Homeschool Potpourri annual sale 2014

Confession time: I get giddy when I am planning a trip to this awesome store. It is one of my favorite places, and I never come away empty handed. I could spend days pouring over everything they have, and even after many, many visits over several years, I seem to discover something new just about every time. They have amazing prices, the staff is knowledgeable and very kind and helpful, and the many consignors they have (me included!) help to ensure there are always wonderful treasures to discover.

I believe this is the third time I have come to this particular sale. This year, I prepared far better for it than I normally do. I suppose my organizational skills are slowly improving with age, haha.

We have recently decided to completely redo the way we homeschool our children because frankly, what we were doing was NOT working. Parts were, yes, but as a whole there were a lot of issues, both in the fact we had picked curriculum that is time consuming and tedious (not helpful when you have multiple ages to teach) and because we were not addressing a couple specific needs of our children. We also decided that Rich will be teaching math from here on out, as honestly, despite a natural ability with it, I loath math. I do not want to teach my children to loath it as well, and we all know how they pick up on things like that. Rich also decided he wanted to put together his own math curriculum, as he just does not like the available options for various reasons. I will go more into detail on exactly how this is playing out in a future blog. For me, I have decided to do something I thought I would never do, and dive into a fully formed curriculum after hearing some of the amazing things about Sonlight. Again, expect a more in depth blog on this decision in the near future.

So, this year in preparation for their annual sale, during which ALL used items (yes, they carry a few new items) are 30% off, we not only made a list of things to look for, Rich also took a day off from work and we arranged a sitter. Best laid plans of mice and men, the only sitter we could find was my mom, who moved last week, so we decided to still take Ruth and Jeanette to make things a bit easier on her. I have to say, only having those two to worry about, and not my two that are truly challenging at that store, was heaven on earth! It was also strange and nice to only have two kids with us, as it has been a while (you know, over four years) since we only had two children.

So, now for the part I'm sure is all that matters to you, our awesome finds! I think we made out pretty well. We spent about $210, and got a lot of stuff.


We got a lot of math stuff, as this is where most of our need was. Lots of flash cards of varying types (Rich loves flash cards), the "pattern animals" are pattern block cards and something I have been wanting to find. Math wrap up, these things are awesome! There is a third book that goes with the brown and blue books. These are the books Rich found and was just giddy over. He plans to use them as a base for what he teaches the kids. The first book is MIA, so I have a feeling he took it to work with him. Yeah, I love that man. Large Cuisenaire rods, although not a full set, they have proven to be lots of fun, and I'll keep looking for more. The red math board thing is multiplication, Rich was also excited when I found that. It is one that shows the problem, then you push the button and it shows the answer.

Just a couple random things I found, magnets are always tons of fun, and those books have lots of fun songs in them. Now I want to find the CD for the "Wee sing America".

These are awesome. You can build sentences with them. Some have words, others have word pieces to make bigger words.

These were in the math stuff picture, but do you see how many there are here? I paid $19.95 for ALL of these.

We're switching the handwriting we are using, this is what I was able to find of the Handwriting Without Tears that was printing. Not ready to teach Elli cursive since her penmanship needs some work.

These are some random books. "Things That Go" and "Mammals" I found in the clearance section for $1, meaning they were $0.70 with the sale. Elli loves I Spy type books, which the two "Great Search" books are. One book with audio CD for our listening library, a random Dr. Seuss book Ruth picked, "Big Cats" was also for Ruth, and I found one of the Usborne "That's Not My..." books, which are AWESOME for Jeanette with her sensory problems.

This wouldn't fit in the picture with the other books without me getting up and moving stuff around on my bed. However, I think it is awesome enough for it's own picture. Isn't this a gorgeous copy of Huckleberry Finn?!

I am buying all of Tobiah's Sonlight readers separate and not from Sonlight to save money. I know I could do this with *all* the books, but I'm going to be honest, between his readers and the girl's Pre-K books, which I also decided to track down, there were 35 books we did not have, and I just did NOT have it in me to look for more than that. So, this is what I was able to find of Tobiah's. He needs two more books.

This is what I was able to find for the Sonlight Pre-K list that we do not yet have. I had hoped to find more, but honestly, this is better than nothing. That Bearenstein Bears book? Sonlight wants $30 for it. Before the sale it was $6.50.

And, this is what I found after taking all the pictures. Go figure. Rich was excited to find the Base Ten Number set, and it is basically brand new. The Boggle game I fully intend to use for Elli to practice looking for words with, not as a game played in it's intended manor. Although I'm sure we'll play it occasionally as well.

