Highlights from the Garden Patch!

I am such a slacker--so now here is the update on my garden. (hopefully I remember the proper vegetable names!)


Celery is doing well! He's loving his job and has a cool assignment this summer! I can share more after it is completed. He has enjoyed his bowling league this past season--when he was in town to bowl! He is wishing his wife would actually not just listen to Dave Ramsey, but perhaps do a thing or two that he suggests.

Rutabega: Well she turns 9 this summer! Her last year of single digits! She will be having a birthday party at an ice cream shop next to a movie theater and I don't have to do a darn thing but invite children to it! I LOVE IT! We will get to see the new movie UP! She is completing 3rd grade. She has had her testing and everything. But this month, you could tell that they were ready for summer. And I as the loving mother who wants my children to learn realistically opted to let them goof off for the month of May to find out what happens when you don't finish your school work in time!

Yep--we are doing....SUMMER SCHOOL! We still have a few things to finish reading and her Math book to complete.

In the meantime, summer plans include her first ever swim team! She is very excited to do this with a great friend of hers. She also is going to be on her first competition dance team which does a Pom routine (think basketball half-time shows, but age appropriate of course!). She will get to compete twice at Disney World! Exciting stuff going on her!

She has had some Physical Therapy recently for an overrated leg! Okay, so the first day we went to PT, We realized she could turn her leg completely around--with her foot facing backwards! You know that isn't normal when the PT calls for the other PT and says "You gotta see this!" Eeeek! Evidently children are excellent healers and her leg is now behaving appropriately. When she walks her foot now lands properly instead of all pigeon-toed like.

She saw immediate improvements in gymnastics as a result. She falls off the beam much much less than she did and her straddles have opened up more on the trampolines. Her coaches have also nearly ceased telling her to keep her foot straight! Yeah!

The only negative side effect--she is less able to do the gumby twist with her leg. But sometimes we must sacrifice wackiness for proper body mechanics!

She is also excelling at piano. Something's clicking because she now takes ordinary skills and plays them so beautifully. It just sends me to la la land sometimes listening to them.


Butternut is also doing well! She too made the mini-pom team and is ecstatic about her future career plans in some kind of entertainment field.

Yesterday, Butternut got her new to her violin. We rented it from this awesome place her future violin teacher recommended. After a wild search and a call to the store for not knowing where the rosin was hiding, we rosined up her bow and she got to "squeek" as she calls it. She's very excited. We aren't doing too much as we don't know what exactly to do with this instrument. But the store said it was okay to tinker with it a little bit and to enjoy it! We are renting it for now and she is in a 1/8th size. Man is that a tiny violin!

I'd like to say she is enjoying piano--but she puts up with it! She stuck with it only because we required her to as a prerequisite for piano. I mean--hello--we own a piano! She enjoys playing, just not the lessons.

You see--Butternut is our free spirit! She is most happiest when she can Produce, Write, Direct, Choreograph and design all elements of her own production! She just has to be taught that there are "basics" and "techniques". So it is funny to watch her sometimes argue with the Piano teacher over how she prefers to play something "differently". Well not truly funny as we don't want her to be disrespectful and rude, but funny in the sense that she would be quite happy performing on a stage for you just for the sake of doing so. She's got a very laissez-faire attitude at times. Which will have benefits later on. But for now--it's a lot of BUTTERNUT!

Alfalfa Sprout is a pure delight! He was tall enough to ride Goofy Barnstormer this weekend at Magic Kingdom in Disney World! He's just a couple of months past 2, so this was exciting stuff as the girls weren't tall enough until they were 3. Of course, his excitement and fun kind of diminished when we went through the ride itself. He just wasn't expecting all the...roller coaster-y stuff. So we have one photo and he just looks like he wants OFF. I will have to post it later if I can figure that stuff out.

Alfalfa Sprout is still in speech therapy. His pediatrician wanted him in it last fall because he was not meeting any verbal milestones. I won't go into details. I know kids will talk eventually and Einstein didn't speak until three.

But he demonstrates the skill of a child with Childhood Apraxia of Speech. In laymen's terms--he wants to communicate, but his brain just can't deliver the signal to his mouth to move. Much like a child with dyslexia would love to read or a child with dysgraphia would love to write. In those cases, the will of the child does not overcome the brains inability to properly transmit the communication. So it requires help to get past that.

With Alfalfa Sprout and CAS--it requires a different speech therapy. It is my understanding that a kid who is not talking correctly would need help with proper formation of their speech. A child with CAS needs to be encouraged to speak and the therapy is just much different.

For example--a child with a lisp would do exercises to help articulate the S's properly. My son cannot form it at all let alone correctly. While S is beyond his skill set, we have been working on D's, P's, M's and B's. He may say a sound, he may not--but his therapy starts with getting him to say ANYTHING and accepting and praising that and then goes on to the correct sound, then to vowels, then to words.

And funny--my son can say..."cheese". It was his first real word. Completely random but completely normal for a child with CAS. His brain just decided to try that word and it worked--we praised him and he has used it consistently since. It is not perfectly articulated but it is the word. (there's a very hard push that he does with his tongue, teeth, and forced air and there is a lisp in the word) But for now--we accept it and praise him continuously when it is used in context.

An example of something else we accept and praise? Ba-ba. Now you don't know what a Ba-ba is. One my think bottle. Well, ba-ba is Thomas the train and in some cases any train. But specifically it is Thomas the Train. What does ba-ba have to do with a train. I have no idea, but for now we accept it because it is a verbal name for an object that he uses consistently AND it is a consonant sound we have been trying to achieve as well as a vowel sound.

And lest some folks think--see, he's learning on his own. Well he's not. He's been in Speech for nearly 8 months now. Up until 2 months ago, there was no copiable sound that he would do. That is another sign of CAS, no copying. At all. Even for stuff they know in the beginning. (He said ma ma for the longest time but would not copy us at all to say it. So when we learned da da and we wanted him to say ma ma, he would do his da da first and we would copy. Then he would say ma ma and we would copy. But never the other way around!) In fact, these milestones didn't occur until we upped speech to twice a week!

I'm glad that he is in it b/c it does help his self esteem. He has learned sign language as a means to communicate and has a big ASL vocabulary for his age. He has been wanting to communicate for a very long time and could not. Now he can. And that just builds his self esteem so that he will at least try to formulate the sounds that he needs to say.


As for Me?
I joined the gym for some quality me time and when I go, I work very hard. Before our vacation I was up to 4 miles a day on my treadmill at home followed by additional cardio and strength training at the gym later on in the day. I'm very excited because I have always wanted to be athletic! And if I ever opt to do a marathon again, I would like it to not be as difficult to train for a basic finish. Heck, I might even try for a very cool personal record for myself.

I also did some dance in the spring learning some tap and some hip hop. I looked like a goof ball and then after a while the hip hop wasn't so silly feeling. I hope to resume that in the fall.

I am also looking to resume Piano as well. But I have to find a way to fit in the practice time!



And that's what's been happening in the garden!

Sorry for spelling errors--I am posting without spellchecking! Sometimes you have to live on the wild side!