Taking the Scenic Route

Ice cream on the patio.

(and the last one makes me itchy just looking at it.  Luckily, she doesn’t react to grass like I do)

#167 Summertime

And more…

Zane started out filling his own bucket of water, but when Zora heard the excitement and came out, he helped her fill up her bucket.

Not long after, we heard the neighbors going outside to their little pool, and Zora and the neighbor boy, H, heard each other, which naturally led to them wanting to play together, so she donned her suit and happily joined him, leaving Zane to his happy, content self in the backyard.

When did he get such long legs?

Confirmation that he has grown. A lot.

Zora still hanging out with neighbor boy H. She ended up eating Sloppy Joes at his house before coming back home. She has so much fun with him.

She instructed Daddy to draw the circle and the hair, but she handled the rest of it.

The first sprinkler of the season.

Oh Lovely Mud.

After about the 3rd piece of tape, I walked over to see what she wanted tape for.   I got an answer to “what”, but the “why” still lingers.

#125 Summer fun

A study in opposites

I think she is trying to tell me to buy some new puzzles.

And, in a sweet ending for the evening, Zane requests a camp out

Good night sweet prince.

I haven’t been posting much (and have a backlog of emails to answer at this point) because I am spending every moment not dealing directly with kid with my nose buried in books, websites, and academic papers, both on autism and parenting in general.  The ST program I want to get Zane (based around the papers I was reading, and then the website it lead me to) costs more than I can afford, but it really looks good.  I am going to dig my nose through a copy of it at the university tomorrow or next Wednesday (one of the other clinical educators just ordered the program and one of her students is using it) and see if I can start with the main program (Visualizing and Verbalizing), or if he needs to go through the book written for autistic students to get them ready for the program (Talkies).  The description sounds like you are starting from a non-verbal/low verbal point (with labeling…something Zane has done since he was little, it just never formed into functional language like it does for most kids), but I don’t know if the main program starts at too high of a level for him.  I hope I can just jump into it because it is horribly expensive even if you don’t get the whole “kit” meant for teachers.   I’ll write more about the program later, as well as the parenting book I am trying to get through. 

We have no clue what we are doing, so I am sure we will give experienced gardeners a giggle.  Hey, you have to start somewhere though, right?  Zach handed me the money he got from my parents for a graduation present and I ran to Home Depot and Target and got our supplies yesterday.  Today, we pulled everything out and got to work.

Putting drainage holes in the buckets.  (some cheapo buckets from Target…$6/each instead of the $20 cheap plastic pots at Home Depot..if I am getting something cheaply made, it better at least be cheap. lol)  We discovered our drill doesn’t work any more, so we had to improvise.

As we are putting holes in them, I hear in the background “It’s dark in here” and look up to see this:

Which starts this:

Back to the project, adding rocks for drainage  (the farm girl in me had a real issue with paying money for rocks.  I feel so suburban now)

Adding the potting soil.  There were easier ways to do this, but this way the kids could really dig in and help.

The only picture we got of the planting process because our hands were too dirty to pick up the camera.  It involved a lot of “be gentle, don’t hurt the roots”, and “Zora, leave the sticks in there” and “which plant do you think this stick goes to” (will be interesting to see if we got it right when they come up).  Zane was a big help.  Zora was trying to be a big help. Zora should have had a longer nap this afternoon.  lol.

Finally, giving the plants a drink.

Our container garden:  patio tomatoes, a beefsteak tomato, a cherry tomato (breed for containers), sweet green pepper, sweet red peppers, sweet orange peppers, tabasco pepper (which was what I apparently grabbed instead of a second green pepper), two kinds of basil (sweet and spicy), rosemary, Texas tarragon, oregano (I think), mint and parsley. 

I hope it actually grows.  It was fun planting it.