What is THAT Splattered on the Floor?

You know the saying, "What do you do when life throws you lemons? You make lemonade."
Today has been one of those days.

Except I wasn't given lemons.
Try Splattered Nutella.
Yep, that yummy chocolate hazelnut spread.

I walked into the kitchen and splattered everywhere was a dark brown gooey like substance.
I took a couple of sniffs for fear of the worst.
Quickly assessed the situation and found:

Jie Jie jumping with joy with the brown goop spread up both arms to her elbows spraying it even closer to the ceiling above her.
Then she turned and I saw it caked across her face and nose, smudged into her shirt and splattered on her pants.
Another sniff to be sure, and then I saw the brand new opened jar of Nutella.
The 750g jar from Costco.
Half empty.

I started to take a step. The floor was a minefield of dark brown goo.

How in the world am I going to get to her?
How am I going to clean this up?
Where do I even start?
Plus a whole lot of other thoughts that I won't write.

Jie Jie showed me her hands and smiled. I cleaned off her arms at the sink while she giggled with delight. I sighed and debated on scolding her or laughing with her.

I remembered this post from a few years back. I ran out and grabbed the camera and took pictures. I remembered that although at this moment I was between tears and pulling my hair out, that in a few hours I would want to be showing my husband and laughing about it.

Oh, and by the way I forgot to mention that this all happened within a few minutes of having to leave for physical therapy.
We called and canceled.

The minefield. 

My cabinets...

I think she enjoyed herself.

We ate Nutella sandwiches instead.

I used some of the large globs near the jar. I just could
NOT waste it. It made for a nice snack.

My new saying? When life splatters Nutella at you, grab some bread and make a sandwich.

Any Nutella splattered at you lately? How did you make a "sandwich" out of it? 

Homeschool Wrap Up...Apples and Writing

This is a bit late in posting, but here it is. We looked at apples this week and had fun with paint...

I got this cute letter matching game from here.
Jie Jie worked on this, but I found that her attention
span is something we need to lengthen. Reminding
myself that this is normal since we haven't had
"school" all summer. Retrain the brain. 

Counting. I drew very simple trees and put
apples on them and had her count them. Great
thing is that she gets 1-3 at 100%, so now I know
I need to challenge her with higher numbers. 

Writing. This was totally on her own. I
didn't even have my hand over hers. Still
needs work, but I'm seeing progress. We'll
work on more letters next week.

Japanese make the BEST stickers. I found
these at a stationary store so we could make...

...an apple counting book. She had to put
the stickers on the tree for each page.
We will cut the pages out and staple them.

Since the other two were home, Mei Mei
joined in the painting fun. I drew a simple
outline of a tree. They painted it in and added
apples by using their fingertips. We did this
in watercolor paints. (The lion outfits, are just
because they wanted to wear them...)

 My other two are on fall break this week. We will be doing some school work, but probably not as much as we would if they were in school. We plan to visit the zoo, go the beach, and some other fun things that can be "learning," too. 

Homeschool Wrap Up...Review

This week we reviewed letters, numbers, and some writing. I am happy to say that she remembers it all and has progressed even after not doing any school over the summer. *cheering and dancing*
She recognized all the uppercase letters (and tried to "say" most of the letters instead of signing them!) She knew almost all of the lowercase letters, which is great considering we haven't really worked with them before. I had her match uppercase to lowercase from Aa-Mm. She did pretty well.

 I found this here. I cut, laminated and put
Velcro on the back of the apples for Jie Jie.

She recognized all the numbers from 0-10, so I will be adding to that next week and have her start counting. She seems to have an understanding of counting, but I'm not sure how accurate she is. I will do some "testing" with her on Monday, but very pleased that it is coming together.

What I was most pleased with was her writing ability. Last spring we only worked on these strokes "|,-, /, \" and then on letters "T,t,I,i,L,l". This week she remembered the strokes, so I added "O" to challenge her. She really concentrated to stay on the yellow line. Next week, we'll continue with the "O" and begin the letters again.

Love these! Jie Jie knows to start at the green
dot and trace along the yellow line until the red
dot. I'm excited to start up the letters next week.
These worksheets are found here. I laminate them
and have her use a dry eraser marker.

