Best wedding toast ever...

Have you seen this?
OMG I love it.
:sniff, sniff::

FUN site in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad economy

http://tipnut.com/
10 free laundry detergent recipe. Loads of homemade cleaner recipes. Great tips.

After getting bamboozled by tons of cleaners under the sinks I gave up and starting to make my own. Nothing cleans our windows, sliders, french doors, mirrors, etc as a 50/50 combo of ammonia and vinegar.

Yay for a good site!

ASD and Hyperlexia

Our life and Autism - PART ONE

For us it all started when C was 17 mos (July, 2002). Well actually it started before that. C was a hard, hard baby. He was our first baby and was birthed naturally with the assistance of our midwife at the Medical Center at Princeton four weeks early (when my water broke at work). I had one incident of spotting and was anemic (very anemic post-partum) but that was it as far as complications went. 5 days after he was born he went under bili lights for jaundice, high bili levels. WE nursed and nursed and nursed. At 4 weeks he started vomiting... everywhere. And he had colic. I suspected GERD, my pedi thought it was stomach virus. At 4 weeks he aspirated while nursing. Two days later, during a Barium swallow, he clearly had GERD/Reflux. Pretty bad in fact. The pedi didn't encourage me to keep nursing and encouraged thickening a hypoallergenic baby formula. By 10 weeks we had stopped nursing completely and started f/t on thickened Alimentum and Zantac. But still he never really slept well. He went from having to sleep in a his infant car seat strapped in (which we kept between us in bed those first few nights post-aspiration) to sleeping in a bouncer to sleeping with the head of his crib mattress elevated. C was never a sleeper. Period.

By 14 months he was still sleeping poorly. Developmentally he was a slow crawler (10 mos but we atttributed that to the reflux, well the vomiting as soon as he was prone actually) but everything else seemed OK. His first words were at about 10 months, walked at 13 months. He wasn't talking a ton but did have about 15 words at 15 months. Our pediatric gastroenterologist ordered an Upper GI to rule out casein (milk protein allergy) at 15 mos. We had to give him whole milk for 2 weeks prior to the study (a total change from the enriched soy and rice milks we gave him). By day 10 he had diarrhea so profusely I thought he had Rotavirus. I pleaded with the GI doc to just call it a + protein allergy and let me stop the whole milk but he insisted on sticking it out for the sake of the test. The day of the scope was pretty intense because he was a bit on the dry side and was a difficult I.V. stick (finally done on 5th attempt by anesthesia by the way ,to my horror, as an I.V. nurses). The scope was + for casein allergy and reflux. (Gee. Really?)

At 17 mos things were much better so we saw our pedi for our routine check up/shots/etc. En route to the visit my dh called me on the cell and pleaded with me NOT to have any shots during that visit, that C had been through enough. I poo poo'd him with an "Oh Johhhnnnn." See, John was upset that C would be receiving the "controversial" MMR during this visit.

During the visit the APN wanted to "catch him up" on his shots so he rec'd his missed 15 mo and future 18 mo shots. And it was on this day that we saw a major change in C. He lost what speech he had (speech cessation), became more "disconnected" if a 17 mo can do so and actually developed full blown measles 5 days after his shots (his shots were Thursday. Monday he woke covered in Measles). Not a few measles spots. His measles covered him head-to-toe anteriorly and posteriorly. The pediatrician said it was fine, it wasn't real measles or he'd be REALLY sick. I asked about reporting it as an adverse reaction, he was said it was not. He was sick for about two week with Measles. Two weeks. But it wasn't real measles, said the pediatrician. It was when he started to perk up a bit that we noticed he had lost what little speech he had. Now he had NO words.

By 19 months I requested intervention and he started in Early Intervention in NJ for speech therapy. At 23 months he spoke his first word...again. It was "hi." That was his only word for a while. At 2 years + we saw a developmental pediatrician who felt he had some delays but would not diagnosis him at that age, preferring to wait for diagnosis until he was at least 3 years old. At about 27-28 months we found out he could read words. Shortly after his sister was born, when he was 26 months, I sat in his room playing on the floor and drawing on the chalkboard. Being in full-on speech therapy mode I was working on speech with him. I would draw a picture on the chalkboard and write beside what the object was. To my shock, he was reading most of the words I wrote.

Initially we thought these were just words he recognized from the repetition of me writing these words OR he had actually retained some of the information we fed to him early in his infancy. See I have to confess, we were typical new, neurotic parents. We were full aware given my husband's IQ/giftedness that C may lean toward the gifted side. And I was bored. I worked up until the minute my water broke so being a SAHM was shocking. I filled some time of our wonderful, amazing baby days doing the Doman Method with C and if I played a video for him it was one of the Your Baby Can Read videos or Baby Bumblebee videos. Infant education was huge for me.

