Taking the Scenic Route

A rare family visit.  My cousin from France came to the States.  He is exactly 6 weeks younger than me to the hour.  His dad also surprised him by flying to Kansas.

 My brother, me, and my cousin.

All the grandkids and great-grandkids (except for Steve who is taking the picture).  All the great-grandkids were born within a few months of each other.  The girl is very touchy-feely. lol

A few cute pictures of Zora in her bloomers.

Mah baby is growing up…she has widdle bitty tooffers now.  Sharp little buggers too.  lol.  I haven’t been able to get a picture of them yet, but they are just starting to poke through the gums.  I have, however, gotten more photos of her eating adventures and some cute “chilling out” photos.

Some more avacado adventures

Fluffy baby hair

Big blue eyes

Update for the week:

1.  I found the sheet of paper from the Dr. appointment for Zora.  Apparently I heard wrong because what they had written down was that she was in the 3rd percentile with everything, not the 50th.  I will edit and update later on the exact numbers because the paper is in the diaper bag, in the car, and I am not going out there right now.

2.  Zane’s eye appointment went about a thousand percent better than the original appointment.  Both the staff and the doctors were so much more relaxed and patient.  The precriptions was wrong too, btw.  His eyes were not nearly as bad as the other doctor thought.  First of all, the degree of farsighted is within the range of normal for a child his age, so he isn’t correcting for that.  He does have some astigmatism and it is worth correcting for while he is doing visually intensive things, but he doesn’t need to wear the glasses all day if he doesn’t want to.  They also paid more attention to how they fit him and got much sturdier glasses, and included impact and scratch resistance, unlike the other place.  If he still looks around them, I am going to have to figure out something because they don’t make safety goggles or anything with shields around it that small.  Since the script was wrong anyway, I am going to just wait before doing that.  I am betting somebody in my family can help me figure out how to adapt them if we have to though.  The script seems a lot more “right” to my instincts though.

3.  He went under sedation for his hearing test.  (the name of the test sounded like “Bear”, but I am pretty sure it is spelled completely differently).  It went well.  The actual hearing is good.  The only thing a little off was that there was a bit of a delay in how the signal is received, but it was still within the range of normal.  I have to say, Wesley is so dramatically better than St. Francis it is incredible.  The nurses there kick serious butt.  This time the peds sedation unit had moved from the ward like setting it was in last time, to a normal hospital room setting, so it was even better than last time.  (if those things can be good, but you know what I mean).  Zach hadn’t been with me before for any of his sedations, so he was really hitting the end of his patience when different people kept coming in and asking the same questions over and over.  It was pretty par for the course for me and I forgot how frustrating that is because I am pretty used to it.  We also got the celiacs and the mercury bloodwork done, which I think concludes this round of testing. 

4.  Last night we went to a autism informational meeting where us parents were there to tell some politians how we wanted money spent essentially.  They are pushing to get waivers for autism as a separate disability instead of under the general heading of disability since the needs are unique and not being met well with the current waivers.  I spent most of the first half of the meeting standing next to another mom with a baby in an Ergo bouncing our babies to keep them from screaming.  lol.  Her baby was 9 months old, and her older kids were 5 and turning 4 in a few weeks.  She lives within a mile or two of me.  (we were all the way across town for the meeting).  I also met a mom of another hyperlexic (early reading) and twice exceptional (autism and gifteness) kid.  The kid is 6ish, so they are a bit ahead of us in the game.  She was pretty vocal in the meeting with her frustrations of lack of services if your kid is intelligent and autistic.  His IQ keeps getting him disqualified for services and it is really frustrating.  I suspect this is the experience we are going to have too.  Right now, due to his verbal delay, we are fine.  Somebody has to work with him a bit to understand how intelligent he is because it isn’t demonstrated in the typical verbal way, but through problem solving and pattern matching.  I actually think the giftedness in those areas is contributing to the verbal delay…he found other ways to get things done so he didn’t need to turn to pure verbal/audio, which is difficult for him, to make things happen. 

5.  This morning Zach went to his “new faculty orientation”.  Woo Hoo!  It is really happening!  His official title is “instructor”, which is, apparently, a step up from “Lecturer”, and not usually something you can get without a masters degree.  You can’t be a “Professor” unless you either have a PhD or are a PhD candidate (some restrictions there).  All those years I called my college teachers “Professor so-an-so” I was totally clueless about the fact that the title had a specific meaning.  Ya just keep learning in life, eh?

6.  We are going out this afternoon and trying to find Zane a bike.  I don’t know if he will be able to figure it out, but Heartsprings is having a “Pedal Fest” with some events for the kids amongst a major fundraising push.  I figured we would at least try to see if he can get that started since he has always been fascinated with bicycles anyway. 

Zora’s check-up today:  she is 13lbs 9.6oz.  I don’t remember how long she is, but I remember that it was in the 50ish percentile.

While we were getting her weighed, Zane stood under the height measuring thing…he is about 44.5 inches tall now. (but that isn’t official)

40 years ago today my parents got married.  They are still very much in love.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!!!

This week will be a busy one, filled with several doctor’s appointments put off until Zach’s return.  We are in the lull between chapters of our life.  This week Zach signs a contract to be an instructor for the next year.  He will be doing essentially the same job he has done the last few semesters, but will be an actual member of faculty instead of a GTA.  He deserves to finally be recognized for the work he does, but it is sometimes amazing when it actually happens.  We are not used to things happening that are good, even when it is appropriate.  lol.  

The job means we are losing our food stamps.  I could have probably gotten them another month, but we chose not to do the renewal when the paperwork came due at the end of July.  The amount of paperwork to keep the food stamps is insane and since our money does not come in typical paycheck fashion, is usually delayed and we have to go through even more work than normal.  If a mistake was made along the way (which seems more likely than not given our past experience with this office) it could mean us having to work to get them to stop on time once the paychecks start rather than keep paying them and then demand payment back with interest.  It isn’t worth the hassle.  We will be getting paychecks in a month.  We can survive that long.

We will also start getting regular heath insurance instead of Medicaid (or Medicare, can’t ever remember which one it is.  lol).  It means we will have more freedom, but it is more expensive.  Hopefully, it will pay for some of Zane’s therapies because we are likely going to lose at least some of our financial aid for that too.  Right now, his therapy is around 13.5K/year.  We will also be losing our financial aid for the YMCA, so there is another expense that goes up.  Thankfully, there are several possibilities for ‘2nd jobs’ for Zach because with all of the financial aid the paycheck will knock us out of eligibility for, we might need some more income to be able to have the same lifestyle.  That is sad.  lol.  The possibilities include:  helping a professor with some forensic computer recovery/data mining for a court case, working in a Cisco lab, and being paid by NASA for some further research.  None of those is a definite thing, but all are possible.  We will see what the year brings.  All of them would work around his instructor responsibilities nicely. 

We are looking forward with a lot of hope for the future.  The possibilities seem limitless right now and it is a fun feeling. 

19 hours.  only 19 hours and Zach is home.  This long, difficult summer is almost over.