Where the wild things are

Where the wild things are...

After school, a busy time in itself having lugged my iMac with me to sit in the adjacent room trying to finish some work, I put some assessment reports together for Reuben, reading the areas for improvement and the strengths and was heartened reading this from the UCLA developmental pediatrician who assessed him last week.

"Despite having complex medical and developmental needs, Reuben has shown a remarkable course of resilience, including acquisition of verbal skills, being socially adaptive and having essentially age-appropriate (46 months) visual reception skills. These skills have been upheld with interventions and with utmost parental effort with follow through and teaching..."

I'm very much aware of the areas we need to continue working on, those where he wasn't age-appropriate in his skills. It's natural that being hard of hearing, having one side facial palsy, having had a tracheostomy for 3/4 years of his little life to date and nearly a year in hospital and sign language being his first expressive language, that Reuben's speech would be delayed. But I don't use those as excuses. I don't want to keep adjusting his developmental age because of what has gone before.

In the garden with Callum. I thought I'd do a few little stories based on story books we're enjoying, here Where the wild things are. I was also trying to teach Callum to sign the alphabet - he's stubborn that boy! I can sign whole songs and sentences to him and he'll translate everything I say, a great command of sign receptively, but getting those fingers to do the same is another challenge. It's not essential, but would just be lovely for Reuben to have a signing pal.

Haven't worked out the Blip yet, but here are a few wedding images from Saturday that I'm proud of. Perhaps you can help...