I was also the type of parent that only fed my child organics and natural foods (starting him on avocado as his first food per Ruth Yaron's recommendations in Super Baby Food). Yet medically we followed the traditional route (why wouldn't we? I was an RN). My biggest disappointment to this day is that I listened and stopped breastfeeding him.

We moved to Florida when C was 2 years 9 months. At 37 months he was dx'd by the psychologist with Early Intervention here with Pdd-nos/hyperlexic trait. Pdd-nos means he was at the high functioning end of the Autistic Spectrum. Hyperlexia is the "precocious ability to read." However at 3 yo he no longer qualified for ANY services because he "scored too high."

And that's when we began to realize everyone was AS confused about Autism and its'
spectrum as we were.

I'll be back with more ........

Poetry Day

Friday was a low-key Poetry day for us. We had an eventful day with the cable company (a 6 hour ordeal) so thank goodness we're flexible homeschoolers! So I'm playing catch-up now.

We memorized the first paragraph of Longfellow's The Arrow and the Song from this book...


J has really improved her reading. We read two really, really "feel good" books yesterday we ALL enjoyed by Douglas Wood.



So many books I want to read with the kids right now. Between recommendations at http://www.chinaberry.com/ and http://www.montessoriservices.com/ I could been reading 3 books a day to them!!!

In History, C and I read about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon so I have reservced a library video on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The longer we homeschool the more I realize how little I know, how much I need to learn, and how poor my education actually was (sorry Mom and Dad, I know you paid a lot of money in Catholic school tuition). But I'm learning now!

John is finally home and completely exhausted so the kids are thrilled. Yesterday I had major trauma with a house alarm that went nuts and a cable malfunction which of course took him less than 10 minutes to fix once he got home. See, this is why I married him (that and his bug-squashing abilities of course).

Have a great weekend, looks like we're in for a lot of rain ! Yay! We desperately need it here after weeks of FL wildfires.

Tea and Nature Craft Day

AKA....."What SHOULD have been our tea and craft day but Daddy went out of town and it was too.goshdarn.hot." Instead we did homeschool lite then went to Walmart and picked up a small pool to cool off in. So we enjoyed nature outside in the small pool. And stayed cool.

But we did have fun watching the Cormorant in the lake obviously fishing then watched him waddle up on to the grass, spread his wings and bake in the sun to dry his wings. They are flexible, goose sized birds that do not have water repellant feather so it must dry its' feathers by spreading its' wings while perched upright.

We also picked some wildflowers from the water's edge to bring indoors along with some yummy smelling jasmine. Other than a trip to the library to do some returns, pick up new books and my reserved copy of Deep Dish by Mary Kay Andrews... we just stayed cool.

Hope you chilled today as well!

Country of the Week/Person of the Week

Yesterday we watched a movie and read a book on MEXICO (love this movie series for kids). Today we read 2 cute books on Albert Einstein (hmmm seems he and Cam share some of the same quirks we learned).

This is an idea that has worked for us. We printed out our Table Manners and put it in one of these flyer/stand-up things and it's always right there (for reminding).

Here's an idea we tried yesterday for C. He fidgets A LOT during "tasks" like doing 2 pages of Math (yawn) so I had him sit on B's THomas bouncer and it worked. I saw the idea in an OT catalog as an idea to keep children on task and it worked for us!

Last pics... these are of the new improved valance for J's faux window in her "tea party room" and just a shot of the starfish/sanddollar garland on the Family Room mirror. Cute!

Blake and the fish

Last night, while I was putting Blake ( 2 1/2) down for bed, he decided that he wanted to go fishing and would not take no for an anwser. So out to the dock we went. Usually, Blake will be happy to feed the turtles and walk around the dock, but not last night. Blake decided he wanted to participate in the fishing and describe every last detail of what was traspiring. First of all, I had 2 poles in the water, neither with a bobber. Just bottom fishing. I wasnt paying much attention when he came up with "Daddy, you not pay attention" Da fishie pole is bendeek". You got a biggggg fishie.

THINGS I'm loving these days

1. SURFCAT... Does your library have this? It's a way for you to reserve library books at home online. For some reason even though I can "see" a book I want online and it says it's "ON SHELF" it never is. So this way I can just reserve what I want and the library calls me when they have it!

