Book book bookie!

I ended up selecting Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs. A quick read for the holiday season. A nice blog to accompany it is Black and WTF. More old and odd photos for your enjoyment.

What I look like

As previously stated, Nea (age 7) has limb apraxia as well as apraxia of speech. She has worked very hard on her handwriting, which is pretty good now, although still larger than it should be. Work in progress, like much of her life. But she can zip up her jacket. We have no intention of teaching her how to tie her shoelaces any time soon. Hey, if Daniel Radcliff is still struggling with it at his advanced age, why tortune her?

Anyway, here's a picture she drew on her iPad yesterday. It's me. Her people have had a robotesque look for quite awhile. I like them. Check out my biceps! Whooo! I do wonder whether I should have my ears pinned back, though.

Rule one of book club

Rule 1: Do not post information about the new book until members of book club had a chance to get a copy.

We are reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I'm enjoying it, but the German is odd. Must be a dialect. Or something. He translated Zufriedenheit as happiness. That's just wrong. It's satisfaction.

I need to pick out my book for December. You'd think I'd have a bunch of ideas, but I dunno. I've been reading all these crazy books lately. I liked Little Bee by Chris Cleave so much, and then I read another one of his books, Incendiary. Loved that even more. Then I read Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart. Apparently I've got a terrorism/end of the world theme going.

And they took away my Visual Bookshelf (It was free! It was online!) and didn't even warn me, so there went a giant list of books I loved. GRRRR.

Maybe I'll pick The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Or The Arrival by Shaun Tan. Or Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk. Thoughts?

Ugly Christmas Ornament Party: A Retrospective

A long time ago, we used to be fun. That was before we had kids. Back in those idyllic days, we would host amusing parties. I would say the most popular themed party we had was the Ugly Christmas Ornament Party. Which was a nice break from all the serious holiday parties. It started out fairly casual and became pretty competitive by the end, with rules and stuff. Actually, a lot of my parties seem to have rules. It's because I'm German. I can't help it.

The rules were:

• One entry per person.
• Enter into one of the categories: store-bought or homemade/altered.
• One vote per person. Yadda yadda, can't quite remember all the voting rules for having two categories.
• You must be willing to give up your entry. Everyone will go home with a different ornament.
• The winning ornament stays with us.

Luckily we are organized (snort!) and have all the winners still carefully stored all together in a box. I present them to you for your enjoyment.

1998 Red D*ldo -- Joanne Harrison

1999 Paschke -- Perrigo family

2000 Santabird -- Darin and Olga

2001 It Just Screams Christmas -- N

2002 Holiday Time in Afghanistan -- Tish

2003 Cowpie Snowman -- Kris Ward

And this little bonus item that was robbed of winning. I think John brought it the first year we had the party. His grandma made it or something. I'm pretty sure I voted for it. It's top-notch.

And this. This monstrosity.

This started it all. N and I found it in an antique store in Hebron, IL. It was $7. I took off the little plaques N made with the winners' names on them. And ain't she a beaut.

Book Club

Last month was Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, which lead to quite a discussion. As far as I'm concerned, as long as we discuss the book for more than 10 minutes, it's a hit. We all really enjoyed this one: always a plus.

Next month: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. I finally talked someone into picking this one! I think it's going to be a lively talk. Last time we did one of Lionel's books, I was shocked to learn it's a girl. Who names a girl Lionel? Bizarre. Oh, wait, it's not her given name. See? Learn something new every day.

Not in the original job description: SN version

As Robert Rummel-Hudson said in a tweet this week, "I resent the people who can't get to sleep because of all the hookers and blow, rather than parenting anxiety. Dicks."

How true that is.

Our wonderful SLP wanted to write a progress report for the school, especially since we have a new school SLP. She wanted me to answer the following questions/requests.

• What is Nea's average sentence length?
• What is her intelligibility rate when speaking with people who don't know her? Also, was her intelligibility really 10% a year ago? (Yes.)
• Provide some sample sentences she has produced recently.

My gut reaction for sentence length was "approaching 5." Did a little analysis during dinner (as parents do, ha ha!), and Mama's intuition was correct. 4.63 words per sentence on average.

Reflecting awhile, I went with 50% intelligibility. With the caveat of "context helps!" which it always does. If you know what the topic is, you will have much greater success of understanding her. I do think we have done a good job of teaching her circumlocution, and she uses other words or gestures to help her audience along.

We have also decided to leave her talker at school permanently. It's heavy, and she reached for it once all summer, when she wanted to discuss Earth as a ball. I have to say, Camp Invention (science camp) seems to have sparked her interest in science. Below are the sample sentences I collected at dinner. The science ones were all in a row.

Me go home morrow way? (I stay home tomorrow)
Me playdate with Bella?
Why Elmo drive? Too little!
Me hold it one more time.*

Astronomy:
Why people no feel turn around? (about the earth's rotation)
Wind in space now?
Why people in space on moon?
Why flag in space?
Flag in space right now?

Biology:
What is life?
What does plant make cotton?
Plant alive in fridge. Die in tummy?

And this is the child they pulled completely out of mainstream class for science and social studies last year. Sure, they wanted to spend more time on literacy and math, but come on! Anyway, she'll be joining the rest of class for those subjects this year. Which just happen to be units on astronomy and biology.

*Note: We are very much working on the "begin sentences with I" thing. Ugh!

Part 3: How Nea is doing, vis-à-vis apraxia and literacy

Nea is seven and will be starting second grade next month.



Looking back at May, there were many memorable lines from the IEP meeting. From the school psychologist: "Her IQ and other scores were normal! That's good news!" Wow. No shit, Sherlock. Did you manage to find those results in the massive, detailed, financed-by-us neuropsych report we gave you? Or did you come up with that yourself? She has excellent logic skills and does well on standardized tests as long as there is no language component.


From our mainstream teacher: "Oh, no, she's nowhere NEAR reaching the bottom of the class!" (Trust me, it was very clear in context that she didn't mean she's in the middle. She meant there was no prayer of Nea ever catching up.) A hearty middle finger salute to you, Mrs. M. Oh, and this gem: "She's not very good at non-fiction, is she?"


That was when I decided that we needed to focus on academics this summer. Because I know my special special snowflake is smart. She just needs a little more effort than your average kid. Not every mainstream teacher is talented enough to teach to multiple levels. I understand that. But it sure would be nice if they tried. On the other hand, I don't think she should be in the special education classroom as much as she is. It's not a good fit.


Anyway. Enough of the venting. On to more positive things.


The good news is that Nea is advancing at reading! And just as our wonderful SLP said, it's improving her speech. She's using more of the "little words" ("the" and "of" and so forth) than ever before, more full sentences, all that. People comment all the time on how much clearer her speech is. I'll post some examples soon. I haven't been able to transcribe any lately. I mean *blush* she says, "You're the best mommy in the whole wide world" but it doesn't come out exactly like that.


And it's not just the reading. Check out this great drawing she did recently.

Lightning McQueen

She's started with inventive spelling, which is a big milestone. On May 26th (I know the date because I tweeted about it) Nea wrote her first unscripted sentence. "I like you." All spelled right, too! Sure, she's behind, but this is more progress than we've seen before.



In her workbook, she and I counted out loud from 1 to 100 while pointing at each number. I actually wanted to quit twice, but she wouldn't let me.

So. My house is a disaster. My garden is a weedy mess. But it doesn't matter, because Nea is only about a full grade behind her peers, which is better than where we were in June.