December 14

I started this Do-Nothing Monday by - oh my! - doing something. I had an 8:00 meeting with Caleb's teacher regarding the homeschooling situation. Honestly, I wasn't sure what the point of the meeting was, but I felt like it needed to happen. Once I arrived, I realized that his teacher had pulled together a whole team to talk with me. His teacher, a counselor, an instructional coach, and the school's speech language pathologist all came to talk with me. It was a great meeting, and I left feeling supported, encouraged, and appreciative for the school community Caleb has. I'm sorry to be leaving it, but I feel that home schooling is the right thing for Caleb for right now. At this point, I have no idea what the future holds for his education; I'm committing to home schooling him for the next six months, and after that we will reevaluate. 

One kink in the plan is that Caleb will very likely qualify for special education services for his speech. I'm shocked to write that; he's always had a great vocabulary and spoke so well, so early. But in a preliminary observation, the school's SLP saw that Caleb had vocal disfluencies (stutters, pauses, word repetitions, etc.) 23% of the time. 10% qualifies for services, so this is worth looking into. Luckily, the district is required to provide services to home schoolers who qualify, so the kink is just scheduling the further testing and determining whether it will be done at the school, or through a different program. 

Chris handled the kids while I met with Caleb's team, and headed off to work as soon as I was there to relieve him. After that, we did a whole lot of nothing today.

Eli "helped" with the dishes.

He is proud of his work.

And he crawled. Watch him go. Scroll up and down and it's like watching a stop-motion video.

 

 

I know. It's a lot of crawling pictures. But it's not even half of what I took. So there.

The girls were there, but I didn't take pictures. We made cinnamon applesauce ornaments that were a disappointment, and the girls spent a lot of time reading and making music with their guitar and ukulele.

But back to Eli. I'm really enjoying the way he is suddenly communicating now. He repeats sounds back to us, and I'm pretty sure he says a few words, but not consistently enough for me to declare anything his first word. When I left this morning to go to the meeting, the kids were all eating breakfast at the kitchen table. I called, "Bye-bye!" as I left, and Eli absolutely, clearly said, "Ba ba!" in response. It was awesome.

At dinner tonight, I noticed that when he wanted more food, he would sign "milk". We've started working on "more" and "eat", but he hasn't grasped those the way he has "milk". And really, I suppose it makes sense. I had to get a video of him in his high chair, signing "milk"!