Princess Breakfast

For weeks, Lily has been looking forward to the Princess Breakfast.  This morning it was finally here!  We dressed up and saw a short performance and then ate breakfast while the princesses came around and greeted everyone. Lily loved it!

Lily's friend Kaitlyn also came, which made it extra fun.

 Lily told me Aurora was her favorite princess.

 She also really liked Rapunzel.

 But her favorite character overall was Jane, the girl in the performance who got to meet all the princesses.  I think she identified with her.

 Both girls with Cinderella.

 We waited a long time to see Snow White.  She was worth the wait, though.  She danced with the girls, which they loved.

 

Lily wanted to meet Peter Pan, but then she was really shy.  The girl beside him is Pocahontas.



Bathroom Castle

Playing Peakaboo

...one handed

Happy Birthday, Grandma!

Today we had a joint Mother's Day- Birthday Party for Grandma B. She is such a gift to all of us!

Biblical Playmobil

I'm starting to plan for next year's homeschool theme of Exodus, and I bought some new Playmobil to go with it. It was suppose to stay in the boxes until next September, but of course that didn't happen. The kids had fun with them today. Hopefully we won't lose all the pieces before next fall. At least Pharoah's throne room is still in the package...

I also got a new Christmas set.  It's smaller than our old one, but has a plastic stable (our old one was paper).  Hopefully between the two sets we'll have a full Playmobil nativity this Christmas.  It's just so fun that there are such cool biblical toys the kids can play with.  I just love listening to them act the stories out themselves.

Growing Ladybugs

We are talking about life this month- what people, animals, and plants need to live, and how we take care of animals and plants, farming, etc.  I wanted Lily to get a chance to take care of an animal.  Not wanting to be too ambitious, we picked the short term project of ladybugs.  What a blast! 

Talk about an easy starting point.  You buy the habitat and order the larva.  Then when the larva come, you drop them in the habitat along with the food.  You put water in every other day, and that's it!  It's been so fun watching them grow and change.  And the process goes so quickly.  They started becoming pupas on Tuesday or Wednesday, and today the first adult ladybugs emerged.  Wow!

At first I was scared we'd kill them all, and we wouldn't get to see any of them grow up.  But instead we find more bugs every day.  When they came we counted 8 larva.  Then when they formed pupas we found there were 9.  But today after five have become adults, there's still 9 pupas.  Eric joked perhaps we have a ladybug farm going on.  Actually, I think some of the larva were little and didn't move much, and we assumed they were dead when they were good and alive all along. 

Anyway, Lily was all excited to feed the adults raisins today, and now she's looking forward to letting them all go in the garden.

Little Mozart

Taking After Aunt Jenn

Abby's gotten into taking pictures lately. She even grunts to the inflection of "say cheese." I think she's going to be our technology girl; she loves computers and buttons. Eric got a new phone recently and gave Abby his old one. She'll sit and jabber on it for 5-10 minutes at a time. What a ham!

Miss Piggy

I finally gave up my old camera for lost, and Eric got me a new one.  So I have pictures again!  Yay!  Here's Abby in a piggy costume.  This is what you do when all your sleepers are dirty, and it's still chilly at night...  She didn't seem to mind. =)

(Yet Another) Praise Report

It's been IEP time around here, and my lack of posts on the blog prove it.  Today was the IEP meeting, and it went so very well. 

Now that William is in elementary school, he has all new service providers writing his IEPs.  The good news is that the lead teacher is an absolute gem.  I have to wonder if she's a Christian.  She has been extremely attentive, working to get a full picture of William and seeking to implement just about every suggestion his private providers or I have made.  And she'll be in charge of his IEPs for the next three years.

In addition, the elementary speech therapist has decided (at least at this point) to defer to his private provider SLP as well and included almost all of his speech and language goals.  That's 4 goals with a total of 14 objectives just for communication.  Pretty amazing...

I wish I would have posted about the process so you all could have been praying with me, but at least now you can rejoice with me. =)

If you would like to pray for something for us, pray for wisdom for next year's schedule.  We need to decide whether or not we get a new tutor with William's current tutor retiring.  I am also seeking God for social opportunities for Lily, especially if I need to be schooling William by myself.  I've had a growing concern for her to have experiences outside the disability world.  God has been so very faithful, I know He will make a way again.