I seem to have a lot of school related things on my brain lately. I will be the first to admit that i am not a math person, numbers can literally confuse me on sight. J brought home a math worksheet for homework the other day and i had to get help on it. How sad is that? I am not smarter then a first grader in math? I at least thought i would have the Elementary School years before my kids found out that mommy is definitely lacking in certain educational areas.
Apparently not.
At the end of Kindergarden, J went through the testing for the IEP and qualified for services in speech which is the only area that he is lacking. This IEP enables him to get extra services for the areas that he is lacking. The only other thing to do was label him and i hate that term “label” because it will be with him forever. However it needed to be done we had to determine if he would be “Developmentally Delayed” or “Learning Disabled”. Both of them will get him services that he needs, however the “Learning Disabled” label will limit the services that he receives to just those outlined in the IEP whereas the “Developmentally Delayed” will allow him to get whatever services he needs within the time frame. A child can only be labelled “Developmentally Delayed” until they are 8 and then if they are still having issues and needing an IEP then they will be changed to “Learning Disabled”. Having gotten the IEP in place for the start of the school year was a big help, however either i didn’t listen or they didn’t make it clear that not only was J to get speech assistence he would also be seeing a resource teacher and that would be every day. I have gone over my notes and i know that i didn’t get that anywhere.
First grade has been an adjustment for J, he is in a class with a lot of students with IEP’s and i am not sure that is a good thing. The teacher is great and has experience not only with students handling delays, but a variety of grade levels and really is the type of teacher i had hoped J would have last year.
J’s schedule is tough and he comes home exhausted at the end of each and every day. It makes getting the homework he has to do hard because he is so tired and i swear there are days that i hear his brain say “STOP!”.
It is hard as a parent to know that your child, while they need this assistence, is constantly struggling to do the work and retain some of the stuff that they are throwing at him. There is such a constant push on the teachers to get the kids taught and a push to get them all ready to take the EOG’s (End of Grade Tests) starting in third grade that school is more like a boot camp.
I have a good team of teachers though and am able to communicate with all of them my concerns. I am keeping up with his schedule and am giving him some time to adjust to all the work being expected of him. While i know it is tiring for him, i cannot stop encouraging him to try to keep up with the work. I cannot storm the school and demand that they change all the rules just for my son, as much as i want them to. I cannot expect that after a summer of easy times that his first weeks of school will be easy ones, since so many things come hard for him. I know that he is trying his best and is being challenged every day.
It has been a few weeks now and we are getting into the swing of things here at school, i am noticing that first grade is SO MUCh harder then i remember. Ok i don’t REALLY remember first grade, but i certainly don’t remember this amount of work being put into it. Maybe i don’t remember it because first grade may not of been as hard for me as it is for my oldest, J.
Many of you may or may not know, that J has suffered from a Speech Delay since forever, really since he should of been cooing say at 6 months but really didn’t. Somehow that whole hearing thing is really important in that sort of development. Well medical reasons aside when we finally got him to a point where he could now hear at 100% around the age of two we started him in on the speech, occupational and cognitive therapy to help him catch up to his peers. He still hasn’t caught up and i will tell you that i am fine with that. Don’t get me wrong, it breaks my heart to see him struggle, really struggle with conversational skills and just get completely frustrated with his inability to communicate even after 4 years in speech therapy. He has come such a long way though and we have done everything we could get our hands on to get him here.
At the end of Kindergarten last year i was able to finally get him back on an IEP (individualized education plan) since having his lapse when the public school system didn’t have speech therapists avaiblable even though he qualified for the public school program. Our county is really struggling in this area and they couldn’t fit him in. So i paid for him to see a private speech therapist to continue his therapy because i was just not going to let his progress lapse and we have great insurance that picks up 60 sessions of speech therapy a year, just enough to get him to Kindergarten.
In Kindergarten i really fought with the teacher to get him put back on an IEP (if you do not remain with the state provided program even if there is no one available and you get outside help your IEP will lapse) and she just kept telling me to wait that a switch will turn on… *sigh* I understand the need to be optiimistic, i do, i want nothing more than J to be more like the others, but he won’t ever completely and i knew that he needed this plan to get assistance. It came down to my getting the principal involved and this was after the New year and then things got moving. The speech therapist had already known about him and was helping him once a week without the IEP as a favor to us and i know that we needed that IEP to get him more time with her.
