Our kiddos

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

NeVaehs Ipad

I haven't said much about NeVaeh lately but she had progressed leaps and bounds. I don't know if anyone realizes the hours I put into her Ipad. She uses the Talk Tablet app on the Ipad for communication. It is wonderful and NeVaeh benefits greatly from it. I get great Ideas from Facebook friends...mostly Julie who has a teenage son with 1p36. We are both are brainstorming together to get our kids vocabulary at their fullest. NeVaehs favorite pages are the food, out to eat and movie pages. But of course I don't have pictures of them. She uses this for school and home. She does get Speech therapy every day in school and we go to out patient ST every other week which is where she got started on the Ipad. It is one of her primary sources of communication. She however does know sign language and for anyone who knows NeVaeh realizes it is very easy to know what she wants. Her body language and gestures are very clear. At over 9 1/2 she is very smart just is unable to talk. She can say a couple words and we all hope someday she will come out talking. She jabbers a mile a minute and spits out big words but then never repeats them. Thanks to a generous gift from my mother for the Ipad a couple years ago she has been really going forward with it. She hates it if someone else tries to find a page for her as its hers. She has some fun games on the ipad and we used to lock this app in so she couldn't close it out but now this is the first thing she goes to. It is endless for the things we can put on it. So help me if it ever breaks....The first one Mom actually gave us the screen shattered....the week Paul died. We were able to get it replaced and had to start all over with it. Since then I've figured out (luckily) how to save it. She deleted it once because I forgot to reset the Ipad after cleaning some apps off of the Ipad so she was able to delete it. I about had a heart attack. It had over a year of work on it. I put the app back on and it was like a new app :( . Thankfully when I hooked it to the computer and restored it it all came back. Here's a few pictures of her pages. Note she has I bet over a hundred pages. She uses it well. Like I told Julie the other day..when she doesn't like something or it doesn't interest her she ignores it. But then one day she will surprise me and come to the page and tell me about it.

Main page that all the others are linked too. I actually have a fifth column added since I took this picture.

This is her main school page. Each link to new pages.

This is her holiday page. I'm trying something new for her. Have Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween and Easter each linked to new pages. Eventually will link them all to new pages with things about the holidays.

This is the Easter page

ThanksGiving

Christmas

Under Christmas I placed a tab for What I want for Christmas...Umm think her and I need to discuss things so we can be putting things her..lol

Here's her church page...I put the whole lords prayer on it. The Sunday school Choir sang a song that said Yeah in it so I put that on it too....that interested her but when I tried to get her to go to the church tab in church she got mad at me grabbed away the Ipad and and told me she wanted Chicken Nuggets....Ok Guess she was hungry LOL

I put some games on it...her's go fish. She actually has learned how to play both Go fish and Uno fairly well. She's doing things other kids do!! Makes me so excited!!

This is the main game page that links to her games

This is the start of her library page....Its bigger now. I went on line for the school library and actually googled the names of books in the school library and put on her Talk Tablet app. When she goes to the library in school then she can pick what catagory book she wants and pick what book she actually wants. Then her classmates in school go with her and help her find that book.

This is a picture from one of her games on the Ipad....she can "color" a picture and snap the picture to save it. She loves this.

NeVaeh is progressing greatly in swimming. I think she has a float on in this picture but she has graduated to swimming without now. SHE CAN SWIM ALL BY HERSELF!!!!!

Which is more than I can say for myself LOL.

Our big girl continues to amaze us every day!!!!

Halloween and Birthday party

The three kids went Trick or Treating on Halloween then on Saturday we had a Costume party for Andres' Birthday. We managed to snap a picture with all of the youngest grand-kids...except NeVaeh with my mom. She's pretty proud of this picture...I call it Grandma's goblins...note there are several more Great grand kids of the same ages but this is all 7 (since I stuck NeVaeh) the youngest Grand Children! (Yes there's a whole generation of older Grandchildren LOL)

NeVaeh, Aaliyah and Andres all ready for Trick or Treats on Halloween.

Clarice and Ruby snuggling with Grandma.

Lucky kid...another birthday cake.

And...the youngest of them all Trinity :)

Deep breath and blow..wait wish first ;)

The kids had a blast...then the next week end we went over to Trinity's house and celebrated her first birthday! The weekend before Clarice had a four year old party but Mommy worked so we had to give her a present when she came to our house. Wow every body's having Birthdays...A couple other cousins are having birthdays too.

Busy months September, October and November!!

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Happy Birthday Andres

Andres turned 8 on October 30th. He hasn't had a big party yet but we had cake and some presents. We even invited Grandma over. He wants a costume party on Saturday. Our little boy has grown and matured so much since the short time he has been living with us.

Yes its a skunk LOL.

NeVaeh was more interested in the Smurfs.

Grandma was very happy to give Andres his Birthday spankings...umm I mean Hugs :)

Happy Birthday Aaliyah

Little behind...Aaliyah turned 6 on September 2nd. She had a fun party...We started at Pizza Ranch with a bunch of relatives then since the kids were kind of rowdy my sister suggested going to our place (lesson learned clean house lol). Well we went to our house and the kids had a blast and played the rest of the afternoon.

Come on its your Birthday kid..Smile..

that's better lol.

Nothing like tearing up the kids rooms lol.

They had a blast!!

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Summertime

Well guess I got a bit behind on my blog so guess I will try to sum up the summer here.

Was a busy, fun summer. We had lots of thing we did.

The summer started with Aaliyahs Eye surgery in June. It only slowed her down a little bit. She did have a bit of pain and swelling from it but never the less she was out and playing on the play set as you can see on the picture below. Her face is a bit swollen in the picture but she was still our little fire ball :) After about a week she was back to her normal self.

We had a fun family day at the zoo. I managed to tackle going with just myself and the three kids. This day we went the weather was great and the kids enjoyed the animals.

Fourth of July was a festive event. NeVaeh really enjoyed all the fireworks. She was cheering on the fireworks. We saw the display at Garretson.

We also went to Laura's to set off fireworks. The kids got to play with cousins and set off snakes and snaps. They enjoy playing with cousins.

Gramma at Lauras

Couple candid pictures of Aaliyah and Andres

NeVaeh worked hard all summer with communication. We added new features on her Talk Tablet on the Ipad. She now has some jokes and starting to add some games.

The weekend before the Fair in Sioux Falls there was Family Fun Days at the fair grounds. The kids had a blast...they also went to the Sioux Empire fair the following week but I didn't get any pictures of that.

After the family fun days we ate at Mckennan park and played there too.

This has been a very fun summer. Its been very busy!

We ended the summer up a week before school started with a vacation in the Black Hills. It turned out to be a very enjoyable and welcomed getaway!!

These are pictures taken at Reptile Garden.

Aaliyah (the brave one) pet a snake.

We watched the Alligator wrestler.

She of course had to pet the alligator too.

We drove through Bear country too.

Saw Mount Rushmoore...Or the Men on the Mountain as the kids call it...LOL

We visited Crazy horse too.

Dinosaur park had many steps up to it about 120 or 130...NeVaeh was NOT going to go to up those steps so we stayed down and checked out the gift shop while Dan and the other two checked out the dinosaurs.