purpose more lately (it gives him proprioceptive input) and acting up more, and he gets upset at disappointments a lot more easily. But we can work through that.

Here is Kevin in the waiting room.

Here he is after he woke up from the surgery. FYI, his face wasn't swollen--he was chewing on a graham cracker.

Waiting at the bus stop.

http://youtu.be/v9NKt8hG2-I

Great Day of Service 2015

Our stake puts on a Great Day of Service every year, and this year we were able to choose a project that our entire family could participate in. We helped pick up trash along a walking trail. Even though it was drizzling we still had a great time. I was grateful that the kids could have an opportunity to help our community and see the effects of littering.

Here are some of the more interesting things we picked up:

• diaper
• large piece of nasty carpet
• three shopping carts
• umbrella
• old TV
• sandal
• basketball

getting ready to leave

Kevin did a great job helping.

Ann Marie is signing more (by clapping her hands) when she eats now. She will even say, "Mah, mah." So I guess "more" was her first word. :) She will say Mama and Dada, but she doesn't associate them with Ryan and me yet as far as I can tell. She learned the sign for Dad a couple of days ago. She's getting excited at the concept that she can do something with her hands to communicate with us. She is also starting to wave hello and goodbye if you show her how. She is army crawling all over the place and starting to rock back and forth on hands and knees a little bit. We had to pull out the cupboard locks to keep her from getting into the cupboard under the sink. (We had stopped using them because Kevin knows how to open them.) She will also crawl over to the kids' bookshelf and pull off all of the books. She can use chairs or the couch to stand a little bit if we help her get into position.

Heidi is learning to recognize more letters at joy school, which is exciting for her. Last week I taught the letter U and this week I am teaching the letter V, then I get a break for a few weeks. If nothing else I'm glad I didn't decide to be an elementary school teacher. I do enjoy doing activities occasionally with my kids, but even teaching five kids for two hours is a little overwhelming for me. I feel like my lessons last week were pretty effective, so that was good. I heard from one of the moms that her daughter showed her how I taught her to write the letter U. (Yay! Something stuck!) I used the BYU SEEL program's lessons for the letter U and the kids enjoyed it. Today I did my first letter V lesson and it went really well, although it helped that only one other child showed up. We drove cars on a large letter V while saying, "Vroom!", made letter V's by putting violet velvet squares on velcro, and tested the viscosity of several different liquids.

Lately Heidi seems to be sleeping a little better. She's not coming out to sleep on the couch as much.

One of the neighbor boys has been reading the Harry Potter books, and Kevin really wanted to read them too, so I checked out the first book and have started reading it to him. We usually read a couple of chapters at a time. I don't think he's fully grasping what's going on in the story, but he's still enjoying it and so am I. I think it's a good challenge for him to listen to a chapter book. I'm impressed that he will sit and listen for that long.

Kevin will get fixated on certain songs and listen to them over and over again. One of his latest favorites is Summer of '69 by Bryan Adams. He asks for me to play it repeatedly whenever we are driving, and now he's figured out a lot of the words and will sing along. It's so cute. Lately I've also noticed him humming How Firm a Foundation, complete with the introduction that the Tabernacle Choir usually uses.

Kevin saw the picture of Joseph and Potiphar's wife and wanted to have a family home evening about it. I wasn't sure how well that would work, but it went pretty well.

A couple of months before Heidi was born, a family in our ward gave us their old piano because they didn't want to move it. As I've mentioned before, I'm really scared of calling people on the phone, so even though a friend recommended a piano tuner to me, it took me over three years to work up the courage to make the call. Yeah. Okay, so it was also partly that I knew it was going to cost at least a hundred dollars and that still sounds like a lot of money to me. But anyway, last week the piano tuner came and tuned the piano. He had to take three keys back to his shop because they were broken and he wanted to glue and then clamp them, but he brought those back yesterday. So now I have a functional piano again and it doesn't sound awful. It was really, really out of tune, and playing it was kind of depressing because it sounded so bad (and of course the three broken keys also made things difficult). But now I actually enjoy playing it again, so hopefully I'll be more motivated to practice. It was pretty interesting to watch him tune the piano too.

I had a nice birthday on Sunday. The weather was beautiful and we decided at the last minute to grill some chicken and have a picnic dinner. I never get to have picnics for my birthday because it's usually cold, so this was pretty exciting. We also had mashed potatoes and homemade BYU mint brownies. Kevin enjoyed helping Ryan get the fire going and both of the kids enjoyed playing on the grass while we waited for dinner to cook.

