Southern Babies: Warm Weather Week

It feels like spring has arrived – but I’m not getting too hopeful. I know it can go back to being cold at anytime. We did enjoy our near 70F days by playing outside. It did us all good to get some fresh air.

Lindy had PT on Tuesday morning. She had a couple meltdown moments but overall she did pretty well and worked hard. It feels so long between sessions now that we only go every other week. Drew was headed out of town that morning and I was going to have to take Will with me – something I don’t enjoy doing. I talked to Uncle Ed and soon-to-be Aunt Jamie and they agreed to watch him while I took Lindy. They live very close to the hospital so I just dropped him off on the way. I think he was a little confused. I’ve never dropped just one of them off somewhere. He was standing at the front door just watching me drive off which was a little sad. But I knew he would be fine. I hear he got to play on the piano and the steps which would constitute a great morning for Will!

Wednesday morning Will had speech therapy. He did not talk as much this week but overall we notice a lot more talking from him. Our early intervention service coordinator was here so he might have been acting a little shy in front of her. He was also very interested in playing with her toys and not talking. We did talk about Lindy getting a speech evaluation and Lawson starting services with her too. I figure we should take advantage of the fact that we have a speech therapist coming to our house every other week. She used to work with cochlear implant and hearing aid children at her last job so I think it will be a good fit.

Wednesday afternoon we had hearing therapy but we didn’t actually do any therapy. North Carolina has a couple great programs for kids with disabilities. Our vision and hearing therapies are all free to us. Chris works with the North Carolina Early Intervention for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing but there is another program called Beginnings. Beginnings is a parent advocate group here in NC. Terri from Beginnings came out when we first got Lindy home and explained all about hearing loss and what forms of communication we could choose for Lindy. She fades out after that until you start talking about transitioning kids into preschool and the school system. We talked to her for almost two hours on Wednesday. We learned a lot of stuff about her preschool choices and all the IEP meetings. We looked at an IEP so we could be a little bit comfortable with it. Terri knows the laws inside and out and will be coming to all of our IEP meetings with us. She will be there in case we need her to help fight for Lindy and what she needs and deserves. Of course we hope we have no problems but it is great to know she is there and available to us. It’s hard to believe we are even talking about all this IEP stuff – how can they be old enough to go to preschool?

Today we had vision therapy with Lesley. She works for Governor Morehead which is another free state program for kids with vision loss. We worked on colors which is great. Lindy kind of struggles with matching up same color objects. She has started saying the color names but she needs to learn which ones are which!

Speaking of talking, we feel like the kids are talking a lot more. Will knows all his colors and can say ‘blue’, ‘geen’, and ‘ellow’. I haven’t really heard him say ‘red’ yet. Lindy will also say the words if you ask her to. It is so cute to hear them talk. We’ve been working hard on getting both kids to say ‘o'.' Neither one of them really purses their lips when they say it. We’ve talked all week about ‘open’, ‘moo’, ‘boo’, etc…. Wednesday night Will was playing with a Winnie the Pooh phone and I told him to put it away. He turned it off and Winnie says' ‘Goodbye’. Will repeated him and said ‘Goodbye’. It was cute. We see both of them talking more, but Lindy has to be prompted more to say things.

Don’t forget to support us in our March of Dimes walk. We have 14.9% of our goal! Thanks to the Grecos, Birbicks, and Joanna for recent donations. We had a fundraiser dinner at church last weekend and raised money for our team. We had the 1st Annual Palmyra UMC Chili Championship with 9 people entering chili into the contest. Congrats to Nancy who was picked by three judges as having the best chili! We appreciate the people who did come support us. I think everyone there had a great time tasting all the different chili!

Lindy pretty willingly poses for me these days. Poor Buddy just hasn’t embraced the camera yet. But Daddy can always make them smile! Our chili entries last weekend. The highly esteemed judges. Not eating chili at the chili contest! Cody, the other boy in the picture was a preemie as well. He weighed 1lb 13oz at birth. He’s now 10 or 11 years old! Nancy, the winner, receiving her gift certificate to a local restaurant.Playing outside in the warm weather! Yeah, Daddy is home from the grocery store! Swinging – sorry it’s blurry. Sliding – Blurry too. Can’t catch them in motion without it being blurry! Waving at the cars driving by. I love when Lindy sleeps like this. Reminds me of a frog! Will was so excited to have the letter ‘A’ on his shirt. He talked about ‘A’ all day long. He kept finding the ‘A’ magnet and holding it up to his shirt. He was still talking about ‘A’ this morning! He loves the alphabet these days. Chillaxin on the couch watching a little of the ACC basketball tournament. Lindy doesn’t watch tv, she just follows us around. I can’t get enough of my babies giving kisses to each other. This one is blurry and off centered as well, I wasn’t fast enough to get it focused. But it’s so cute I’m posting it anyway. I told Will to give Lindy a hug and he laid his head on her shoulder. Then she put her hand on his back. TOO CUTE!