Now a couple pictures of what my girls were doing while I was writing this blog. I love to teach them the "right" way to use manipulatives, then just let them go at it however they want. Ruth was putting on a "puppet show" with the snap cubes.

This is the "race car airplane" Naomi made with the Cuisenaire rods. She is SO detail oriented. She made sure each rod was lined up perfectly.

There honestly may be one or two things that the kids ran off with before I got pictures. I really do not remember. I do not believe so, though. So, all of that for $210 (rounding the change up). I think we did pretty well!

Next time I will do one thing VERY different. I will email them ahead of time with my list of the important stuff (like the books) and have them look before we get there. I meant to do this Friday and it just never happened. This would have been very helpful for two reasons: First, I may have found more. By the time the search for the books happened, it was already around 1pm and they had sold hundreds of things already, and there were a couple books the owner said he thought they had that could not be found, so who knows, maybe they had already been purchased since they opened. Second, I had to wait for about an hour for him to help me search out the books, and I had NO idea where to look for most of them (since this is my first time looking for literature there). That is not usually the case, they usually are not terribly busy and are always happy to help you find what you are looking for. It was PACKED though. I've never seen it so busy! Guess that is what the first day of the sale looks like, though.

All in all, it was a fun trip, and I'm excited about what we found. We'll be going again soonish, perhaps when the baby comes and Rich is off for a couple of weeks, or perhaps before then, so that he can talk with the owner about the math curriculum he wants to put together for the kids. That was the one and only thing we did not get out of our trip yesterday, the personal touch of sharing in the wisdom of seasoned homeschoolers. They were awful busy, though.

Autism Awareness April 4th

Autism Awareness April 4th

I apparently published this on the wrong blog. Whoops!

I talked a bit about how Naomi plays. So today I am going to talk about Tobiah's favorite play. Since before his first birthday, he has been obsessed with anything that has wheels. To this day he will line his cars in a perfectly straight line and lay with his face in the carpet looking at them. He will take one and play with the wheels, then roll it slowly back and forth on the floor before putting it back in line. He completely flips, and always has, if anybody so much as touches his car lines. Naomi's very first way to "play"? Why go kick his cars and laugh while he flipped out, of course! (She was barely one when she started that, and honestly these days it's mostly Ruth)

We have had MANY cars lose their wheels over the last five years. His obsession has never been limited to cars, but anything with wheels. The obsession is not slowing down, either. 

I recently saw a post on Facebook of a perfectly straight line of cars that said something along the lines of "Just because autistic children cannot draw a straight line, doesn't mean they do not know that one is". It made me laugh. My autistic kids are very artistic, but I can still relate to the car lines.

Naomi does play like this as well, but not as often. Her preferred way is collecting, and in turn that manifests in very limited, perceivably normal ways for Tobiah (he has a rock collection, and is very obsessed with "complete" sets of toys like Imaginext). Each autistic child is different, but both of these behaviors are very common.

I will get a picture the next time he does this and update the post.

Viability

With every pregnancy I have breathed a little easier when we have reached the point of viability, which is typically considered 24 weeks (there are babies who make it before then, but 24 weeks is when the baby has a 50% chance of survival or more). It is always a huge relief to make it to this point because I know that if something awful were to happen, my baby would have a fighting chance.

This time, I have waited rather impatiently for this day to come. As I have brefly talked about in a previous blog, we experienced some complications at the beginning that put my baby at a higher risk of not making it. I have what is called a subchoriatic hemorrhage. This is actually a fairly common thing, and I even remember being told in a dating ultrasound I believe with Ruth that I had a small one. That one resolved and never caused a single issue, which is the most common outcome.

With this pregnancy, I started bleeding. The part that made it the hardest is this bleeding started about an hour after we told our kids (at the Thanksgiving dinner table) that we were going to have another baby. The bleeding was very heavy, and then the cramping started. We were sure we had lost our baby we so desperately wanted. We spent that whole weekend convinced she was gone, then I went to the ER Sunday night because I couldn't take it. The doctor found her on the ultrasound, her little heart beating. I was elated, but that was not the end of the roller coaster. 

We spent the next two weeks in and out of appointments and hospitals, one day it was good news, the next it was bad or suspected to be bad. The bleeding finally stopped after a couple of weeks, and I was relieved until it started again. For me, it never completely stopped. It has continued to come and go, and each time I stress a little more because I'm at an elevated risk of my placenta detaching.

