Life as I know it.

Ashley on her 1st morning here, no smiles for the camera . Today is the mark for our 1st full week with Ashley, it has been a good week. She is slowly coming out of her shell and showing us more of her personality. I had to work at the JBF sale, on Thur - Sun, so she got to spend a lot of time with other people, but has still adjusted fairly well. Ashley "helping" Bug with his piano lessons on her 3rd day here. On Thursday she was watched by my mom, she calls her grandma and already is very attached to her. We figured this out on Wed, the 1st 2 times she met her, she didn't really say much. Then on Wed morning when she came upstairs to leave for work, Ashley went running for her saying "gwama". She has adored her every since and she and grandma and Bug had a great time together on Thur. Ashley taking a nap on her 4th day here, she apparently read herself to sleep . She went and stayed with my friend Meegan and her 3 little ones on Friday, she seemed to do w...

As you can see from our other posts it has been a big week for the family. But I thought I should catch up with what is going on in Bug's life. He is in 2nd grade this year, still being schooled at home, but now goes to school 1 1/2 days a week, a regular day on Wed and and an enrichment day on Fridays. He is really enjoying his away school this year and came home from his 1st day saying I love school (but finished that by saying he wouldn't want to go every day.) Homeschooling seems to be going better this year, whether that is because he is getting older or because I am attempting to be more organized this year I am not sure. We also changed our curriculum this year and we both seem to really enjoy this new one. I have also started putting all of his work for the day in folders labeled Sun-Sat. Then at school time he goes down and finds that day's folder and starts to work, then when the folder is empty he is done with school for the day. Also we added school to his chore...

This morning Ashley had her OT assessment, which she passed with no problems, she scored a 38% which is a smidge low, but well withing normal limits. I wasn't too concerned about her after just observing her the last couple days, she colors well and can put the top clip on her car seat together and a couple other things that seemed right on task. After that we went to my friend Brenda's house to do her and her husbands massages. She was very quiet and well behaved while we were there, she loves to pet Brenda's cat and see her fish. After that we grabbed a bite to eat and took it home for lunch, then I laid her down for a nap, the next door neighbor kept an eye on her while I ran to work to do a massage. When i got back she woke up and we went up to Bug's school to pick him up. It was fun at school taking her around and introducing her to everybody. Of course everybody thinks she's adorable, she just kept looking at everybody like "who are these people and why d...

Today was a pretty mellow day around here. Ashley slept through the night, although she must have woken up at some point because we closed her door completely after she fell asleep and when I got up at 6:30 it was open but she was still in bed sleeping. She is an early riser and gets up around 7 and comes out to hang out with me. We gave her a bath for the 1st time which I had been warned was something she did not like. It went much better than I thought it would. No high pitched screaming or kicking or anything, she didn't want to sit down in the bathtub and would whine when I poured the water on her. But overall she did really well. When I got her out of the bath and dried her off I slathered her up with lotion since she seems to have a touch of eczema. Then we got on her diaper, (she is not potty trained yet) and got dressed. She even let me put her hair in 2 little piggie tails, very cute. We had a bit of confusion with getting dressed, since she wanted to pick something out of...

We went and picked up our new foster girl Ashley this morning around 9:30. It has been a good day, we started out by taking her shoe shopping. She came with quite a few bags of stuff but only one pair of sandals. I have been wanting to try out a shoe store downtown that specializes in fitting children's shoes. I always worry about having good shoes for Bug since I have always had foot problems. Anyways we ended up buying 2 new pairs of shoes for each of them, and then headed over to where Don is working answering phones while he is out with an injured foot and had some lunch with him. Then we brought her home and showed her, her new room and her new stuff. She is very cute, with dark blond hair and gorgeous blue eyes. She seems well taken care of, she is quiet and tends to repeat what you say to her, she also likes to color and will color on any paper if handed some sort of writing utensil. She really likes animals and was very excited when we stopped over at my friend Brenda's...

Bug had his 2nd football game of the season today. He is playing upwards flag football, he enjoys it but as with most sports he drives his dad and I nuts. He gets out there and dances and plays around while the game is going on. The boy with the ball could run right by him and he would never even notice. But I guess we should be thankful he is a good sport and always cheers on his team and is having fun. He has 2 boys on his team that do especially well, one is the shortest boy on the team, but he runs like the wind and the other one must be close in age to Bug and really does a good job of keeping his head in the game. I ended up going to talk to one of the league officials today, Upwards has a lot of very specific rules especially about rotation of players and making sure all the kids have equal playing time. Well at the last game Bug was supposed to be a starter and the 1st thing the coach does is sit him out, so I thought well that is strange but just let it go, then I figured out ...

As most of you know, we went through all the hoops to get our foster care license this summer so that we could bring a daughter into our home. We are planning to do foster care and eventually to adopt a little girl. We are looking for a girl aged 2-4 years old, somebody past the baby stage, but still young. Well we finally got a call yesterday, on Monday we will go pick up our new foster girl Ashley. She is 2 years old and will be 3 in Nov. Sadly her mother is deceased and her father is unable to take care of her. Right now she is in voluntary placement while her father tries to get things together or they try to find a family member that can take her more permanently. If neither of those things work out she may stay more permanently. Bug is beyond excited to bring her home, when we went to meet her last night and I told him it was time to go, he thought we were taking her home with us right then and there. He was disappointed to find out that she had to stay where she was for awhile l...

This has been Bug's 1st week of school. We are doing things differently this year and so far so good. We are using a whole new curriculum. We have been using K12's curriculum the last 2 years, but have moved on to a more eclectic, mix and match for this year. So far I like the looks of it and the math seems like it will be good for Bug. We are using horizons math and the pages are brightly colored and easy to follow. Another change we have made is I am trying to be more organized and I am putting his work into folders each day. He has 7 folders that way he can go down each day see what is in his folder and know up front how much work he needs to get done. then he can go through and pick out what he wants to do 1st. That way when his folder is empty he knows that he is done for the day. We school 7 days a week, but we usually do the more entertaining things on the weekends, like create a book or do his book reports, plus history which is his favorite subject. It will be interest...

This afternoon we all headed down as a family to Pig Out in a the Park downtown. Lots of good food hard to make a choice. We started out with some corn on the cob, and pink lemonade, then I had fish tacos, and Bug had a cheese quesadilla and Don had a really good Philly cheese steak sandwich. Then I had a frozen turtle dipped cheesecake and Don had a chocolate dipped banana and Bug had a chocolate dipped strawberry. I guess we are all related after all, chocolate must run in the genes. Afterwards we walked around for a bit and Bug rode the carousel a couple times , then we hopped on the bus and headed back home. It was nice to get out and spend time as a family.

I had my 1st time at my new location for work today. Don was home this morning so I spent time setting everything up this morning, then came back and had my 1st client this evening. The people seem really nice and I love being so close to home. The new room is nice it is painted a pretty color, the floor is a nice color and it has a little alcove at one end with a cabinet and a counter top with lots of space underneath. I'm hoping to put some sort of covering over the windows to make them more opaque and need to organise underneath the counter top. I still need to get some sort of rug for the floor and something to block noise from under the door. But the decor is up and the table is ready and the clients are on the books.