To my boy...

If I have a monument in this world, it is my son.
-- Maya Angelou





2004


2005


2006


2007


2008


2009



2010


Happy Birthday my sweet, sweet boy.

All About Me...

When we went to the school for Max's IEP meeting, his classroom teacher gave him some "homework" to do, to share with the rest of the students in his class.

Yesterday, we started it by letting Max color all of the t-shirt and write his name in red, his choice. He also chose blue for the letters up top. And I guess you figured out he chose yellow for the t-shirt.

Thanks to Addie's Aunty Rachel who is living in Poland right now, we got some amazing crayons that are so simple for Max to use. Addie gave them to Max this past weekend, so we put them to good use on this project. I wish we could find them here...I can see that the yellow is going to disappear fast!

Once Max finished the coloring, he and I talked about his "favorites" and I helped fill in the rest. So, here it is...Max's All About Me Tee...his first school project!

Pumpkin fun...

The Great Pumpkins...


It was a tough pumpkin!


Gooey!


A Pumpkin Hat



The stencil for carving is put on, and Steve is separating the seeds for us to plant next year.


Abbey's finished pumpkin...


Max's Great Pumpkin with his leaf craft he made in school today...


And his face in yellow (which is hard to see, but of course he insisted on yellow)


And the number 7...for how old he is going to be. He and daddy have a joke with each other that he is going to be 8, but I told them they could paint that on there after his birthday on Sunday!


And, finally, a little pumpkin juice all the way from Harry Potter land, thanks to Whitney and Benji!

Party at zoo...

We don't do big parties for Max's birthday, but we wanted to do something fun to celebrate while his sister was with us this weekend. His birthday is coming up on Sunday, so it was an early celebration.

We had a really busy weekend with everyone here, but he's looking forward to his birthday on Halloween!!! Here are a few photos from our time at the zoo. Abbey took hundreds of photos of the animals, but the last one is one I took of my favorite moment at the zoo. The male orangutan was looking out the window at all of us!

IEP Meeting...

Today was our IEP meeting at the school for Max. Over the past couple of months, his teachers and support team with the school district have been meeting with each other and to evaluate Max to decide what would be on his learning plan, and today was the day to go over that with us all.

Neither of us had ever been to the school before, so once we figure out where we were supposed to be and go, we were greeted by the whole team in the library.

His first grade teacher, based at the school

his first homebound teacher,

his current homebound teacher,

the principal

and assistant principal,

the significant needs support teacher (special education),

and her student teacher,

the school counselor,

the vision specialist,

the occupational therapist,

the augmentative speech therapist,

the speech language pathologist

Is that all?!

Oh...and the district nurse.

It really was a pretty easy meeting. They went around reading aloud their parts to the IEP, making notes along the way if we found anything inaccurate, or that needed to be added. There wasn't much to amend, so I think it went by pretty smoothly.

At the end of the meeting, we got to talking about the possibility of setting up a camera and computer to allow Max and his classmates to interact over video chat. I got teary a couple of times thinking of Max having little "friends". His teacher said she would be happy to come with some of her students that live in the neighborhood to introduce them to Max. She said, he's a part of the class and they all know about him, even though they haven't met him yet. And once they start seeing him on video, maybe we can set it up so they come sit on the porch steps and read to him in the summer. She also offered to figure out a way for us to get his school pictures done.

I never expected in this process of being "homebound" to have such full inclusion with the school. She sent home some "homework" for him to do with his teacher tomorrow. It's an 'all about me' project, and they will hang it up with all the rest of the kids.

I'm so pleased it's gone so well. We have to keep pinching ourselves, because things rarely go so smoothly when it comes to Max.

I guess after 7 years, we're due at least one thing.

Fall is...

Fall is leaves falling.

Fall is pumpkins.

Fall is all about Max.


(Max's school work, writing stories about Fall)

We've had a junky cold here this week. It hasn't gotten us down too bad, but still we've been running a little slower. Today, we got out for a walk in order to soak up some Vitamin D, in the beautiful Colorado sunshine, and take pictures of all the yellow we saw along the way.



He looks like he's sleeping, but he's looking at the yellow flowers. We stop at these flowers every time we take our walk. They are the only flowers tall enough for him to see in his chair.


Blazing red trees...


Wide open spaces, right behind our neighborhood...


Stopping to see the berries...


Beautiful fall colors...


And Max's pumpkins are nearly ready to be cut from their vine. He's just waiting on Abbey to get here on Thursday to do it. He wants to paint his with a yellow face and a yellow "7", he told us on our walk today. I'm sure Abbey will want to carve hers. Either way, we'll be saving the seeds to make sure more pumpkins grow next year!

Surprise Visit...

