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.