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A few weeks ago, we took a Saturday and went on an adventure in SouthEast Utah.

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I have always loved looking at picture books, so consider this blog post our Timpanogos Hike picture book, with some commentary.

Here we are at the beginning of the hike–so hopeful and relatively clean:

Our hiking group consisted of Zach, myself, Mickey, Isaac, Charlotte (pictured above) and David, Kiersten, and Mercedes (pictured below). Read more »

I’ve been so out of the habit of blogging, that I forgot to write about Isaac on his birthday and only just noticed that I had forgotten.

Twelve is a big age.  Isaac is starting Jr. High in August (which is making me incredibly nervous).  He was ordained a deacon in the priesthood at church and he is old enough to participate in the first proxy ordinances in the temple. Read more »

I’m so excited to share these before and afters.  I’ve been itching to redo this bathroom (visit their website for the best bathroom services) since we bought the house and I’m so pleased with how well it turned out thanks to much hard work from my husband and his illustrious father.

BEFORE:

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I’m constantly amazed by this girl and how much she grows and changes every year.  Last year I wrote about her first year with an autism diagnosis.

Nicole is a deep thinker with an inquisitive mind.  She comes up with the most off the wall questions and makes me laugh all the time. She makes life so much more interesting.  I regularly share the funny things she says on facebook and several of my friends have told me that she is the most amusing part of their fb feed.  She is curious about everything and her enthusiasm for things draws everyone in.   Read more »

Nicole was telling me that she has started writing a story at school and she is excited that she gets to finish it tomorrow. I suggested she could write a story at home to show her teacher and this is the story she wrote:

“The Magical Ms Bre  By:  Nicole” Read more »

Thomas is a little smarty pants.  He has had a natural love of letters and numbers for years. Last year I posted videos of him playing with magnetic letters and putting them in alphabetical order (see link at the end of this post). This year his reading skills have really taken off.  He learned all the kindergarten sight words before his big sister, Ila.  When Ila started bringing books home from kindergarten, Thomas would read over her shoulder, often saying the words before Ila.  We had to start giving him a turn to read the books after Ila reads them.  We give each of the children a turn to read a verse of scriptures each night and Thomas is reading most of the words in his verse independently.  He is constantly shocking me by reading words that I didn’t know he knew.  Sometimes his reading ability causes me problems.  Like when I told him we were going to Winco and he got mad because the store says “Winco Foods” on the outside.  “YOU SAID WE WERE GOING TO WINCO, NOT WINCO FOODS!” (he actually had a tantrum about this a few times, I’ve had to learn to call it Winco Foods instead of just Winco).  He has started reading all the names of the cereals we eat and sometimes corrects me when I call the cereal by our little nick-name for it instead of it’s actual name (ie:  ball cereal = Reeses’ Puffs).  One day I discovered that he can spell all of his siblings names except Charlotte.

(Here is a video of him reading.  This was the first time he had ever played with these story-making magnets).

And here you can see the creation process:

Thomas loves to play games.  He learned how to play Rummikub this year and absolutely loves it.  I usually play several games of Rummikub with him every Sunday.  He refers to the happy face tiles as “bad guys.”  At first he was a little bit of a pill when playing because he didn’t like people to rearrange his creations.

Thomas is very vocal about his love of “cars and trucks, and airplanes and trains, and rockets and things that go.”  His favorite vehicle is probably a tow truck.  He also loves to play with Legos.

Lately Thomas has been carrying around a Beanie Baby frog who he calls “Lumpy Bumpy.”  He takes the frog everywhere we go and sleeps with it at night.

Thomas is still good friends with Ian, though they’ve spent less time together this last year for reasons outside of their control.

Thomas has a new best friend in the neighborhood whose name is Sean.  Thomas and Sean always have a blast together.  We’ve started having playdates with Sean twice a week.  On Monday Sean comes over from about 9:30-2:30 and on Fridays Thomas goes to Sean’s house from about 9:30-3:00.  Thomas’s favorite days of the week are what we call “Sean Days.” The picture below is of Thomas, Ian, and Sean deciding what to do about a spider.

Thomas loves to play on the computer.  He is able to login on his own with a PIN and navigate to whatever he wants to play.

Thomas’s favorite show is still Daniel Tiger.  He has memorized all the little songs and will sing them periodically during the day at relevant moments.   Like when he helps me unload the dishwasher he’ll sing a Daniel Tiger song about helping.  “You can be a big helper, in your family. . .”