This morning I woke up groggy, because a certain little monster thought he should stay awake giggling until 12:30 in the morning!

I got out of bed and into the shower before lolligagging through the morning until music therapy at noon. Except...I forgot half of Max's Education Care Team was coming this morning to do some assessments before his IEP meeting next Tuesday!!!

I had just sat down after getting dressed, and hair combed through when the doorbell rang. I didn't think we had any deliveries, so I sat there for a second, trying to decide if I wanted to answer with my wet hair...but it sounded like there were a couple of people on the porch, so I went for it.

DOY!!!! I opened the door to the support services (special education) teacher, and her student teacher, and also the AAC (augmentative speech therapist) teacher smiling at me. I welcomed them in with apologies that I had COMPLETELY forgotten about our appointment!

I got Max into the dining-room and they got right to work, before I could realize that Max needed his diaper changed. Peee-eeeeew! Plus I was scrambling around still giving him his medicines. What a mess!

So, they got to the testing and assessing. First, the teacher brought out two animal figures that made noises. An elephant and a tiger. She asked Max to look at which was the tiger. It was in her left hand. He turned his head to look at the elephant and said "uh-uh". She kept saying, you keep looking at "this hand" is that the one you want? Again, he said "uh-uh" and chuckled. So, I pointed it out he was saying "uh-uh" that the elephant was NOT the tiger. She then asked him to just point out which one WAS the tiger...so he looked at it, with a little look of..."no fun!". HAAAA!!!!

From then on, he mostly stuck to showing her what she wanted. They went through big letters and little letters, he chose correctly the uppercase A. He knew the colors, between yellow and red, he chose yellow, even though she asked for red. I told her that was his all time favorite color, so she asked if the yellow was his favorite and he looked at it again. She said, can you show me red? And he showed her.

She then moved on to pink and blue...he knew the blue one when she asked. Grey and Brown...and he knew the bear was brown...I don't know that we've ever gone over the neutral colors! Purple and orange....she kept referring to purple for the Rockies (baseball team) and orange for the Broncos (football team). I thought I would wait and see if he would answer...but he kept looking back and forth between the two colors. He finally settled on the purple, which she asked for, but I told her we don't follow the sport teams here. She then said, and orange and grapes? I said, he doesn't eat by mouth...how about a pumpkin and a purple monster? That worked and he got it right away. Context is everything, as Steve loves to say!

She wanted to see if he could tell us "favorites" next, so she got two of his favorite books and asked him to choose between the two. She held up "Where The Wild Things Are" and "The Cat In The Hat". She asked him to tell her which one was the Cat In the Hat...this one he did have a little trouble with, because in school, his home teacher has had him choosing which one he WANTS. So that one was a little confusing to him. But, he quickly showed them he could choose his favorite number between 7 and 8...he chose 7. He'll be 7 in a couple of weeks!

Then just for fun, and I think to try to stump him on SOMETHING they pulled out a 6 and a 1 card. She didn't tell him what the numbers were, but asked him how old he was. Not only did he fix his gaze on the 6, but he went ahead and touched it with his left hand. :) Proud, proud, proud, Momma!

They wanted to see him use his talker, which he politely refused. But, they really wanted to see it...so he really showed them a great big fit. I calmed him enough to get him to choose with his talker that he wanted to play with his computer. He finally got there and smiled. Little booger!

He then showed them the "Fall Is" stories he did yesterday, but was really done with all of the showing off...and mostly ready for MUSIC! (Which was what I told him we were doing today...oops!)

They all left feeling impressed with his abilities. I felt happy he showed them he did have a lot going on! I only freaked out once when the teacher coughed on her hand and went to touch Max...I yelped...HAND SANITIZER! Don't touch him!! Yeah...freak. I guess if nothing else, they'll know we're serious about the germ thing!

IEP is next Tuesday...we'll see what they come up with, and what they have to say about his assessment today.

New teacher...

Max's new teacher came today. Max was a little tired and not on his top game...but still I think he enjoyed it a lot. They did a lot of learning each other, but she was good to get right into it too. He was ready to do more learning!

He read a book on Halloween, and laughed right through it. They talked about what will Max be for Halloween, and then he got to see a pumpkin. It wasn't nearly as big as his big BIG pumpkins still growing in the backyard, but still he enjoyed touching it.

It was COLD and ORANGE and had BUMPS and the stem was ROUGH. He liked that pumpkin so much, he wanted it on his tray the whole time.

They then read a story to know what numbers Max knows. They started with #1. The book went through, "Do you want" 1,2,3,...all the way to 10 of an item. Each time, the little boy answered his sister, "No! I want ONE!". Mrs. J. would wait at the end of the page have Max answer "ONE". And he did, over and over again!