Ryan got a three-inch memory foam mattress for my birthday. I was a little nervous that I wouldn't like it, but now that we've been using it for a week I love it. I haven't slept this deeply for over a year. Now the problem is waking up in the morning or if someone needs me. :)

The government was kind enough to take an hour of my life away on my birthday for daylight savings time, but it looks like we might finally get spring weather, so that's good. This winter has felt very long.

reading woes

I am becoming very frustrated with the way schools teach reading. I honestly don't see any logical progression to their method other than the font size getting smaller to accommodate more words. I think the problem is partly that they're trying to teach kids to read before most of them are developmentally ready. At the beginning of the year Kevin was getting books with text like, "The cow. The horse. The pig. The sheep. The farm." They didn't decode the words--they just used the pictures to know what it said. As the year has progressed, they have learned a lot of sight words and they are also learning endings like -ing and -ed and being trained to see sight words with those endings added, and they largely use the pictures and first letters of the words to guess what the rest says. I have not seen very much phonetic reading. So now Kevin has gotten into the habit of thinking that you have to know the word before you can read it, and getting him to sound out words is like pulling teeth. It's frustrating because I spent a lot of time and energy teaching him how to do that last summer and it feels like they've undone all of that work.

It's also hard because the books the kids are given to read are terrible. First of all, they are not interesting. What five-year-old would want to read a book that says, "The train goes up the hill. The train goes down the hill. The train goes around the bend. Oops!" (The pictures show some toddlers playing with a toy train.) Second, they throw in words that the kids have no resources to read. And when I look at the easy reader books at the library I find the same problem. I spent fifteen minutes going through them yesterday and wanted to cry. How are these kids going to be motivated to read when we give them stupid books to read? I realize it's difficult when they don't know that many words yet, but can we at least try to make them entertaining? I don't think the writers of these books have spent any time with five-year-olds.

I still try to pull out Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons sometimes, but Kevin won't have anything to do with it. At this point we're trying to find books that are interesting to him and helping him with the hard words. There are several Step Into Reading books about superheroes and movies that are interesting to him. If the words are phonetic I make him sound them out and if they're weird words I give him time to try to figure them out and then just tell him if he doesn't. One of the books he read this week had the word pigeon in it. This was supposed to be a Level 1 book. I don't get it.

It feels like they're trying to move all the curricula back one grade. I really don't see what the rush is. There is still so much mental and emotional development going on in the early grades of elementary school. I really don't see any benefit to expecting all kindergarteners to be able to read and do addition and subtraction. Let them play. I think so many people don't realize that playing is a physical need for children. It's not just that it's pleasant or fun for them. They need to be running, jumping, and swinging, especially kids like Kevin who struggle with regulating their senses.

And if you're going to suggest homeschooling, believe me, I've thought about it. Again and again. I seriously considered it before enrolling Kevin in public school, but when I prayed about it the answer was clear that he needed to be at a public school, and he needed to go this year. I do feel that he has gotten a lot of benefits from school. Other than the way they teach reading I've actually been very happy with what he's learning in school. He loves having a routine, and I just can't give him that kind of routine at home right now. Just having the routine has really helped him to regulate himself, and his behavior has improved dramatically since he started school. He's gone from refusing to pick up a crayon to writing all of his letters and numbers and spelling phonetically. Oh, and for the record, I don't blame the teacher. The state has rigid requirements for kindergarten students to be reading at Level D by the end of the year in order to move on to first grade, and she kind of has to teach the kids using the methods they tell her to use or else the kids won't pass the tests.

The one thing I'm hoping is that Heidi will be more interested in the reading book, because if this is the reality for public schools then I want her to be reading before she goes to school.

I thought writing this blog post would be helpful, but I think I'm just more stressed.

Parenting Myths I Believed

Don't give your child coloring books because it stunts their creativity. Instead give him/her blank pieces of paper and plenty of art supplies and let him/her come up with his/her own creations.

I know, it was dumb to believe this. But in my defense I was also under the impression that coloring books are expensive. The reality is that coloring books are dirt cheap in the dollar bins at Target, kids love them, and there's nothing wrong with them. Yes, there are some kids that can come up with creative things without being taught, but I've found that if I just give my kids art supplies they get overwhelmed and upset. I used to give Kevin scratch paper and crayons and try to get him to color, but he would get tense and usually refuse to even try. All he wanted was to tell me what to draw and watch me do it. Now that I know that he has dyspraxia I understand why he did that. Once he was given a model for how to draw a person he calmed down a lot and now he will draw all sorts of things. There's nothing wrong with giving them pictures to color and demonstrating for them how to draw basic things like cars, people, and trees. A lot of kids need to observe and then learn.

