Allison's 9th and Jordan's 4th Birthday

Jordan's Cake

Allison's cake

Allison's "big girl" duffle bag, she has out grown her princess one.

Lung Power

Our beautiful 9 year old

Our handsome 4 year old

Here are just some of the pictures from this past weekends parties.

Kiddos to Allison for being willing to share her birthday party with Jordan. She has never complained once about not having her own party. Next year she will get her big one....10 years old is a big deal in our house.

9 Years

9 years ago today our world was turn upside down when Allison decided that she didn't need to wait 10 more weeks to be born. What a roller coaster of emotions we were on, but God was faithful and after 9 weeks in the hospital, we brought home out beautiful little girl.

Happy Birthday, Allison! You are an amazing young lady.

4 Years

4 years ago at this very minute, I was holding our new born son. It is amazing how fast these past 4 years have gone.

Oh the things he has learned and the things he has taught us.

Happy Birthday, Jordan. You are a gift from God.

Summertime in Pictures

Summer Time, Sum, Sum, Summertime

The kids have been out of school for over a month and are enjoying the lazy, hazy days of summer. My cousin, Jeff gave us their old swimming pool( which they outgrew, but is a perfect size for us). The kids would live in it if we let them.

Our days have been filled with 2 weeks of Vacation Bible School, playing with friends, a trip to the zoo with Grandpa and Grandma Krull, and swimming. Bill and I get a vacation of our own when my Dad and Step-Mom take all 3 of the kids to NY for 7 days!

OH and the biggest news of all!!! Jordan is 100% potty trained!! Can I get a Woo, Hoo!?!? He finally figured it out, just in time for the NY trip.

Enjoy the last month of summer, before we know it the buses will hit the road again and it will be back to lunch boxes and backpacks.

Allison's Poem

This is what Cochlear Implants have done for Allison!! I will not write anything else, I will let Allison speak for herself, because that is what she can do.

End of the Year

Yesterday I had the 3 year reevaluation/IEP meetings for Jared and Allison. Wow! It is bad enough sitting through 1 of those, but I had the joy of sitting through 2. I know it is probably the law, but do they have to read all 44 pages to me word for word?
Both kids are doing great! We are really pleased with their progress. Of course they both have areas that they need to work on, but what kids doesn't? I am sure they would have the same areas if they where not HOH.
Here are the highlights:

Jared has made great progress in the area of reading. He is reading at a DRA level 34. He has mastered all of his reading goals on his IEP this year.
His phonemic awareness and word attack skills have improved a great deal.
He is reading 100% of the high frequency words on the UA district high frequency word list.
Jared enjoys writing and loves to express himself. He does need work on encoding unknown words and increasing his knowledge of affixes.
Like his mother, he struggles in math. It took me a long time to get those stinking multiplication facts down. I guess you know what we will be working on over the summer. :-)

Allison is reading at a DRA level of 28, which is at grade level. She can read 198/200 of the K-2nd grade sight words. She is a great reader. Allison has improved her attitude when writing. She still needs assistance to write with correct verb tense, spelling, transition words and to extend her opening and closings.
Allison can identify 21/21 consonant sounds, 5/5 short vowel sounds and 5/5 long vowel sounds.

This next part is a BIG improvement for Allison. This has to do with her newer ear, the one that has been giving me many sleepless nights worrying that she will never be able to use it, BUT..........Allison is 100% accurate with "ah,ee, oo,mm" She is 90-100% accurate with "s" verses "sh". She is identifying among closed sets of 6 to 7 words in length with 90-100% accuracy. She is also repeating these sentences verbatim with the same performance level. She has mastered all of her goals in this section of her IEP. YAY, Allison! All your hard work is finally paying off. Thank you for not giving up when it was hard, you did it!!!!!!