The foods Thomas loves the most are cheese sandwiches, pepperoni sandwiches, pizza lunchables, and ice cream.  Ironically, he almost never asks me for ice cream, but he always asks his grandparents for ice cream whenever he goes over to their houses.  He is particularly excited about the birthday cake ice cream that he has picked out for his birthday.

He still loves alphabet books, but his favorite books are Mo Willems books.  We love the Elephant and Piggie series and the Pigeon series.  Thomas likes to make up his own titles for Pigeon books like “Don’t let the Pigeon eat my lunch.”

Thomas is generally a very loving boy.  He gives me lots of hugs and tells me how much he loves me.  Since he’s my only kid not in school this year, he’s been my sidekick wherever I go and I love him to pieces.

Here is what I wrote about him last year when he turned 3.

 

Charlotte is my biggest animal lover.  She loves every kind of animal and spends large amounts of time petting any cat she meets.  She participated in a campaign with her father to try to talk me into allowing them to get pet rats.  I never really agreed, but somehow we now have pet rats.  Charlotte loves to hold the rats and pet them.  She especially loves when they crawl all over her.  On her Christmas list she wrote “a new pet.”

Charlotte is in the 4th grade this year and is enjoying learning about Utah history in school. Math is her best subject, her teacher was impressed that she got a 4 on some special pretest they took at the beginning of the year (the goal is to get a 3 by the end of the year, 4 is the highest possible score).  Charlotte has signed up to participate in the knowledge bowl this year and is excited that the topic is science.  I’m a little concerned about her ability to get up in time for the 8 AM study sessions, but we’ll see how it goes.

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Ila started kindergarten this year and she loves everything about it. She loves her teacher and gets along well with her classmates and she’s so proud to be a school girl. I was a little worried about how she would do since she can be such a shy sensitive girl, but she has been confident and friendly and has made lots of new friends.  Everyday she gets so excited as she tells me about what she did at school that day.  She’s also lucky to have her mom volunteer in her class every Wednesday and her Dad teaching music in her class on Fridays.  Today she asked me if I could guess what part of kindergarten was the worst and then she told me that it’s when they have to line up and go home.

Ila has been excited to learn to read. She has learned all the Kindergarten sight words and has been gaining confidence in her ability to read.  She has started noticing and commenting on the different sounds in words all around the house.  She’ll say things like “I want something for lunch that starts with a digraph.”  (That means she wants “ch ch chicken nuggets”)

Ila adores her big sister Charlotte.  Most days Ila spends all afternoon and evening with Charlotte and Lucie (our neighbor).  The three of them make up imaginative scenarios about everything.  If they have to clean something they pretend they’re in “slave school.” Sometimes they refer to the kitchen as the mess hall and pretend to be at a camp.

Ila’s love of everything orange has faded this year.  She decided that pink was her favorite color for a few months and now she says blue is her favorite.  I’m hoping she changes her mind back to orange because it’s unique and it represents her roots (as a girl who was born in Knoxville).

Her favorite toys are Lego Friends. She loves to play with Charlotte’s Lego sets and always chooses to be the Lego animals.

Ila is an animal lover. She thinks every baby animal is adorable and loves to talk about animals.  She often carries around little stuffed animals.

Ila is still an intensely picky eater.  Some of her siblings were starting to catch on to the fact that she got to eat something different at every meal, so we’ve recently started requiring her to have a small bite of 2 parts of our dinner before she can choose something else to eat.  There has been much crying and complaining, but she’s managed to taste more things in the last month than she has in years and the other kids have stopped requesting other food too.  She even secretly admitted that she’s starting to actually like pizza and she doesn’t abhor potatoes anymore.

She loves to help me bake, especially if whatever I’m making has chocolate chips in it.

Everyday Ila tells me she loves me “this much” and stretches her hands out as far as she can or tells me she loves me “a tillion” which is a made up number that’s more than a million billions.  Then she’ll often follow it up with “and this is how much I hate you” which she will represent by holding her hands together as if to say not at all.

Here are links to what I wrote about her each year on (or near) her birthday: Ila at 5, Ila at 4, Ila at 3, Ila at 2, Ila at 1

We got a call towards the end of September offering Nicole a spot at Spectrum Academy.  It’s a charter school for kids with Autism.  We toured the school last year and felt like it would be a really good option for Nicole.  I really love my kid’s home school (Foothill Elementary) and I loved having all 4 of my school aged kids in one school.  Unfortunately, I felt like our home school didn’t have the perfect place for Nicole.  The regular ed class is too big and didn’t have enough support and the small group seemed too restrictive and not challenging enough.  I love the idea of her being in a class with her peers.  Kids with the similar abilities and similar disabilities.  The thing that I was most excited about is that they said they were seeing the kids develop genuine friendships.

