Kids School & Activity Update

Grant had his IEP meeting this week for speech and parent teacher conferences for school.  For a long time he has been working on his hard K and G sounds and his therapist has tried everything from A to Z with no luck.  He was not being defiant during his speech time but would openly say "I don't like K's"  It was mutually decided that a break would be a good option.  Experts in the field say that there is a level of maturation needed to make the tongue arch up in the back which is necessary for producing these sounds.  Hopefully with some time we will see improvement.  The fear of repeating words constantly the wrong way was also discussed.  So we will work on modeling sounds correctly for him and hope this is just a phase that he will out grow.  In the past he has had some minor issues with stuttering but each time it comes and goes and each stuttering phase seems to bring on a wave of new sounds.  All those neurons firing at the same time and not being to process it all type business!  In the last 10 days or so he has starting to stutter words at the beginning of a sentence. I am hopeful that history will repeat itself and perhaps this stuttering phase will be for new sounds.  We will have him screened again in the fall for sure, maybe end of this school year if we see progress.

His parent teacher conference went well. Academically he is doing great.  Apparently, I don't make my capital G the "right way" so he learned wrong is working very hard on trying to follow the standard! I know from Elizabeth's report card that he needs to conform (if only for a short time!) in order to receive full credit.  He's got his letters, shapes, numbers, etc... down.  He is respectful in class. The only concern is that he is pretty content to play alone.  When put into groups he plays fine, he apparently just enjoys doing his own thing.  The comment was also made that sometimes the other kids may have a difficult time understanding him and this may be leading to his solo play.  This breaks my heart, especially since we just concluded that there isn't anything we can do about the speech right now besides wait for his skills to develop.  I'm kind of bummed about this one, but all of this helps reassure our decision to wait another year before sending him to kindergarten.  We will keep a close eye on his social skills and make sure he isn't becoming a recluse!  He has a playdate tomorrow with two of his favorite friends so that makes me feel better :)

Elizabeth brought home her 2nd report card and it was all good.  She had improved her handwriting to receive the highest marks.  They are picky about this handwriting business.  It looked good last semester, but because the circle part of her g's or a's didn't fill the entire space she was marked down. This is when the back of my mind says "really, people is this the most important thing to focusing on right now?" but whatever!  Any of the anxieties that she struggled with at the beginning of the year have totally subsided.  She goes to school happy and willingly!  I was typically eating lunch with her on Tuesdays while Grant did his speech session and it gave me a great opportunity to meet her peers (as does art cart!).  Now that speech is over I know she is going to want Grant and me to go in and have lunch with her.  It can't be a weekly thing though, which she isn't going to like but will have to accept.

Grant is in an activity lull.  There was an opportunity to do soccer but we were going to miss two weekends and all I could picture was him crying unless I was on the field with him, so we passed.  I really wanted him to do a small golf session but it conflicted with EB's gymnastics.  I will sign him up for t-ball next week and he said he would do swimming lessons again, so I need to get him signed up for that ASAP as well.

Elizabeth is still really enjoying swimming and gymnastics.  They are both such good athletic sports and great exercise.  She has decided that she will do the summer swim team through the park district and will compete...which is a huge step for her!  When they swim against each other at DOCS she turns up the heat and you can she puts her competition cap on! All four of her strokes look good and I believe legal (from what I know!). Hopefully, we have a good experience this summer.  DOCS swimming will be over soon and she will have a break.  She wants to do Pixie league (coach pitch softball) and we are all supporting that!

Swimming puts Grant to sleep

Working on the dive