Homeschool Wrap Up...Fine Motor Skills

Matthea is doing better this week, but we still have kept it really slow. She had a checkup with the doctor yesterday and he could still hear some "rattling in the lungs."
More medicine in our bag and away we dashed home.

Today we had leftover donuts for a snack. (Yeah, not so healthy today. It is GeGe's birthday so all health food is out the window for ONE day only!) I cut hers up into bite-sized pieces and let her use her fancy chopsticks, the Edison. I bought them at a local store about a year ago thinking that she would be able to use them one day.
It was a great eye-hand coordination activity. Next week I'm going to have her move cotton balls from one container to another. After she masters this, I'll use something a bit smaller and heavier.
Below are pictures of the Edison with Pororo cartoon character and of Jie Jie using them.

Homeschool Wrap-up...Letter Tracing (and I'm in need of help!)

I must confess that the last few weeks I've not been the best teacher. I don't like excuses, but here they are anyway:
1. I was not feeling real great last week.
2. The Hub is gone this week.
3. I feel uncreative, so I can't come up with theme ideas.

Bible: Girls are still working on the Lord's prayer and it is coming along. Not as fast as I had planned out, but coming along.

Megan:  She is progressing in the phonics and writing lowercase letters. Some days are easier for her than others, but moving forward. I'm going to start a sticker reward chart for her. She is HUGE into rewards (what kid isn't?). I think that will help motivate her to do her best work.

Matthea:  So, this week, we've really just focused on Letter Tracing. I started having her trace letters that have straight lines. For example: Tt, Ll, Ii, H, E, F
I got this idea from Learning to Write. They have the simple tracers, but not the tracers for letters. They do, however, suggest you make them just like I did with a highlighter.  I used the green dots for starting and red dots for stopping. I laminated them, and she uses white board markers to trace with. Then we can erase and reuse.  Matthea is getting the idea. I still do hand over hand with her on these, but I let her control the stopping of the lines.  Next week I plan to let her do some on her own to see what she does.

Help! As for themes....could I ask for some help? Could you leave a comment with an idea or a few ideas for me to do this spring. I have a few ideas, but not enough to fill up the entire rest of the this school year.  I can find lessons, crafts, etc...but for some reason coming up with ideas is just overwhelming me right now. (probably due to the fact that we are moving in a few months and all the changes that are going to happen! YIKES!  One day I'll get around to posting about that change...)

And, thanks ahead of time!

Homeschool Wrap Up....Valentine's Day

This week we have focused on Valentine's Day.  Mei Mei is still on vacation, so we have had some extra fun at the house. 

1. Valentine collages.  The heart template was from DLTK's site. You can click here for the directions.

Girls cut up pieces of red and pink paper. You could tear it instead,
but I wanted them to have scissor practice.

Mei Mei gluing her pieces to the heart-shaped outline.

Jie Jie gluing hers.

After they finished we cut them out and glued them onto colored
paper to give away to some special people. 

2. Valentine Cookies!

The girls LOVE to bake with me. So, we made pink heart
sugar cookies. We just added pink food coloring
to the dough to make it pink.

Quite the team, aren't they?

We worked on the other school things, too. Numbers, letters, speaking, writing...still plodding away. Not always seeing improvements, but know (or believe) that one day counting will all make sense to Jie Jie. =)

Bible: I've been teaching them both the Lord's Prayer. We are working on the sign language so that Matthea can memorize it as well. Once we get it all down, I'll post a video of them. They really are doing well with this. =)

On Monday Mei Mei starts half days at the local Chinese school. We've cut her back from full day to half for two reasons. 

1. They have a mandatory 2-hour nap. Which equals late nights for all of us. 

2. We are hoping to put her in the Christian School next fall, so I want to make sure she is up on all her English language work.  So, she gets a homeschool lesson in the afternoons.

