Homeschool Mondays

(Noah is HUGE! and has gotten a little more demanding in his old age - he's ready to be crawling but can't yet so he's a little impatient with life right now. He still adores his sisters and his Daddy - in fact he'll giggle at Daddy from across the room! He's sitting up on his own and working on crawling at five months!)

I get to have Gracie home with me on Mondays now. We arranged for a four day school week for her so that she would miss less school with our support raising trips. So I'm practicing homeschooling with three 100% dependent children! Today we made truffles... I'm not sure why, but I decided that I wanted to make truffles for Valentine's Day (taking advantage of having ANY ingredient that strikes my fancy immediately available while we're still living in the USA?) .

Ana and I bake together a lot and she's very good at helping with ingredients, stirring, and today we worked on measuring - looking for the numbers on the measuring cup and filling up to the right number! (Noah's supervising.)

Gracie enjoyed pouring the measured ingredients into the bowls and especially liked the sensory experience of running her clean fingers through the chocolate chips!

We also do a lot of home therapies and Gracie's been doing a lot of nice sitting - here she is on a peanut ball with her new TLSO (Thoraco-lumbar support orthosis) to isolate different muscles to stregnthen her core.

We did get dumped on with all the recent snow storms. Ana enjoyed playing on our patio in the snow (much to the surprise of the passing by plow driver!) despite the cold.

Comments

Amanda said…

The body jacket looks great!! And cooking is probubly the most favorite activity in my classroom =)

11:43 AM

Family of Three!

We are in Liberia - the electricity goes in and out because the generator is having trouble keeping up these days! So hopefully it will stay on long enough to post and the internet connection will allow me this luxury! We were united with precious Gracie on Thanksgiving day - I will write more about this later. But, oh! is Gracie a joy! She is so beautiful, so joyfilled, and a bit mischievious. Her physical limitations do not permit her to accomplish much mischief, but we can tell that she is trying to push some limits already. If we were not in love with her already, she is irresitable and such a treasure and blessing from God. In our two days together, she has not cried once. She spends most of her days smiling, she loves to snuggle (good match for us!), and has the most contagious laugh! Life takes more effort for her - her cerebral palsy is moderate and every activity is a challenge and is clearly tiring for her. Meal times (which she loves) take a long time and much patience and d

Check out this progress!

A year ago, my friend Rachel http://josiecomehome.blogspot.com/ emailed a photo of her beautiful son standing on his own... I've since dreamed of having a photo to post of Gracie doing the same thing. It was always one of those wild-don't-think-it'll-ever-happen kind of dreams, a romantic, fairy tale type of dream. But this week, Gracie made another leap in development and muscle tone. It started when I leaned her up against the wall and planted her feet a shoulder-width apart. For the first time, she didn't lunge for the safety of my arms or hands, but rather, she allowed herself to stand steadily on her own two feet and she kept her center of gravity centered over her feet instead of wildly in front of her or to one side or the other. She even quickly figured out that she couldn't lurch around in excitement while standing on her own two feet with no support but a wall behind her back, but rather had to express her excitement over this new development with a gentl

Amazing girls!

Gracie and Ana have taken to walking around the church together - Ana pushes Gracie's gait trainer as Gracie walks along. Between the two of them, they make a pretty efficient team (except for the steering part!). They love it and could do it for hours! Gracie has made amazing strides (no pun intended) in standing up - we'll get some video up soon of her standing, supporting herself ONLY with her right hand (her otherwise useless hand) - it's amazing! We didn't dream that we'd see her looking this strong and steady. Plus, now she's smiling and her little heart isn't pounding out of her chest with stress at the thought of standing up without human contact - God is SO good! Gracie went to music camp this summer at the Y which was somewhat fun for her, but definitely good to have her around other kids.

Rattins living Coram Deo

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