This and That

I love the Spring.  For me it means new beginnings, beautiful flowers, long afternoons spent outdoors, lots of bubbles, family walks, time at the park, time in my garden.

Family photo taken Easter Sunday

I have a funny story.  Chris and I were talking about how we will celebrate Mother's Day and he said he knows how much I like working in the garden and weeding and perhaps I'd like for him to tend to the girls while I take some time to weed the garden. Seriously!  I had a good laugh over this - him suggesting that me weeding the garden would be a highlight to my Mother's Day.  I do like to garden but weeding is not on the top of my fun list!  I love the garden once it is weeded, but doing the weeding not so much love.  Poor Chris felt so bad about suggesting after when he spent a moment to think about the suggestion.  Needless to say I won't be weeding the garden on Mother's Day :-)  

Julia and Emma with MeMom and PopPop

This year I've been a bit lazy on my garden.  We are *still* trying to sell our house and I would rather not put in the work for a vegetable garden when we will be moving soon.  We've worked out a back-up plan in case we don't sell our house because we really have to move.  Chris is completely exhausted after 7 years of a 3 hour (1.5 hours each way) commute to work and with Julia going to his school in the Fall for kindergarten we need a reasonable commute time.  We also want to be closer to family and in a school district for Emma that she will attend for a long time.  Because it's hard on her (and us) to transition out teachers, therapists, etc.  She will have a couple more years of preschool and we would like them to be in the same school district that she will attend kindergarten.  This move is turning out to be more stressful than we anticipated, so send good vibes our way for it all to have a happy ending soon!

Emma is crawling so much and starting to get *stuck* under things.  I love seeing her move!

Julia and Emma are changing so much.  Emma now has some freckles on her nose/cheek area.  They look super cute and I love noticing her cute little freckles.  Julia is getting older by the day and asking hard questions.  Questions that I don't always have the answers to and that actually make me think before I respond.  I like learning how she is processing her world by the questions she asks - it really drives home how mature she is getting.

This weekend was Family Day at the race track.  There was a moon bounce, face painting, pony rides, live horse racing, and a bunch of other fun things so we took the girls.  They loved it!  There are several more this summer and we hope to make it to another one.   Today the fun continued when Chris took the girls to the minor league baseball game to help celebrate Rocky Bluewinkle's birthday.  They had a ball while I got some time to myself to grocery shop and sew a new dress for Julia.  I love little family and we have so much fun together!  

Last week Emma tested out the eye gaze communication system.  It did not go well.  I guess I'm not surprised that it didn't go well, but I am a bit sad that it didn't go better.  I truly hoped that Emma would find her voice in the eye gaze system but she seems to prefer a more tactile communication system.  We did get some suggestions on what to try so we can move her closer to an eye gaze system and we will pursue them.  We are working hard on giving Emma a non-technical Yes/No.  She does say Yeah on occasion and we are having her make an attempt to say Yeah or shake her head yes before we give her something she is communicating she wants.  I'm happy to say she is doing better at this than previous attempts.  She said Yeah for her bottle twice one day this week, which is amazing progress.  She is also shaking her head no more often.  I wrote a story on her iPad and we were reading it on Saturday with her OT and Julia wanted to turn some pages and Emma kept shaking her head no when we asked if Julia could turn the page.  This is so uncharacteristic of Emma because she is usually much more agreeable.  It's nice to give her a low tech Yes/No that she seems to be using.  We've worked on this for the past few years with not much progress - she definitely prefers high tech solutions! - but this time I feel like she is ready to implement it.  I sure hope she continues to use her Yeah/No more frequently because I just love to know what she thinks and hope it will help cut down on her crying a bit.

That's the update for now.