Other News:

I just found out about a fun book giveaway that is easy. Many of you already know Amy, at The Green Bathtub.  If you don't, you need to go and meet her. She's great! She is giving away the book Learning to Swim by Sara J. Henry. Click here to enter,

Tuesday's QBR...something a bit different

I did not finish one book this week. Not. One. I'm blaming it font size, but then that shows me admitting I'm getting old. Boo!
But, I just got an email from a friend who sent me a lovely piece. I've read this before, but not in a while. It is such a great picture of a family with a special needs child. Hope you enjoy and get a different perspective from it as I did almost seven years ago.
WARNING: Have tissue in hand!

WELCOME TO HOLLAND

by
Emily Perl Kingsley.

c1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

Image via Wikipedia

It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very 
special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.




Love the last line....

Homeschool Wrap Up....Letters

Ahh, one of those weeks where there is so much going on that homeschool sort of happened, but not like I had planned. Go figure.
But, some great news is this:
1. Jie Jie's ST will now be weekly. Half hour individual and half hour with another student. So, double happiness for us. 1. ST an hour long each week and 2. She has a classmate once a week.

2. She has started "reading".  Ms. Jones has been working on the word "go". We have a little book that we practice reading together.  It is fun to watch her realize that the letters on the page are words.

I also want to share another resource that we've been using to help with letter recognition and matching lowercase letters with uppercase letters.  These both come from Musings of Me, which is where I got last week's resources from as well.  Can't say enough about her units and how grateful I am to be able to get them for FREE!

Sorting letters...

Matching...and I'm not sure why this picture
did this. Sorry about it.

And now to plan Mei Mei's birthday painting party for tomorrow...she turned 6 last Monday. 

Homeschool Wrap Up....Bears

This week in Bible, we read about Jesus' baptism.  We outlined Jie Jie's hand to make doves. It didn't turn out that well, but she understood that it was a bird. 

We continued with the theme of Winter and looked at bears. We read Sleepy Bear by Lydia Dabcovich.  I liked this book because it was simply one sentence per page and it showed how the bear slept during the winter, hibernating in his cozy cave. Then when spring came he looked a bit grouchy, but remembered honey and followed the bees.  Jie Jie loved the illustrations.  After we read the book we made a bear puppet using a paper bag.  We used DLTK's pattern. You can choose to print it out in color or in B/W and color it yourself. I let Jie Jie color herself.  Click here for the pattern.

The finished puppet.

Jie Jie gluing on the pieces after she colored them.

She LOVED this. I think next time I'll do a sock type puppet with
her so it will last longer than ten minutes. =)

I wrote last week that I'd post some resources that I've used for numbers.  I got all of these from Musings of Me, which I printed out and laminated. They are cute and so easy and fun to use.

Matching cards. The site has them up to 20, we only use 1-5. I've
printed and laminated all of them because I think Mei Mei can
also use these to practice her numbers as well. The pink piece is
Velcro that I attached to both pieces.  

This is counting the stars on the snowman and
matching the correct hat.  Again, I've used Velcro
so that Jie Jie can attach them and I don't loose pieces.

This last set of cards, I've used two different ways.
First, we attach clothespins to the card. This helps
with fine motor skills and with counting.

  Here she is learning the concept of "2".
 I've made two marks on laminated paper.
 After she attaches a clothespin she erases one
of the marks. When the lines are gone, she
doesn't need to add anymore clothespins. Then we
count them together to make sure it is correct. 

This is the other way I use these cards. She builds Lego towers.
These cards I glued onto construction paper before I laminated
to help make it a bit more sturdy.

Okay, that pretty much sums up what we've been doing. Next week I'll post some resources that I've used in letter recognition and how we are starting to write letters.

Homeschool Wrap Up

I had such huge hopes for this week and then Monday hit me with stomach issues. Tuesday they progressed into a fever. Wednesday the fever hit strong, and then left. Thursday I was in bed. Friday still had stomach issues, but could leave the apartment. Today, a bit better.

So, homeschool didn't happen. But,  I do want to report one thing. Matthea has started a class with Ms. Jones, a Special Ed teacher, twice a week for 45 minutes each time. We were able to get those in this week and I am so thankful.  In class they continue to work on Matthea's IEP.  I'm glad for this time because it gives Matthea a chance to be with another teacher. For me this time allows me to see if she can sit and listen, follow instructions, and communicate with another person.  It is going well and Matthea LOVES going to school. Here she is with her backpack ready to go out the door.

