Memories… Times two!

I was reading with Miss 8 tonight before my weekly violin teaching. She’d read her school reader earlier this afternoon, so we’d pulled out a book that I’d read when *I* was learning to read, a few decades ago. “The Hermit’s Purple Shirts”. I liked it, and so does Miss 8.
It was strange, to be listening to her read I book I’d read, so many years ago. The memories of then, combining with the memories that were created tonight… So precious.
Here’s hoping that you also had a great day, dear readers!
— Ceridwyn

A rainbow *sob*

Yesterday was a memorable day. My pretty much non-verbal, autistic, Mr 3 blew me away.

“Mummy? When [it] raining… when it stop… [we see] rainbow. Okay?”

Precious words from the gorgeous lips of my (no longer non-verbal!) little man!!! It was lunchtime, and he was busy munching on his favourite sandwich – sprinkles – and we were listening to the pelting of the rain on our tin roof. And he just started talking, right out of the blue (well, grey, actually, if that phrase is referring to ‘sky’ LOL). He’d obviously been thinking about when the rain would stop (although for most of the day, it just poured and poured and poured; the type of rain that you think will never ever end) and he verbalised what he’d been thinking about.

What a tear-jerker moment!!!

And what made it more special? Posting about it on Facebook and getting SO many supportive comments and ‘Likes’ from online friends. It was just SO incredible to be able to share it with those who know me, and know Mr 3 & our situation, and to see that they were as touched as I was by it. One comment especially made me think. Katherine Howard, I’m looking at you! She mentioned that it was “a lovely observation to verbalise” – and I couldn’t agree more! The idea of the ‘rainbow’. The beauty, after all the miserable-non-stop-rain; the happiness after the perpetual dreariness; even the promise of hope from the original Noah-and-the-Ark Bible story . It perfectly mirrored what had just happened. My little man, talking, after so many months of not. So unbelievably precious!

Wow. Just wow! It was a special, special day. 😀

Thanks for letting me share that with you, too, dear readers – and have yourselves some incredible days today, too! 😀

With $200 I can…

It’s interesting, isn’t it, the value that we people place on things. $200 is a lot of money – in some respects. In others, it’s a tiny amount.

I blogged the other day about the Proloquo2Go app – and how I felt as though the $200 I spent on it was worth it, to hear my son go from pretty much zero speech, to now volunteering, audibly and fairly intelligibly “Look, Mummy, look at all the bubbles” (washing his hands in the bathroom sink). Is $200 a lot for an App? Yes, absolutely. I don’t disagree. Nor do I regret paying it; I’m daily witnessing the results!

I guess… it’s what you compare it to. See the expenditure as ‘just another app’ and it seems ridiculous. See it as ‘educational’ and then it gets classed with other such educational expenses, right?

–       It’s cheaper than Miss 8’s glasses. And HEAPS cheaper than her 6 weeks of ‘Vision Therapy’ that she attended

–       It’s more expensive (but not by much) than one term’s worth of swimming lessons. For one child, that is…

–       It’s cheaper than Miss 8’s orthotics; but it’s about the same price as the school shoes we bought for her just a couple of weeks ago

–       It’s more expensive than school books, or school uniforms (when you buy them second hand LOL) but it’s ¼ the price of school fees for a term

–       It’s roughly equivalent to Hubby & I eating out at our favourite restaurant… twice

And I could keep on going, but I’m sure you get the idea.

When it comes down to it, value is in the eye of the beholder. Do I feel as though the expense was worth it? Yup. Absolutely. And I’d do it again in a heartbeat!

App review: Proloquo2Go

Late last year, I purchased the App “Proloquo2Go”, on the recommendation of Mr 3’s Speech Therapist. It was expensive. But worth it!

It’s programmable, so you can make words (buttons) and phrases and sentences, categorise them according to high-interest activities (we have one folder for Playstation games and a separate one for Wii games, and then folders for breakfast, lunch, etc etc) and if the photo to accompany the word isn’t already in the App’s library, you can take a photo of the concept, and use that.

One downfall is that you can’t program your own voice – but that’s a pretty minor disadvantage, compared to all the positives.

Worth the $200? To hear my autistic boy move from being non-verbal to verbal?!

YES!!!!!

Sleeping in

Hubby likes to sleep in. Fair enough – he has an extremely intense job, and he needs his recovery time.

I’m an early bird. I’ve never really enjoyed staying in bed when I could be up and doing stuff. (I go to bed late too, but that’s probably an insomnia thing…) I’m always up and about by 6. Often by 5.30 – and regularly, much earlier.

Our kids seem  to follow my ‘early rising’ habits, which Hubby doesn’t particularly appreciate. But it was funny, the conversation the other morning.

Hubby: “You slept in until after 6.30 this morning, [Miss 8]. Well done!”

Miss 8: “Yes, I’m learning. I like sleeping in! I try to sleep in until 7 o’clock on weekdays, but Mummy won’t let me!”

(It was at this point that I choked on my toast. I laughed, hard, for a long time. We have to leave for school before 7.30 if we’re going to get there on time – and getting them ready by 7.30 only happens when they all are out of bed by 6am.)

It was really a very very very funny moment!

Miss 5

Miss 4 became Miss 5 today. She’s very very very excited about it, but also a little confused that her party isn’t happening today. And the concept of “everyone’s on holidays so we’ll wait until school goes back” *is* a little tricky to understand for someone who only starts school (and therefore has holidays) this year. Her big concern, when she woke up this morning, was that today would just be a ‘normally day’ (her words) like her Daddy’s birthday was yesterday (it was his first day back at work) and so she was trying to insist that today was NOT her birthday, but that her birthday would be the day that she had her party. Cute, huh?

