Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Misc. news

Lily's 2 month appointment was on Monday and she weighed in at 11 lb 4 oz, nearly a 3 lb gain since December! That puts her now solidly at the 75th percentile for weight. She definitely was a slow starter and then too off. Her height was 23 inches.

Today, Noah had his speech and language evaluation, the results of which are as we expected with him being normal or slightly above in comprehension (receptive language skills) and below average for his age group in expressive language skills. Hence, he is going to qualify for speech therapy services, to be arranged soon. Hopefully this will continue to encourage him (as we do already) in his words, and lessen his frustration at not being able to tell us what he wants.

Lastly, Zach now is enrolled in a local public homeschool charter school. We spoke to our EF (educational facilitor) via telephone today, and set up our initial meeting. My hope is that he is able to attend some classes on site and slowly build up a group of similar-age peer friends. He continues to do exceptionally well educationally speaking, but I would like to see him work on some friendships. A side benefit of this being a public school is that we will get some tuition assistance towards classes for him. We are usually unable to afford very many classes for him, so this will be nice. The down side of course is that we are accountable with recordkeeping and regulations of a public school. At this time, it is an acceptable tradeoff for us. We will continue to reevaluate this each year, continuing with the charter as long as the benefits outweigh the drawbacks for us personally.

Sewing wise, I have been trying to sew a little each day. Early in the week I finished up the binding of a UFO (unfinished object) that has been lingering since early 2007 in my sewing room. It is a quilting wallhanging, and I'll post a picture of that later on. This week I also completed some simple serged fleece baby blankets for charity, adding a little embroidery to one corner of each using my reader/writer card (VERY exciting, was my Christmas gift from DH). Today's project was a pair of jeans for Zach made from an old pair of papa's jeans. I got the project idea from the files at www.sewingmamas.com, and they came out quite well. You lay the pattern on the jean legs, using the two side seams and hem and then just have to sew the crotch seam and add elastic in the waist. I actually for mine cut off the casing allowance at the waist and added a separate knit waistband with elastic inside the knit. These are certainly not high fashion, but Zach reports they are very comfortable play clothing, and they took less than 15 minutes to create! :-)

1 comment:

SimplyBillie said...

Your Noah sounds a lot like my oldest son. He tests very high in receptive language skills, but below average for expressive language. We put him in an early childhood program at one of the local schools (my mom is one of the teachers) about a year ago. He works one-on-one with a speech and language therapist there and has been doing so much better! Sounds like you have a beautiful family and you are a talented sewer!