 

 

 

The temp just dropped to 65F and all the kids thought they needed winter coats.

 

 

 

  Since this week was a strange one for me, I will post the giveaway details on Monday.  So, be on the lookout for a fun and eventful blog party celebrating that feeding tube removal!

Weekend Wrapup

I know most people do a Weekly Wrapup, but this weekend just needs to posted about.  First, the hospital visit for Matthea.  If you didn't read the last post, Matthea has a feeding tube and we were going Saturday to see if she was ready to have it removed.  Well, we saw a doctor who agreed that it was time and told us that we'd probably need surgery and referred us to the surgeon. We saw the surgeon on the same day...btw, can you believe THAT?  Amazing I know...just across the waiting room from the doctor. Anyway, more amazing things to come. The surgeon took a look at her sight and told us that she probably would NOT need surgery.  Yes, you read that right...so I took out the last feeding tube EVER from my daughter and she threw it in the trash herself!  We didn't have a camera...we had no idea that Saturday was going to be the DAY!  We do have a follow up appointment with the surgeon on Wed. to make sure the sight is healing correctly. If all looks good...we are cleared!
So, for a last minute unplanned celebration, we walked in the drizzle (which we could care less that we had no umbrella) to TGI Fridays and went crazy with food orders!  There WILL be a planned party at our house later after we get the cleared checkup and I'm even going to have a Celebration Giveaway to celebrate as well. More details to come!

Can't top off that, now can I?  So, I won't....I'll just add some pics of other things we did this weekend for fun.

Listened to The Pond for a few hours. We have their cassettes.
I know, cassettes? Yes, we got them free from a library that
was upgrading...

Built a scarecrow together..well, minus Matthea.
She was Scared.To. Death.

Made a pumpkin jar craft together. Matthea tearing paper.

Final product. Got the idea from here.

My Heroes...

Growing up, my heroes were the "Duke" boys of Hazard County....

Partially because they were just sooo cute....but honestly it was that they raced General Lee through some wild mazes and jumps, most always escaping the evil Boss Hogg and his troops. Between the ages 5-10, they were my heroes. I had a nightshirt of the Dukes, I named my pet turtles after them, and I had a few General Lee cars. And everyday out at my grandparent's farm, my cousin (btw, also a girl) would pretend we were Bo and Luke Duke....Pa had a junkyard with a few rusty cars in it. We'd spend hours jumping through the windows pretending to race over dirt roads or jump ponds to make the great escape.

OK, I've grown up a bit and my heroes have changed over the course of those years. This past weekend we were involved with "I Am a Hero Games". This is a field day for kids with special needs. This event always makes me stop and think about who my heroes are. So, today I want to recognize my family....how they are heroes...

So, my first Hero goes to Matthea, my daughter with Cri-du-Chat. This is the first time she ran without her "Buddy" holding her hand. She did trip and fall at the beginning of the race, but got up and with encouragement from her "Buddy" and from the other bystanders she ran to the finish line. She LOVED this day!

Matthea running the 50m with her "Buddy" from TAS. Uwe is in the back cheering her on to finish.

My second hero goes to my youngest daughter, Megan. She's five. This could have been a day where she could have complained and whined about not getting to participate with the other kids, but she didn't. In fact, she helped out by holding the flag with her friend. She loved cheering for the kids as they ran across the finish line.

Megan doing her "job" with her friend. (she's the one with the blue pants)

My third hero is Marcus. This guy is just growing up way too fast for me. (I know, all parents say that!) He was a runner for this day. That means he took score sheets to the score table so that they could be recorded on each child's certificate. Again, not a complaint about having to help out.

Marcus going around checking for finished score sheets.

My fourth and final hero is my husband. Without his vision for "I Am a Hero Games" this day would not have happened. He and his friends plan these events and put them on, not just for our family but for other families with special needs children. They created a day where the kids can be kids and the parents can be parents no matter the disability.

Uwe talking with a mom before the games began.

"I Am a Hero Games" is a day to celebrate life.

For one morning, a child with special needs...

is cheered for not shunned

is praised, not scolded

is adored, not despised

is a Hero, not a "Nobody"...