After going through the book, she wanted him to show her which amount of blocks in her hands were only ONE. She held up three little shapes in one hand, and one in the other. 4 out of 4 times, with her switching it up, and moving hands he got it with his eye gaze. AMAZING! Every single time!

Because he did so great with that, Mrs. J. wanted to see about if he knows the letters in his name...and in what order they go in. We got out the computer to play with some of his switch games, but since I'm still learning the program, it didn't really show us what he can do the best.

I got out his LeapFrog letters and got out the M, A, X letters. Again, she had him eye gaze which letter came first. He proceeded to spell his name, in order.

He played with the rain stick a little next, but was really starting to feel tired at this point, so Mrs. J. sang to him about rain while he played with the rain stick.

At the end of the time, he wanted to show Mrs. J. a story on his computer. He scanned through his choices until he told us what FALL IS.

It gave the first part, Fall Is... and then he scanned through the different thing about Fall. Here is what he chose...



So, first visit was a good visit. His new school days are Monday and Wednesday. Hopefully he's going to be up for more fun by Monday.

Full life...

Last week, we had friends come to visit us. This was something we were looking forward to, and very excited for. Because we can't travel with Max, it's so appreciated when friends and family come to us. It makes life not feel so isolated.

Our friends, Dean and Tina got here first. They hail from Southern California, and got a taste of Fall in Colorado. Cool, and warm, and sunny, and rainy! We got to visit for a couple of days before our friends, Sam, Rachel and Eloise came all the way from England for a visit with us all. It was so much fun to have everyone here. But WAY too short!

We haven't seen Dean and Tina in 4 years, and Sam and Rachel in over 2 years. Lots of catching up...but not really. Mostly just picking up right where we left off...but not really. See, we talk daily to these friends. Online, through emails, and facebook, and chat, and skype. They are always at the front of our minds. And it was so great to just be with them all!

But, as it goes in the House of Watson, it didn't go without some drama. Friday, after we got home from the airport, I was changing Max's diaper when I noticed he had some blood on his ear. Not totally uncommon, as Max tends to scratch at this ears and if his nails need trimmed, he'll scratch the inside of his ear. But this was no scratch...and it wasn't a little bit of blood.

I called the doctor on call, and they told me if it didn't stop in the next couple of hours, we should take him to urgent care or the emergency room at Children's. So, we made dinner...had a nice meal...said goodnight to all of our friends, and loaded up in Max's van to take him to Children's North Campus. A quick look in his ear, the doctor didn't see any infection, or damage, just plenty of blood pooled around his eardrum. He gave us antibiotic ear drops and said if it didn't stop by the morning, to take him down to the main campus, so they could get the ENT docs involved.

We got home and started getting around Saturday morning, when we saw that he had indeed continued to bleed throughout the night. And was still pooling, so we had to come up with a plan. We had planned for weeks to take our friends up to the mountains on Saturday, but we definitely needed to get Max's ear looked at. So, my sister came to the rescue and she and I went to Children's in the car and Steve took our friends up to the mountains in Max's van.

The doctor saw that he had a small tear at the top of his eardrum. It was possibly caused by his hearing test last Thursday. The tester had to use 3 different sized probes before finding the one that "fit". May have just got his ear just right to induce a little tear. So, with that answer, we were sent home and told to continue with the drops.

Luckily, we were able to meet up with everyone for lunch, and continue on with our visit. But, I was sad to miss the time up with the beautiful fall colors and friends. PLUS, it SNOWED while they were up there. Ah well...next time!







Until next time friends...

Max's School Work...

Max got his first stars in school on Tuesday...



Max is still enjoying school so much! We got some sad news this week from his teacher about going forward. Mrs. G. has a lot of kids this school year already, and they needed to add extra help. So, they brought on a new teacher to pick up the elementary aged kids from her. Sadly for us, that means Mrs. G. won't be back to teach Max.









BUT...we will get to meet his new teacher soon. Hopefully, next week we'll start school with her. She has been a second grade teacher for years, so we're actually looking forward to what she has to bring to Max's teaching.

So, on our last visit with Mrs. G., Max got to do his first school paper-work. She brought a special gadget that helped him hold on to the marker without hand-over-hand help, but we can help him move the marker so he can color "by himself.

Max has been learning about the color BLUE. He used his marker, with Mrs. G.'s help to color the different things that are blue.









Can you tell, "What else is blue?" Max's eyes of course!



Finally, here are some videos of his time yesterday.

I have been amazed at his intention in playing with this rainstick toy. For those who haven't seen Max in person, he'll often hold his hands balled up. Not in tight fists, but just curled in. For him to open his hands fully, both hands, and move this toy, is unlike anything he's ever done.




And a video of Max coloring..