They gave us 48 hours to decide or they’d offer our spot to someone else.  Spectrum Academy does a lottery system for enrollment, so it can be tough to get in.  Clearly by the title of the post, you know what we decided.  We got the call on Tuesday and she started at her new school the following Monday.  I picked Nicole up early from her last day of school at Foothill on Friday.  This picture is of Nicole with her Foothill teachers.

Her teachers have been very kind and supportive.  I felt a little sad pulling her out.  I took her straight from Foothill over to Spectrum so she could see the school and meet some of her new teachers.  This is Nicole in her homeroom.

The school runs a little bit like a Jr High.  The students start out in homeroom and then they go to other classrooms for other subjects depending on their levels.  They test the students to determine appropriate levels for math, reading, ect.  If the student preforms well, they can move up, if the work is too challenging/stressful, they can move down.  It’s a continuously leveled system.  The whole school is designed for kids with autism which is particularly evident in places like the bathrooms.  It’s a new experience for all of us.  Nicole was telling me about the upcoming fire drill for two days and we got an email from the principal about it before it happened.  (Things like fire drills can be traumatic for these kiddos).

Here is Nicole on her first day at Spectrum:

She has been in her new school for about a month now.  I asked her today which school is better and she said “Foothill is better because it’s the best school and it has more stuff” but when I asked her if she wanted to go back to Foothill she said that she wanted to keep going to Spectrum so that she could “get used it it.”

She had her first friend from Spectrum over on Thursday.She was super excited to have her friend over, but they occasionally had to be reminded to play together instead of just doing their own things.

I feel like I don’t know exactly how she’s doing at school because I haven’t been able to observe her at school.  They require background checks to enter the school and I can’t volunteer to help out in the classroom on a regular basis.  I can schedule 15 minute observations which I haven’t done yet since I wanted to give her a chance to learn the routines.

The school itself is about 15 minutes away which means it has added more than an hour in the car to my daily schedule.  Since she started I have felt like my schedule is more demanding and stressful.  I think I expected to have more free-time with 4 kids in school.  I suppose that might have been true if I wasn’t volunteering in the schools as much as I am and if I didn’t have a half day kindergartner breaking up my day.

Nicole has been really interested in bugs lately.  I’ll find her outside talking to ants and offering them things.  In the picture below, she is giving an ant a ride on a swing.  As she pushed the swing she kept talking about how happy the ant must be and how much fun the ant was having.

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First day of school breakfast:  Overnight french toast with fresh whipped cream and sausage.  I wanted to make something special for breakfast, but it turns out my kids like regular french toast much better.

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Thomas loves Sister M.  She comes to nursery to sing with the children every Sunday and she does a fabulous job.  Whenever Thomas says he’s too sick to go to church, I tell him Sister M. will be so sad if you’re not there.  Singing with Sister M. is his favorite part of church. One Sunday he wanted to stay home so instead of saying he was sick, he just said “I want Sister M to be sad.”  Another time he told me that Sister M. lives at the church.

Each week he watches for her and as soon as he sees her arrive, he goes over to her and gives her a big hug.

Yesterday morning he decided that he wanted to make a card for Sister M.

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Nicole really wanted to wear make-up so I put a little eye shadow on her.  She went on and on about how beautiful she looked.
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We took the family up to Cottonwood Heights for the birthday party of a friend’s daughter.  She had a frozen theme and lots of fun themed activities.

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Can you tell I’ve given up on titles for my posts.  I used to try to be just a little bit more creative.

This is Nicole with her helmet, sword, and shield.  I thought it was a creative combination.

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Nicole started summer school in June, only they have strict rules about picture taking so I had to make arrangements to come in and take pictures after school when all the other students were gone.

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Zach has been wanting to celebrate Juneteenth for a few years now and this year we finally did.  We invited some friends over for brisket and strawberry soda on June 19th.

Zach explained the history and read the Juneteenth proclamation to everyone.

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Isaac is a unique kid.  He would rather read a history or math book than fiction.  Military history is still his go to subject, but his favorite book this year is a book called “What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions”  it was written by the other of this blog.  Isaac read it cover to cover more than once.

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Due to a variety of circumstances, we ended up celebrating Isaac’s birthday in parts over a few days.  First we had cake on Monday so that both sets of grandparents could be there.  Isaac wanted Baked Alaska for his birthday cake.

In keeping with Cochran tradition, everyone sang terribly.

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