Week 93

We had Ryan's CSE meeting on January 19th and as expected they qualified Ryan for speech services.  We are still annoyed that we wasted all of this time.  He could have been receiving speech services since September.  We are still not pleased with the progress that we are seeing with the program at Wappingers.  He made such great progress by this time last year we are now wondering if we made a mistake in not sending him to a full day program.  But we did meet with his new speech teacher and she seems really nice and we are hopeful that with the twice a six day cycle sessions we will start seeing some progress with Ryan.  We will keep you updated.
 

Getting ready to play in the snow!

Ryan loved throwing snow at Daddy and Julia!

Ryan with his cousin, Johnny.

GFCF brownies!

Making very elaborate paper airplanes with Nonna and Papa!

Happy Birthday Uncle T!  

PC

Ryan and Julia are both very excited about having a baby brother or sister.  Ryan now says he wants a baby brother and might want to name him "Batman Beyond"; too funny!  Now that the baby bump is evident we are getting tons of questions about the sex of the baby.  We are not planning to find out and want to be surprised.  So usually the next question to follow is which we would prefer.  I know it is somewhat of a cliche, but we truly just want a healthy baby.  Once you actually have your own child this statement really hits home.  I look at my children and am so grateful for who they are and what joy they have brought us.  I know we are very lucky!  As difficult as things may sometimes get, and the sacrifices we need to make, it is nothing compared to what others have to face with a truly sick child.  I would feel an enormous amount of guilt and sadness bringing a child into this world who would suffer from pain; sadly there is way too much suffering in this world already! 

DC

Week 91

Ryan had a good week and a busy weekend.  I made him flashcards of the site words he is working on in Kindergarten, and he did a great job.  There are 100 and we started with 6 of them.  Once he was able to recognize and read all of them back to me, I added another 6.  And then another 6.  So he is up to 18 words.  He struggles with a couple of them, but for the most part he has them memorized.  Julia participated in the same activities with us and learned how to read the same site words.  It was interesting to see the difference in how each of them handled the task at hand.  Ryan wanted me to read him the word, then he studied it, and somehow memorized it.  For the ones he didn't quite memorized I tried to get him to sound it out, but he had a lot of difficulty doing that.  He made numerous mistakes with the sounds that the letters made.  And most times, he just refused to sound it out, knowing he wouldn't be able to do it.  Julia didn't want me to tell her the word, or even help her sound it out.  She sounded each one out on her own, and was able to correctly read the word most times.  We already knew Ryan is a very visual learner, and now we know Julia is a very auditory learner.  We'll keep practicing the cards until we get up to knowing all 100!

Ryan did cheat a bit with his diet over the weekend as we visited family and friends, but overall he did a nice job.  Here are some pictures of our trip to Eastchester and Brooklyn on Sunday:

Hanging with his cousins!

New ornaments

Meeting my friend's baby for the first time.

With the anniversary of our first miscarriage passing this week, it was reassuring to get another ultrasound and hear that all is going exactly on track with this pregnancy.  By the way, Ryan would like us to name the baby "Batman Beyond".

DC

Week 90

We have been so busy the last few weeks.  We have had a lot going on and the blog has taken a back seat.  But we are back and have some updates for you.

Just after our last blog entry, Ryan was retested for speech. This was something that he received 3 times a week last year but our current school district cut it out of his IEP.  Now they are telling us that they noticed that Ryan had some speech delays and they wanted to get him tested.  This is something that made us both angry, because we fought to get him speech this year but they refused.  Now they are telling us, as if we did not notice, that Ryan was behind in his speech and that he needs to be tested.  He could have been receiving speech services these past five months if they listened to us back in May.  But he was tested and we have a meeting next week to set up his speech services for help with pragmatics and language.

Ryan had a lot of fun this Christmas.  This year we had Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the day after Christmas all at our house.  We had a lot of company visit and Ryan had a great time playing with his cousins.

His large gift from Santa was a Lego table which he sits at almost every day and plays.

While everyone was having a great time, this was the start of Phil's medical problems.  Phil had to be rushed to the ER for kidney stones on Christmas morning, right in the middle of us opening gifts.  He was in the ER for over 4 hours.

New Years Eve we spent at Dawn's parents' with Uncle T, Auntie B, Amelia, and Alyssa.  The kids had a great time staying up to watch the ball drop and ring in the new year.  It was another exciting time with the cousins and Ryan had a lot of fun learning how to play pool with Papa.

Pillow fight with Amelia

Happy New Year!

Ryan displayed good patience learning from papa how to hit the ball.

After the New Year, Phil had his kidney stone blasted.  He had so many complications with this procedure that he ended up back in the ER three more times in four days, and finally had to be admitted to the hospital for emergency surgery to remove the stones and drain the infection out of his kidney. This surgery was supposed to be a simple, in and out procedure, but since nothing with these kidney stones had been simple so far, neither was this.  Some complications arose and he spent two nights in the hospital.  He was discharged today (Sunday, January 8, 2012) and both kids were very happy to see him (and mommy too!)

The break from school during the holidays, and constant change in care givers as we spent so much time back and forth in the hospital this week, threw Ryan's schedule off tremendously.  He did not want to go back to school after a week and a half of vacation and gave us a real difficult time getting ready in the morning.  He does not want to do his class work and even forgot to bring his backpack to school one day.  He's also giving us a difficult time about writing his last name and doing homework.  He seems a bit depressed about going to school, and we'll be discussing this further during his CSE meeting at school next week.  Hopefully with everyone getting back to a regular schedule Ryan will settle back into his normal routine.

Although it doesn't seem like we've had the best of starts to the new year, we do have a lot to look forward to this year!!!

12 weeks

We hope that everyone had a wonderful Holiday Season and we wish you a very Happy New Year.

PC and DC