2. From Martha's site- The "Organizing Tip of the Day." SUCH simple ideas!!! Love it.

3. And I'm DEFINITELY doing this for the white open shelving I'm planning for the kitchen wall with white plates on it. A DIY project.. dot painted china. Can't wait to hit the cheapie stores for some cheap white plates to start this project. I don't think I'll use Martha's templates (sorry M but I'm not liking your Monogram "S". I'm thinking more along the lines of some scripted "S"'s in my color Blue,Robin's nest egg blue, and maybe some shells). This will be a fun project.

My weekend project:
I have to post a pic of J's new valance. I took the valance that was in her old room striped it green and white and painted "Juliette's Tea Room" across the front of the valance.

Her old room was a take off of the whole Bombay kid's GIGI theme. I couldn't replicate the room here because the store went out of business and she wanted a change. So we brainstormed and came up with the idea of a "Shabby chic tea party room." I think my 5yo dd has a future in decorating. SHE comes up with the best ideas (like wanting a Pinkalicious Birthday Party). She's sooo creative.


HAPPY MONDAY! (really gotta homeschool these kiddos now)

Nature Pics

Since I grew up in the city and suffered from "Nature deficit disorder" (well I know what squirrels and pigeons look like) I really want to teach our kids about nature, as I learn.
The turtles are two of the many that come up to our dock to be fed. It's hilarious. And then there's "Mr Heron" as B calls it. Mr Herron has become a good friend since C fed him one of the sunfish he caught one afternoon. He comes pretty close to us now.
We also see lots of hawks. The boys have fished Sunfish, Catfish, turtles *unfortunately*, and impressive bass from the lake. There's a pickerel just teasing J out there. We have tons of tons of Bass pics. Like TONS of pics. C wants to build his own Bass scrapbook! :)
We have a Veggie Garden going and just started a tiny "fairy garden" of just flower seeds right beside it.
And we're trying to take more and more pics of the waterlife in the area. The waterlife here has been so impressive WITH THE EXCEPTION of our cat's mishap. Poor Oreo fell prey to a Red Tailed Hawk which apparently picked him up by its' claws then dropped him. He was stunned for a day or 2 and it took about a week for his back legs to heal from where he was picked up or pecked at. He's back to his ole self now though.

I'm a bad, bad blogger

I'm soooo not tech savvy so I'm handing over 50% of the reins to John who is a much funnier writer than I am. I have not blogged since we moved. We moved a whole whopping ONE MILE from our old house to a house which was our rental home. This home needs cosmetic work but the yard, sunroom, and dock make up for it. I'm going for a whole Beach Cottage look in this house. Our kids are too small and ruin things too often so I think the whole cottage look works for us, at least until they're older.

But since I'm here now... homeschooing is going well. We have routine of C getting up first (he's the earlybird), waking his Dad and out to the dock they go. After about 45 min of fishing he comes and then our morning starts: breakfast, chores, get dressed, start homeschool. At the moment Cam is using: Horizons Maths 2nd grade, Story of the World for History, Spelling Workout B for Spelling, piano practice (we were using Themes to Remember as well until a little 2 yo stepped on the Cd), a mishmash of Language Arts 2nd grade workbooks with First Language Lessons as our Language Arts Spine, lots of reading, and for science we changed to Evan Moor's Read and Understand Science which he likes. He also has SOTW copywork to do weekly, daily journal writing using a different daily writing prompt (this is quite a challenge for Cam since he lacks abstract thinking) and we use Daily Paragraph Editing 2nd grade.

Jules is using Explode the Code 3 for phonics, Singapaore Math 1a, and right now she's doing daily copywork (a sentence daily) on birds.
We also started to plan our Nature table now that we're officially homeschooling 2 kids. We started collecting items for it last night.

I've tried to schedule things on different days..some have stuck, some haven't. MWF is History. T and Th is Science. Daily Math, Language Arts and Writing. We JUST started (now that Jules is home) doing: Person of the Week and Country of the Week. Monday- Person of the week
Tuesday- Country of the week
Wednesday - Craft (tea and craft for J and Mommy)
Thursday- baking day
Friday- Poetry Friday.

Our method is a secularized version of Classical Homeschooling trivium and Charlotte Mason. But we don't have a method. We use what works for now.

In the fall the goal is to get the kids into a homeschool private school which will be 2 days classroom time/1 day classroom GameDay (using critical thinking skills) and 2 days homeschool. That's the goal for now. We're not happy with our local feeder school and the nearest private school we like is a bit of a drive and pricey. We're trying to just navigate through the next year then move out of Daytona.

I think the only thing we'll miss is this house we JUST moved into... the kids love the lake out back, the dock, and the sunroom is VERY large which makes a great playroom and classroom.

Phew...well that was a mouthful.