Ms. Ava is 7 last week. Her birthday is also the 1st day of summer vacation for us as well. I took her to her favorite restaurant, Olive Garden, on her birthday and the Saturday after her birthday we had her party at the skating ring. She loved it.
Today we went to Legoland. Had a great time with the family on our annual trip. Definitely better this year than last year.
The boys birthday is just over a month away. Not sure what we will do yet, but definitely think we will do minion theme. Andrew wants a fart gun.
Even though the boys will be 5 when school starts we made the decision to leave them in preschool again for next year. Andrew is still not ready. He is very immature and has a lot of behavior problems still. He was diagnosed with autism a few months ago and receives physical, occupational, and speech therapy outpatient to work on his issues to help prepare him for school when he is 6. He still can not grasp a pencil, color, or wite age appropriately. This really concerns me and wad my deciding factor on leaving him in the special needs preschool with Jacob another year.
Jacob got a new stander and had his wheelchair growth adjusted recently. He received the same type therapies as Andrew. We will be working more on communication skills with him in the near future than feeding therapy like we have been. We have been doing intensive feeding therapy since August and have seen improvements in decreasing his oral aversion and allowing people to touch his face, but he still doesn't want to put food in his mouth and swallow it. We are not giving up, but moving forward with other skills and evaluation on skills we think he can achieve.
Ava made leaps and bounds at school this year. I home schooled her the 1st 9 weeks. She started public school on October 4th. She left kindergarten behind and the point of home schooling was to to help her catch up but she didn't want to listen or learn from me. So when starting school she was still very behind where they wanted her. She made A's and B's in almost everything all year except reading she made C's Toward the year her writing grades slipped go C's as well. Even though she passed the testing to move onto 2nd grade and technically had the grades to move forward. The last 9 weeks she stopped trying and her grades on her papers were bad, well most were even with extra help. Her teacher told me she thought she should repeat 1st grade so she could catch up and stop struggling. After a lot of anguish and meetings with teacher, Ava actually decided (I would have made the final say so anyway) she wanted to repeat 1st grade and not move on with her friends. I was really worried she would be upset about being held back, but I think she is afraid to move on and she loves her teacher who she will stay with next year. Anyways, I think this will be good for her. Technically since she was barely 5 last year she didn't have to go to kindergarten last year and if anything she probably should have been repeating kindergarten this year....but I told her this year was "practice" 1st grade and next year us for real and she has to take it very seriously and that there is no more practice grades...she seemed to accept that.
