Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Inauguration Day

We hurried quick-fast through lunch so we could watch the inauguration.  Here’s a few pictures of the children watching the President say the Oath of Office.

Monday, 1/12- Tuesday, 1/13/09

My House Lost 50 POUNDS!

Or so it seems anyway!  We finally took the time last weekend to get all the Christmas decorations put up.   I’m never a big fan of “spring” cleaning but there is something  about January and putting away the Christmas decorations that inspires me to do a big spring cleaning in the winter.   Further inspiring me this year is that my Uncle (Dad’s brother) and his wife are coming to visit on 1/25.  They will be spending the night on their way to Florida.  Then two weeks later my cousin, his wife and their four boys are coming to visit Saturday-Tuesday.   It is the first time my Uncle or my cousin have been to our house.  (They both live in Upstate NY where I am from)   SO- I have been a cleaning whirlwind this week.

Dining Room- rearranged a little bit, swept, dusted, put away Christmas tree, new tablecloth on the table.

Study- Moved chair and ottoman up to the Guest Room.  It gives us more room in here and it will be nice for guests to have a place to sit other than the bed.   Dusted, swept, re-organized homeschool shelves.   Looks great.

Entranceway- thoroughly swept, dusted and spiffed up with some new pictures.   (I realized that we don’t have any pictures of Puddin’ out.  Just the big kids.  I haven’t had frames, so that’s why.  I took some pictures I wanted to frame of Savannah, one of all three kids and one of our entire family with me to Kohl’s and got some nice frames.  I feel so much better now!)

OTHER Stuff- we cleaned out all the cabinets underneath the entertainment center and relocated all the kids games to there, cleaned out the toy closet (threw a bunch of stuff away and reorganized what we had left), spent 3 hours dealing with paperwork and filing, wiped down the chair-rails, re-did the kid shelves in the living room, cleaned Savannah’s room.   I tell you, I’m on a roll.

I’ve still got some work to do in the kitchen and laundry room.  I need to do the baseboards and some of the windows.  And I need to straighten the guest room and get it ready for company.

On to the good stuff!  Pictures from this week-

Monday, 1/12/09

Mary has been on a huge puzzle kick lately.  Here she is working through some of them.

These aren’t the best pictures- a little dark and blurry.   Here’s Savvy enjoying her independent play time.

When I redid the toy shelves in the living room I made up a book basket for Savvy.   She loves to tuck back in this corner with a stack of books and just sit quietly and look at them.   We find her like this pretty often.   I think it is so cute.

Mary and Nathan playing outside.

Tuesday, 1/13/09    It was pretty chilly on Tuesday but they had a good time outside playing with bubbles.

Another Update on Savvy

Savvy had her eval on Monday, 1/5/09.

Savvy has made HUGE progress lately.  In a two week time period from Saturday, 12/20/08 through Saturday, 1/3/09 she started:

Climbing up the stairs

creeping around the furniture

walking while holding our hand

letting go and standing independently (only about 2 seconds before she falls, but still, I think this is good)

climbing a little bit.

That’s a lot in two weeks!   The physical therapist came out and evaluated her  on Monday 1/5/09 and said she has very low muscle tone in her legs in addition to the “looseness” in her hips, which we already knew about.  She scored lower in some unexpected areas and I was at first concerned.  However, the PT said that her weakness in the Gross Motor Skills area are affecting her scores in Fine Motor, Cognitive and Language.   Here are her scores in the various areas they tested and also an explanation of how the gross motor skills are affecting the other scores.

Fine Motor:  15 months (Because she only army crawls she has weak hand strength.  She doesn’t crawl up on her knees and hands and so doesn’t get those hand muscles built up.  So she was unable to do one or two of the tasks the PT gave her because she didn’t have the hand strength.   It’s funny because one thing her pediatrician ALWAYS mentions it what good fine motor skills she has. )

Gross Motor: 11 months

Cognitive: 15 months (Again, because Gross Motor has affected Fine Motor skills, she was unable to complete two of the tasks on the cognitive assessment.  The PT said though that really, it’s not that she didn’t know how to do those tasks, she just didn’t have the motor skills to complete them.  She did not feel that she was truly behind in any way cognitively.  It was more about that specific task and her hand strength as opposed to any true cognitive ability.)

Language: 15 months (PT said that if you think about yourself, as an adult, when you are trying to do something physically demanding how you often clench your jaw or hold you mouth very stiffly.  She thinks that Savvy is doing this- walking/trying to walk are difficult for her because of her hips and muscle tone so she’s really concentrating hard and those “holding” her mouth stiffly.   So that means she doesn’t babble as much as is expected so she lost a few points for that.  She does have the appropriate amount of words though, for her age, so that was good.

Self Help: 18 months

Social/Emotional: 18 months

Based on her Gross Motor score, she qualifies to have a PT sent out to the house to work with her.   However, she’s made so much progress in two weeks time that we decided to hold off on any interventions for a month and to reevalute then.