Rosie has her speech evaluation tomorrow at our local elementary school.
I’m kind of nervous! I wonder what it will entail. Rosie is nervous too, more so than I am.
She has trouble saying her R’s. They are like W’s. She also can’t say the letter J, she says a D sound instead. Like “dam” for “jam” or “poil” for “pearl”. “Girl” sounds like “gal”. She’s improving slightly as she gets older, but she still has such a baby voice compared to her peers. I don’t want it to be something that she gets made fun of over later on. It’s most noticeable when she’s reading out loud. That’s what finally motivated me to seek the opinion of the speech therapist just in case.
The speech therapist told me that they only offer therapy to the very worst cases in public school. The preliminary evaluation will tell her if Rosie needs to be evaluated further for free speech therapy at school, or if she should get private speech therapy (out of pocket, yikes) for a mild issue, or if we should wait another year or two for her to grow out of her speech issues.
On the phone the speech therapist told me that the major speech issues they treat are ones that interfere with learning in the classroom. I’m not sure Rosie’s speech is that terrible, it’s just a bit wonky. I would be surprised if her speech was found to be poorly enough to be approved for public school speech therapy, but I’ll gladly take the speech therapist’s free opinion of what we should do.
Just to clear up any confusion we’re still homeschooling, but Rosie can get public school services like speech therapy the same as any student in the district. I had to call the speech therapist and schedule the evaluation a few months in advance. If she were in a classroom at school her teacher would set it up. If Rosie does qualify for their speech therapy then I would take her to it and pick her up just like I would for any appointment.
I kept thinking that she would start talking more clearly at any time, but it just isn’t happening. I have no idea why. I started getting concerned when she couldn’t sound out words. She sounds out words and writes them really wrong–like she would mispronounce them. For example if she were to sound out the word “reading” she would write “weeding”. Speaking of reading, she is doing really well with it. She can read and comprehend books like Frog and Toad, and she’s starting to read harder books like Junie B. Jones. (I dislike Junie B. Jones quite a bit for her bad example of behavior and I banned it from our house, but it’s crept back in.) She reads books to herself every night in bed while falling asleep and then tells me about them the next morning. It’s crazy how she’s suddenly so much older. She’s wanting to spend more and more time off by herself reading and writing, and playing games on the iPad.
Rosie broke her glasses today. We ran into each other in the hallway. I was carrying a huge indoor slide we have, that one shaped like a school bus. Rosie was running down the hall. She fell under me and snapped the ear piece off of her glasses so hard it scratched her face and made it bleed.
She was utterly devastated that she’d broken her glasses. She sobbed and sobbed.
We went to the eye place to see about a replacement. They were under warranty for a full year! But they had to order the frames and it will take at least seven business days before they come in, so in the mean time the lady frankensteined another mismatched ear piece onto Rosie’s pair so that she could still wear them.
Ada tried on every pair of baby glasses they had while we were waiting. Most of them looked ridiculous, except for this one pair. If they weren’t so expensive I would have bought them just because Ada and I both loved them so much. (Red stuff on her nose is from a fall down the one step out the back door…)
Bad eyesight runs in Tyler’s family. Tyler got glasses as a preschooler. I didn’t take Rosie to the eye doctor as a baby and I regret that in hindsight. I made Ada an appointment for April 11th. If by some chance she needs glasses we are so getting this pair! I’m a little nervous about how the appointment will go. What if she won’t let the eye doctor near her?
We’ve been spending all day, every day outside. This weather!
Rosie is tending to her garden of strawberries. She has two 4×4 beds of them. They send out runners and make new plants every year. One bed is less full than the other and I’m thinking about condensing them all to one bed. I think they can be quite close together. Or maybe I’ll just plant the green beans around the strawberries in the less full bed? Google told me I could do that.
Here’s the fuller bed. I just weeded it and pulled out all of the fall leaves that had piled up in there. The strawberries were happy to see daylight again! I’m going to mulch them as soon as I dig up the cash to buy mulch.
This green house I found at Tractor Supply is awesome. It works! It’s warm and wet inside, perfect for my sprouting seeds.
(Warm and wet inside. I can hear Tyler making an inappropriate joke in my head.)
We did something great today. We found out that we could consolidate our $7,500 of credit card debt by rolling in into our small second mortgage and refinancing the whole shebang into a principle and interest 15 year low fixed rate loan. We did it through the credit union so there were no closing costs or any fees. Now we have no credit card debt!!! NEVER AGAIN! The main reason it accumulated in the first place was when Tyler lost his job while I was pregnant with Ada. We paid bills with our savings and bought food and gas with the credit card. Desperate times. Hope that never happens again.
I feel such relief to have it gone. We still have to pay off the second mortgage, but it’s so organized now. Just one payment every month that’s even lower than all of the minimum payments we were making before on several cards, and lower than the interest only payment we were making before on the scary adjustable rate second mortgage we had. This is a total win-win situation beyond what I could have imagined.
Now we only have our main mortgage, our small second mortgage, our low car payment for the van, and our basic household bills. This is very good.
Plus paying off those credit cards will really raise our credit scores, which in turn will enable us to get a better mortgage rate and amount for a farm/house when we are finally able to move. It’s looking like that won’t be until after Tyler is hired on and we’ve saved some money. I’m trying not to think about it. Maybe it will go by fast. Hopefully I will be complaining about cramming a third kid into this tiny house…
I think it’s supposed to be rainy and in the 60′s this weekend. Maybe our random brief summer has ended and we’ll get back to regular spring.
I’m a bit sad about that.
Rosie looks a lot different without her glasses on. I love this picture of us together though. We have almost the same color eyes. At least I was able to sneak in one little part of my DNA. Tyler’s DNA took over the rest of Rosie’s appearance.
Tags: instagram, instagrams, moving, photos, Rosie, the house, urban homesteading
ugh about the saying R’s thing. brought back bad memories! over the summer between 2nd and 3rd grades, my dad told me that if i didnt know how to say my R’s by time school started, my 3rd grade teacher was going to send me back to 2nd grade. i was terrified of starting school! my dad always had the worst strategies for dealing with my problems!!!!!!
hope rosie figures out those R’s and J’s!