Stopping To Smell The Roses

 Last post I talked a lot about all our plans for this summer, and how excited I was to be to be doing 'nothing' with my children. Here we are more than half way through the summer and we have done none - count 'em ZERO of our 'nothing' planned activities this summer.  But you know what?  Amazingly, I'm OK with that.

 One of the biggest lessons I've learned from being a mother of a special needs child and 3 other above-average intelligence siblings is to just go with it.  Hope for the best, but expect the worst.  I guess I wouldn't exactly say expect the worst, because sometimes I can actually get stuff done.  But I've learned not to get bent out of shape if things don't happen the way I want them to.

For instance, NO - Jacob still is not potty trained.  But, if I let him run around nekkid (which is his preferred clothing status anyway), he does make it to his potty toilet about 80% of the time.  If he's clothed, he'll end up wetter than if he'd jumped in the swimming pool.  There seems to be some sort of disconnect having to do with the whole 'take your pants off before you pee' thing.  I don't know.  But I'm happy with his progress and still hope to have him potty trained by the time he starts back to school. 

 Although I never got Jake into swimming lessons, I've seen tons of improvement in his gross motor skills.  For instance, a few months ago, he wasn't able to navigate the McDonalds play area.  He could go up, but couldn't go down, and spent most of his time yelling for his sister to come help him.  At 5 years old, she wasn't too keen on following her little brother around helping him up and down the obstacles.  And I don't blamer her.  Today, we went to McDonalds and Jake didn't need help a single time.  He can go up, down, through the netting, down the slides, through the tubes, and is completely independent.  Not to mention the fact that at home, he does somersaults, jumps, tackles, walks up and down the stairs without any assistance, and a whole myriad of other tasks he couldn't do at the beginning of summer.

 

Plus, Jakes's been trying out a new program we discovered to help with his speech (he's still only doing a couple consonant sounds) called the Gemiini program (www.Gemiini.org).  He's 2 days into it and already mimicking some of the sounds, pointing at the animals, and his babbling has begun to accelerate.  I'm cautiously optimistic.  I'm sure I'll give an update on my next entry. 

The toughest part about the summer time has been the change in his schedule.  Jacob does NOT like to have his schedule messed with.  And going from several months in the strict schedule of the early intervention class to being home all the time and dealing with the chaos of our large family, there have been some adjustment periods - i.e. he acts out by getting hyper and getting into nearly everything he can get his hands on.  I've spent most of my summer just going from mess to mess to mess cleaning up after the boy. 

 At first, it drove me crazy, but after a while, I realized that he was just curious.  Jake is an active boy with an active mind.  Without the stimulus of school, he is busy trying to find other ways to keep his mind busy.

We've still gone to track meets, and play dates, lots of time with extended family, reading books, exploring, playing outside, etc.  We still plan on going camping, and tomorrow our family will be watching a minor league baseball game complete with fireworks afterward (That should be exciting!).   But I no longer worry about my long to-do list screaming at me from the kitchen table.

So until next time, just know we're be-bopping around the house, doing our own thing.  Although we don't look like we're doing much, we take time to stop and smell the roses, enjoy the little things, enjoying that fantastically wonderful thing we call family and health, and bask in the sunshine of life.