Nevertheless, today is definitely her birthday, the day that, back in 2008, exhausted and in pain, I held her in my arms for the very first time. She looked like her big sister had, blue eyes and dark brown hair (which would later lighten to blonde) and she was SUCH a good baby, right from the get-go. She had an umbilical hernia, and a huge strawberry birthmark on one knee, and when the midwife saw her at her ten-day mark, she discovered that she was also slightly tongue-tied. (No wonder feeding her had been rather painful; she couldn’t latch properly!)

Still an’ all, those were wonderful days, and now they’re precious memories. Like today will be, I’m sure. She’s my middle child, my blondie with blue eyes, my cruisy kid, my clumsy yet giggle-a-minute, talk-under-water-with-a-mouthful-of-marbles kid. I love her to bits and am SOOOOOOO blessed to have her in my life.

Happy birthday, Miss 5!!!

Birthday week

It’s Sunday the 13th of January. Which means that tomorrow is the start of birthday week.
There are 5 in my immediate family. Hubby & me, our two daughters, and our son. Hubby and both of our daughters all celebrate their birthdays in this coming week.
Hubby’s birthday is the 14th. He turns 41. Miss 4 turns into Miss 5 the following day. Then, on the 20th, Miss 7 becomes Miss 8.
It’s going to be a big week…

Zoo day

On Saturday, “Baby Bob” Irwin turned 9 years old. And judging by the crowds of people who were at Australia Zoo on the gorgeous sun-filled day, he had a very happy birthday!
We were there, the three cherubs and I, sunscreened to the max and with full water bottles weighing us down. It was a beautiful day!
I had hoped to follow our family favourite – the 10am otter feeding – with the 10.30 Feed the Elephants session… but I had not realised that they’d moved the Elephant feed to outside their enclosure, all the way on the other side of the zoo. Oops! Oh well. Tea cup rides and time on the Jumping Castle soothed Miss 4’s extreme disappointment, and time in the sandpit near the dinosaur ‘cave’ was in order, prior to feeding the baby farm animals and then the midday Croc show. It being Robert’s birthday, he came and fed a croc, as did Bindi; and Terri tried getting a uncooperative Mossman (the Zoe’s largest Salt-Water Croc) to eat a feral pig. We sat up the back, and got a good view of the birds, with a lizard for company next to Miss 7.
Then it was kangaroo feeding time, pony ride time, and elephant feeding time…

Catching up

I can’t believe how quickly this last week has gone. It’s Sunday afternoon and I only blogged once this week!!! (sorry Jo!) I *knew* I was going to be busy… I guess I just figured that I’d still get the odd few minutes here and there to blog. Whoops!
So I spent all day Tuesday in Brisbane, at the Facebook Small Business Bootcamp. As in, a workshop run BY the people from Facebook. It was great; I learned heaps; and will (when time permits) be making numbers of changes to my own Business Facebook page, and the pages of my clients’. So that’s cool!
But Tuesday being gone, that meant that Tuesday’s work needed to be done on Wednesday (as well as Wednesday’s work, of course) and I also needed to plan Thursday’s, because I’d be spending Thursday in Hervey Bay, running a branding photoshoot morning for a client. Home by 5.30pm Thursday to an even bigger backlog of work, plus a house resembling a bombsite because I hadn’t been there…
So now it’s Sunday afternoon. I’m in Hippo House, Morayfield, sporadically looking up to check on my three cherubs amongst the others running around at this birthday party. Yes, I’m being anti-social, blogging on my phone instead of socialising with the other parents. Oh well! I’m sure they don’t mind (it’s hard to carry on a conversation here anyway, due to excited children screams and other various noises) and I’ve really really missed you, dear readers! So. Better late than never??! And here’s hoping that I’ll be back in some kind of routine again this coming week!
Oh crap. I’ve just realised that the week starts tomorrow. 😦

(It’s rather noisy here at the moment…)

Bernie

It feels like ages since I blogged about Miss 4. She’s my little TV addict. Hubby used to worry about how much time she spent in front of the screen, but I assured him that it was less than he thought. She would just like to watch ABC2  (a kids’ TV channel) in the early evenings, so he would come home from work, see her in front of the idiot box, and assume that she’d been there all day. Which she hadn’t.
Plus, from what I remember of what I learned, way back when Miss 7 was a baby and I was going to a Mother’s group, the main concern with too much TV watching in kids was that they don’t develop their vocabulary as quickly as non-TV watching kids. Apparently it’s something like 6 words fewer that they learn, per every hour of TV. But that was never going to be a problem with her. She could talk the hind leg off a donkey before she was 2 and a half!
So she was always able to balance out her TV watching with talking, and drawing, coloring in, trying to write, and so on. And she, like her older sister, seems to be developing an amazing memory – for images, at least!
Just the other day, she asked me if she could watch a particular TV show. But she couldn’t really remember the name of it. So she drew the picture (below) then tried describing it, and what she remembered.

• It is on ABC2
• The main character (on the left) is ‘Bernie’
• He is happy
• His friend is angry a lot

I still couldn’t guess, so I delved further.

• Bernie is on two shows, she only wants to watch one of them
• In the show she’d seen, he was playing with a baby (this didn’t help very much!)
• One of the shows he is in, is Sesame Street
• She doesn’t want to watch Sesame Street, she wants to watch the other show.

And then the penny dropped. And I looked closer at her drawing and was very impressed… Miss 4 hadn’t watched the show in literally months, yet she had remembered the huge smile on her favourite character, the stripes on his shirt and his bigger, frizzy hair. She’d also remembered the unhappy look of the other character, his plain shirt and his shorter, sticky-up hair. And drawn them both really, very accurately, all things considered!
So… can you guess the show too?