Recent Activities

The other day, Paige arranged all of her tank tops on her bed and declared that she was going to put them all on.  First just the spaghetti strap ones; then all of them.  Nine, I believe.  Skylar could not let this fun activity go by without her participation, of course, and here is the result: two giggling four year olds, each wearing nine tank tops and mugging for the camera. :-)

Yesterday, we headed to AC Gilbert Discovery Village in Salem, a place they love, to meet up with our dear friends J, Z, and M.  The three girls enjoy each other's company immensely, as you can see from these silly photos taken right before we had to part ways.

I was very impressed by P and S's fearless conquering of the triple-decker twirly slide, which must be 30 feet tall and dark for most of the ride.  Not only did they scamper up the play structure to the top and swoosh down together without hesitation, they repeated this circuit no less than seven times, getting all pink in the cheeks and grinning ear to ear.  Yes!  See Exhibit A and B below:

Lastly, I had to include the shot below because it is so cool.  On our snow weekend reunion with graduate school friends (which was awesome!), four of us moms stole away to the brewpubs of Hood River for a few hours.  (Attention JTC moms, this is reason #2 to attend Hands and Voices National in June). This shot was taken at Big Horse Brewing's Horsefeathers Pub, with a view of the Columbia River from a big wooden house perched on the hill. Good, good times. 

Best Friends Ever

Cooper Spur Mountain Resort

As part of our snow weekend we went tubing for the first time! The girls did great and it was nice to have a mellow, positive first ski resort experience.  Phew.

Planning for Kindergarten

Planning for the Transition to Kindergarten begins in JANUARY for the school year starting in September.  Accordingly, we were recently assigned a school district transition expert for Skylar, since she receives special education services from the district and is due for assessment to determine her eligibility and services needed for kindergarten.  As I mentioned in my last (non-photo only) post, my suspicion is that Skylar will test out of speech services, which are only provided to the bottom 7% of students.

Her PLS-5 assessment, taken last summer at JTC, showed her receptive and expressive language skills to be on par with hearing peers, and she has only grown in these areas over the last 6 months.  Nonetheless, there are obvious reasons to keep providing services, therapy, and consultation to enable her to keep up this success.

At the meeting on January 30, the team agreed to drop speech therapy from direct weekly instruction to twice monthly consultation, and increase direct services from Skylar's TOD (teacher of the deaf) to weekly direct instruction.  The TOD will focus on acoustic discrimination, support her technology needs, and work toward her literacy and self advocacy goals.  Yay!  We have been super pleased with A's approach, and the results, since she was assigned as our new TOD last September. In addition, the U of O clinic we have been attending since October made a major leap forward with a new set of goals and objectives for Skylar, presented the day of the team check-in meeting.  Kudos to our graduate student K. and her supervisor H, for developing a professional, objective assessment and treatment plan for our girl.  It will be useful in and out of the clinic setting.    

So, about Kindergarten.  I definitely want the girls to go to school together.  This complicates things, because Paige's needs are different than Skylar's.  Both are thriving in Montessori, so the public Charter Montessori school (can you believe there is such a thing?!) is high on our list.  We will have to enter a lottery to secure spaces there, as with the other public schools that are not our neighborhood school.  So far, we have visited two of the five options we are considering, and there are definite differences in approach, focus, resources/special programs like music and art, setting, experience with deaf/HOH students, and parent involvement...to name a few!

Luckily, the school visits are spread out over two one-week periods a month apart, so we have some time to consider things before we visit the other three.  Watch this space for more reports after the February/early March school visits.

And enjoy the sun, if you have it where you are.  It's a stupendous day in Eugene!

Hard at work coloring at Cornucopia

Sunny park ride

Mid-Year IFSP Meeting Approaches

On January 30th we will meet with Skylar's team to assess her progress on her current IFSP goals.  She is doing really well - so well I am worried about the team not knowing how to keep helping her, and losing the motivation to help her, which was to enable her to catch up to hearing peers.

She's caught up.  SHE'S CAUGHT UP!!!!!  She's caught up.

Because - we are hyper vigilant about making sure her technology is working, model language skills at all times, teach new vocabulary, and acoustically outfit our home as much as possible. Her teachers are consistently and beautifully using the FM system, and speech therapy has taught her the pesky high frequency sounds that are hardest for her to hear.

At this meeting there will be a representative of the school district, because soon we will be visiting schools to select where the girls will go to kindergarten.  We've been told in no uncertain terms that Skylar will not qualify for speech therapy in kindergarten.  My goal is to help the district understand how to provide for her needs through her TOD and audiologist (we don't have AVT in our county).  She needs listening skills, language skills, social communication skills, and self-advocacy skills.

Wait - I am already teaching her all four of those.  Hmmm.  Maybe I could train the TOD! It will be an interesting year :-)

MLK Snow Day