For me participating in my son’s school activities is very important to me. I want to be as involved as i can in his and when the others are in school their classrooms as well. I make it a point to volunteer for field day and any other school activities that i can and that i can swing getting someone to watch the other boys for. What i don’t understand is how to break into this apparently elite group, the PTA. I pay my dues and am a member, go to meetings, but i tell ya, i have a better chance of snagging a date with George Clooney then getting someone to notice that hey i am trying to get involved over HERE!
What do i need to do to get them to notice that i want to be an active member of the PTA? I have 4 boys and am just beginning this school journey so i think that i will be with them for a long LONG time.
Any clues or hints from you moms out there?
I spend a vast amount of time picking up toys. Anyone else out there have this problem? I often wonder why women walk upright as we spend i bet 80% of the day picking up the various toys that are scattered like breadcrumbs throughout the house. It isn’t as if i will lose them if they don’t leave this elaborate trail, but they feel the need to leave it nonetheless. You times this trail by three since technically the fourth one just leaves a trail of slime and baby food…aahh the cutting of teeth what a joy you are.
I will never fully understand the love that my boys have for each day coming downstairs and systematically taking apart every toy chest that we have. I am also amazed that this meticulous ability does not transfer over into picking up the toys and putting them back. You see this action seems to not work. I think it is genetic as their father exhibits a similiar trait in the area of his socks and the floor.
So my day involves going around to the various piles and screeching to pick them up only to met with looks of confusion each time. One day i will get through or i will snap and they will see a cubix full of Matchbox cars hurtling through space. Mark my words folks, i will not be picking these things up forever… I won’t right?
Today was hot here, i mean super hot and muggy. These are the days that the boys normally want to spend outside while i wilt in the oppressive heat and moisture, however today they were happy to stay inside and play. That might be due in part to the bribing with stickers, i can’t say for sure.
My Dyson vacuum that i love above all other vacuums has succumbed to the vacuum curse that lives in this house. We have the canister model and the hose that travels from the canister to the back of the handle has pretty much torn off. I have no idea how this happened and am not super excited about it. I vacuum pretty much every day, with boys it is the only way to stay ahead of the game. So after much harping on my end, M has called Dyson (as the oh and holy Best Buy does not offer a warranty for this product ~that is billed as guarenteed not to break HA~, but Dyson offers a full warranty for 5 years) and they are sending us a new hose. YEAH I was worried that it would be like the Best Buy deal on vacuums, where you take them in to service and hear nothing for weeks and are then told they can’t fix it come in and get a new one and repeat for the next several years. Hopefully it doesn’t take long, we are going out of town to the in laws on Friday and i haven’t been able to vacuum in two days. I am SUFFERING people. The boys need to live in bubbles so i can look at them without thinking of the dirt they are tracking through the house.
I cannot believe that at this point summer is almost gone! In less than a month i will be sending J off to first grade. There is so much to cram in before then! I have just been drowning in so many things lately and have barely been able to form a thought much less form a decent blog post. I am working on trying to get my craft area organized and get some stuff ready to sell on my etsy store so that i can earn some extra money to pay off the nine gazillion dollars that we owe in medical bills. I have also been dealing with J who has decided that i am a mean mommy and he doesn’t want to be around me, D who has declared war on #3 to the point of causing some serious injuries to #3, #3 who i snow dealing with a torn ear drum from D during some “play” in which daddy was “watching” them and #4 is just growing up so fast i can’t stand it.
Can you believe that Michael’s has their Halloween stuff out already? I mean totally random thought here, but any earlier and we will be taking down the Christmas trees and they will be promoting Halloween!
Enjoy your day everyone and remember to take the time to appreciate your loved ones and show them you care, each day with them is a gift!
With school being out most of us are faced with summer days full of kids running around and quite possibly if they are anything like mine, whining about having NOTHING TO DO!!! They only have forty million toys and every book known to man, yet are faced with a summer of nothing to do, endless boredom. OH THE HORROR! So in an effort to stave off the mind numbing “We’re bored!” and “What is there to do?”, I picked a theme for us to focus on and base activities off of for the summer. Are you ready? The theme for the summer is: The Ocean. I know big surprise and totally original.
