I probably could have done a million blogs with this title at this point in our life!! But in everything we do it seems to ring true. I'm actually getting a little bit better at this waiting thing (not really I've just got more distractions in life!)
I wanted to give everyone an update on our family, life, and our adoption process.
First our adoption process....We've taken a major step forward and now we wait (hence the title)!
Our homestudy has been uploaded to Ind*a and we will wait the next 8 weeks or so for the adoption authority to approve us for adoption from there. In the mean time we will hopefully begin reviewing files if there are any children waiting that our family can match with! This is the part we are obviously most excited and anxious about! Keep us in your prayers, that we would have wisdom, patience, and make smart decisions!
Our family is doing well. Easton has graduated kindergarten and will be in 1st grade next year. Developmentally he is not on target to be a kindgarten graduate but due to his age, we didn't have much choice. We had a wonderful IEP meeting with his teachers and staff at school and have set some great goals for him next year. We have an awesome neighbor/cousin who is working with him over the summer to start gaining an understanding of the skills we hope he gains by the end of the school year. Skills like recognizing the first half of the alphabet and being able to verbalize it, recognizing and verbalizing numbers 1-10, writing his name independently, and understanding number sets with numbers 1-5. This may not seem like much for an 8 year old to some people, but I constantly have to remind myself we are essentially trying to teach a 2 year old all of these things. It's just where he is at developmentally and he lacks some serious motivation, which is the toughest part of all.
Easton has also started swimming lessons and he loves the water more than ever. He gets to go to the pool at least twice a week now so he's all for it. He's learned to kick his legs pretty well! The hardest part is keeping him from going under water. He does it intentionally because he loves it underwater so much. This is the scary part and the very reason we got swim lessons, he doesn't understand the dangers of water. We don't want him to fear water but we want him to be able to save himself if he gets in a scary situation.
We plan to go on vacation to the beach again this year with my parents and we can't wait. When you've got a child whose favorite things are riding in the car and the water, a trip to the beach is a must!!!
Developmentally Easton is growing. He's running, kicking a ball, jumping like a crazy kid, learning to swim. His speech is picking up, he's learned the K and G sound and is saying words like cracker, and go very clearly! We are working on words with 2 syllables that have different sounds, for example MonKey. This is proving to be very hard for him, right now it sounds like muhkuh haha. His apraxia is our biggest obstacle at this point. He has such a desire to talk, I truly believe it, but he just can't make the sounds he wants to, and it frustrates him. It didn't use to, but now that he understands communication and the benefits of it, he wants to talk more and more but it is such a struggle.
Fine motor skills are improving as he's learning to isolate his fingers. We are beginning to work on writing skills, grip, and his ability to trace.It's a slow go...but we'll get there!
His receptive speech continues to grow on a daily basis and there are still days I forget he doesn't communicate verbally because he's so good at letting us know what he wants!
We see more personality come out as he develops a streak of meanness (like all boys do) and stubborness. He expresses his dislike with things more and more and trust me when he doesn't want to do something, it's veeeery obvious.
We truly can't wait for Easton to have a sibling. I think it will be the best thing for him developmentally!
As we are getting farther into our process I will definitely be updating more so be on the look out (for real this time)!!
Until then!
No comments:
Post a Comment