Dossier Submitted And A New School Year!

Our dossier has been submitted! That is very exciting news! We were submitted with the regular process, so we should be traveling in 2 months. Hopefully we are only a couple weeks from receiving our travel dates. Right now we are approximately $10,000 from fully funded, based on our current cost estimates for all four kids in two regions. We need this account to read $26,849. We are getting close!

We are busy with things here at home also! Our new school year is beginning and everyone is very excited to get started! It should be a really great year. I am working hard to get our school routine rock solid now before our new kids come home. I'm really happy with the way we are doing things, and I'm hopeful that we will be able to keep things rolling on this schedule when everyone else gets here.

I don't know if you can tell, but Evan is trying valiantly to kick off his new braces. This kid has some spunk! He has had the braces for a few weeks now, and he has worked up to wearing them for a few hours at a time. He still isn't crazy about them, but we are getting there. Our biggest goal for Evan this year is communication. He is making it more and more obvious that he has a lot of receptive language, but expressive communication has been slower. We are working on a few things including using pre-recorded buttons, signs, and verbal communication. I am always so thrilled to see how proud he is of his new skills.

Orion is so excited for this year. We are seeing huge improvements in his speech, his ability to follow directions, and his ability to rebound and respond appropriately after correction. Helping him learn is always a bit of a puzzle. I spend a lot of time finding creative ways to work around his weaknesses and build on his strengths. He is always very eager to show off what he knows, and I will often find him practicing what we have done each day by "teaching" his youngest siblings what he has just learned. I think he is going to have a really good year.

Barton is excited for the new school year too. We are adapting things for him because of his vision impairment, but we are also trying to find some new possibilities to improve his vision. He can actually see a lot more than we thought he could initially. He has some degree of double vision, which one of his doctors said was impossible for him to have AND impossible to fix. Another doctor thinks he could see some improvement with surgery and patching. We are exploring all the possibilities, and giving him tools to adapt his environment at the same time.

Theo is also going to be doing a lot of great things this year. His therapy work is one of our big goals for the year. He is working hard at walking with support and building a lot more strength and stamina. His fine motor skills are improving also. It is really interesting to see improvement in some areas build on other areas that would seem completely unrelated, but are actually linked within the brain. We are also including ways to make it easier for Theo to show what he knows. Because of some processing delays and because it also takes a lot of his processing "bandwidth" for the motor functions of his speech, it really helps him to be given choices instead of needing to produce all of his responses from scratch. More success makes him more confident and more willing to show us what he knows, which is our goal! He is going to have an awesome year too.

Beginning of the year photos were a bit challenging! It is hard to get good pictures of all of the kids at the same time, but no one is blurry so I will call it a win!