Kids need to be left to play by themselves so that they can learn social skills.

I agree that there is merit to this statement. It's good for kids to play without parents telling them what to do and micromanaging everything. Plus sometimes the magic of pretending goes away when a parent comes in for some reason. But at the same time social skills do not come naturally to kids, and they need coaching so that they can learn to interact with other people and get along well. I've learned a lot about this from taking Kevin to therapy. They often have kids play together and give them a lot of guidance for what to say and how to share. This week I brought Heidi with us to therapy and Kevin's OT had them play a game together at the end to see how they play together. I hadn't realized until she pointed it out how little they communicate with each other. For example, Kevin would grab things out of Heidi's hands without asking. I realized that a lot of conflicts happen because Kevin and Heidi don't communicate what they are going to do and they often expect each other to read their minds. These are problems that would be better treated by playing with them, observing closely, and giving lots and lots of guidance for what they should be saying or doing together. If we don't spend some time playing together with our children and their friends we miss things like that, and they miss out on learning important social skills. Some kids are better at it than others, but it doesn't come naturally and they often need to be directly taught. My guess is that most parents should probably play MORE with their kids, not less.

Laughing makes it easier to bear.

If there's anything I've learned in the past two and a half weeks, it's that laughing makes the hard things easier to bear.

I think I got proof yesterday that I'm starting to get it. I had made some cornbread for breakfast. Ryan and I ate some together because the kids had already had cereal. Ryan didn't finish his piece, so he left it on the table intending to finish it in a while. A few minutes later, Heidi came up to me and said sweetly, "Mom, is it okay if I eat that?" while pointing at Ryan's cornbread. I started to say yes, but then I stopped and said, "Actually, you probably shouldn't eat that because Daddy was sick with a stomach bug yesterday and you might get sick if you eat it. But I can get you your own . . . " Then Heidi got a horrified look on her face and I realized she had actually already eaten a few bites of Ryan's cornbread. Heidi started crying because she was so scared that now she was going to get sick. She cried so hard that she started coughing. She was coughing so hard that I started wondering if she would throw up. Then I realized she was throwing up, and instinctively I put my hand out to catch it because by this point she was on my lap and I guess it seemed like it would be better to wash my hand than to have it all in my lap. All I could do was yell, "Um, bowl!" and stare at my hand and laugh, because I just caught throw-up in my hand and how in the world was I supposed to know that she would react that way to what I had said? And of course now that Heidi actually did throw up she started crying and coughing even harder and saying, "I'm sick, I'm sick!" No amount of reassurance that she wasn't sick could get her to calm down, so I desperately grasped at straws and started talking about the freezing rain on the trees outside like it was the coolest thing ever, and luckily that seemed to calm her down enough. Once she had run off to play I just looked at Ryan and laughed and laughed at the absurdity of what had just happened. It seemed like a better option than getting upset.

Did I mention we've been getting a lot of snow here? In the past two school weeks the kids have had 1 1/2 days of school, plus Kevin missed the 13th because of an ear infection. Heidi hasn't been able to go to joy school, either. And yesterday church was cancelled because there was freezing rain. The first week with no school was rough. I had plans and I kept thinking there would be school again the next day and I could get some stuff done, so when school kept getting cancelled it was really frustrating. The second week was mostly better, although Friday was rough. At some point it got so ridiculous that I could only laugh when we got the calls cancelling school every evening, and laughing about it seemed to make it better. It also helped that the snow was better the second week, so we were able to have some fun in the snow.  It has been hard to have our routine disrupted. I haven't been able to get as much done as I want to. Some days I was lucky to get an opportunity to brush my hair.

I am hoping that school will be back in session this week. The school has changed all teacher workdays and delayed opening days to regular school days, and they've also decided to have school on Memorial Day and a couple of Saturdays (early release) to make up for what the kids have missed. The next couple of weeks still won't exactly be routine, though. I'm teaching joy school this week and next week, plus we have a piano tuner coming (finally!!), a doctor appointment for Ann Marie, my birthday, and of course Kevin's surgery today (Ryan is with him at the hospital right now, actually). I think what I'm starting to find is that there are always things that disrupt your schedule and while it's good to have a plan it's also important to mentally prepare to be flexible instead of getting grumpy when plans change.

I got a lot of pictures of the snow, but I haven't gotten a chance to go through them yet, so those are coming soon.