My sister, my niece and my cousins (mom and daughter) come over an average of 3-4 times a week and so the activities i have been planning involve them as well. First we started off with the sun and i cut triangles out of yellow and orange paper and glued them around paper plates. The boys then painted on them what a sun looked like to them. I wrote the word “Sun” on mine (again so very original) and we practice reading the word.
Next i had some 12×12 blue sheets and some sand colored sheets that i taped to the wall making the water and ocean floor. From this point on we are just working on different crafts to fill our ocean. It is learning without all the boring lecturing and they are learning something. Each one has kept a little piece from everything we talk about.
We are still doing all the fun things that summer involves pools, sprinklers, lots of water things, playing outside, riding bikes, riding scooters and skateboards, cooking outside, eating icees, everything that one thinks of when they think of the summer. We haven’t gone to the beach yet, but it is on the list we just have to find the time. I find that the boys have a better time when they have things to focus on instead of just meandoring around. They like learning and who am i to not encourage that?
What are you doing this summer?
My friend and i were sharing a quick moment at the sink while waiting for her much needed coffee to brew and were sharing stories of birthday parties. We both have kids that have birthdays during the summer and while we love our children, having a birthday party in the summer just sucks. You would think not and that it would be the easiest thing to plan, what with it being warm enough to just hold it by the nearest basin of water. Think about it though, summer is when families do things together, away from home, quite often. This mostly means that 99% of the children invited to summer birthday parties will be out of town or busy. That is quite hard to explain to a now 6 yr old.
We could call around to his friends and find out a date that works better for them, but then that is really no guarentee that they will come. Let’s face it life happens regardless of the season and i want my child to have a great birthday party. Here are some of the things that we did in order to ensure a little better turn out then prior years. I hope that this helps some of you with summer birthdays:
1) Deliver invitations for school friends close to the end of school so that they have something to plan for or around at the beginning of the summer. my son was in Kindergarten this past year and we handed invitations out during the last week of school, this worked out well as it was fresh on people’s minds when planning the beach trip.
2) Try scheduling the party the weekend before or after a holiday, or the first weekend after year round school starts. People are more likely to be in town at these times.
3) Let people know if you are planning on having a pool or water related party and make sure you are prepared to provide towels if needed for all the kids coming to the party. Very few people will be happy to show up to a party where everyone is playing in the pool and they have come unprepared.
4) Use your online outlets to your advantage. I post the event on my Facebook and Twitter accounts and make sure to update my CafeMom page and my blog since many of my local friends read that as well. This keeps the event fresh in everyone’s minds.
I would love to hear any of your ideas on how to encourage a good turn out for your child’s summer birthday party. I hope that these tips help someone with their party.
As the summer approaches we have started dusting off the grills and smoker in preparation of a flame enhanced good time. This year it is our goal to have more people over. While we have done a good job of having friends over in the past, i have been pregnant nearly all the time and it has really been hard for me to enjoy myself. So now we have moved on to this new phase in life and it is one where we get to know our friends again.
Living in North Carolina we have been following the success of the Carolina Hurricanes in the NHL playoffs and this has meant many many grilling opportunities. I will tell you if there is a ball or puck my husband will watch it and cheer on a team with a vengance! So hockey season is winding down, next up is baseball and then football. Ahh the never ending days of sports to come.
For all the men that come over i do quite a bit of cooking as most of them either have wives that don’t cook or are single and leftovers are always welcome. One of the hands down favorites is our patented BBQ Chicken. We mainly grill thighs because that is what we both prefer, but this sauce works on any piece of chicken.
Flowers BBQ Sauce
1 stick Butter
1 bottle Jack Daniels BBQ sauce ( we are partial to Honey and Masterpiece)
1/2 cup ketchup
1/4 cup mustard
2 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp brown sugar
Melt the butter in a saucepan. Add the rest of the ingredients over medium heat and allow to come to a boil. Remove from heat. Cook chicken on the grill, if doing breasts it is about 15-20 minutes per side. Brush the chicken with the sauce once cooked through and cook an additional 5 minutes per side. Brush with sauce once you turn them. I don’t recommend putting the sauce on for the whole time that the chicken is on the grill as the sauce will burn and that is just not good chicken. Also we have found that this recipe really does only taste this great with the Jack Daniels BBQ sauce none of the other brands have that distinct flavor.
That is SO not a plug for the sauce. Enjoy!