So, here we are at viability. I can finally breath a little easier. I still want our sweet little girl to stay right where she is for at least another 13 weeks (although if she follows the trend of the others it will be more like 16.5), but it is a huge weight off my shoulders to know that if the worst were to happen, she would have a fighting chance.

Autism Awareness April 3rd

One thing that autistic children are not is flexible. They are schedule and routine loving people, and thrive with those two things. 

We have a pretty good routine. One of Naomi's favorite parts of her routine is her speech therapy that we go to on Thursdays.

Last night we got her to stay in bed by telling her she had to go to sleep so she could wake up and see Natalie (her therapist). This morning we got her in the clothes *we* wanted her in by telling her Natalie wanted to see that pretty dress. We drove all the way to Seattle with her asking every few minutes how much longer until she saw Natalie. When we got to the hospital where her therapy is, she got so excited and said "yay!" Then we got upstairs to check in, just to find out nobody called us to tell us therapy was cancelled this week.

Autistic children are not flexible. Today we narrowly avoided one of the worst melt down, freak out, kicking and screaming tantrums... Because I told Naomi we would do anything she wanted, besides see Natalie. She cried. She started to freak out. It took every trick I've learned, but we avoided it. Today was nothing short of a miracle.

Folks, that's life with autism. I swore I'd never be that type of parent. I swore my kids would learn to deal with disappointment. When living with autism, you learn to pick your battles very carefully, and you figure out when the battle is not worth it and do whatever is needed to maintain order. 

Thankfully Naomi wanted to play with friends, and we just so happened to have a friend that could play. Like I said, today was a miracle. The last time this happened, I left carrying a kicking and screaming child that I almost dropped repeatedly, and she screamed the entire way home, because NOTHING was good enough to replace what she had planned out in her mind.

We have dealt with this in other areas, too. It is because of her inability to cope with the disappointment of something she is told is going to happen not happening that I never tell my kids what we are doing until we are there. That's life with autism. You learn to avoid the let down. You learn to just give in and buy them ice cream to eat in your freshly cleaned car because you forgot five days ago you said you'd buy them a treat the next time you went to the grocery store, and they remembered. You learn to pick your battles and work within their challenges, and you learn that despite the disapproving comments and looks, that it's ok.

Autism Awareness April 2nd

April 2nd autism awareness:

Naomi is starting to have some great imaginative play. It has come from a lot of work and modeling, mostly by Ruth and I, with the other kids playing with her on occasion.

However, Naomi's preferred way to play is to gather her toys up and put them in anything that will carry them. When this behavior first started, she was two and it was an Easter basket. Since it has been baskets, bags, boxes, toy shopping carts, really anything that holds objects, even when it is too small (which is often a source of great frustration that leads to some of our bigger tantrums that we still frequently have-small compared to the past though). Her favorite is her dinosaur backpack. If she is playing this way, she completely flips out if you try to take anything from her collection, which is very frustrating to the other kids since she is not "playing" with it. This is a major source of fights in our house.

Rich and I were cleaning the entry way and found this box. We both sighed then laughed. This is such a common thing to find in our home.

I think the funniest I ever discovered was when we changed the master bedroom from the playroom to our bedroom, and I went to put something in one of the master bath drawers, and could not open it because it was crammed so full.

The most embarrassing and upsetting was the time she attached to a little tin at the Goodwill, and refused to give it up even to have it ringed up. Once we were in the car and had left, we discovered she'd filled it with random little toys.

Autism Awareness April 1st

Yes, I know it is April 2nd. I had every intention of starting this yesterday, and life got the best of me. So, here is my first post, and only a day late. ;)

April 1st autism awareness:

Naomi sings this song hours every day. The words change, but she's been using the same melody for a couple of years. Before she spoke (approximately 26 months is when she first started using words), it was a wordless song. Naomi has loved music since before she was born, and has a natural ability for it. Not all autistic children do, but quite a few do. This is one of the beautiful parts, but it is also something that can be very trying. She does this CONSTANTLY. She's not often quiet about it. Especially in the car.

In other news, Naomi's creative play has gotten a lot better. We work on this daily.

Oh, and please, pretend you don't see my clean laundry waiting to be dealt with.

Autism Awareness Month

April is autism awareness month. I decided that each day in April, I will post a little view into how our lives are touched by autism. I typically try to keep things upbeat when I talk about autism, because I prefer to look at it in a positive light. However, as a mother of children who have autism, I also feel it is my job to educate and give insight. Autism can be very challenging for both the autistic child and the parents, and a lot of people see the moments of struggle and cast judgement. This is a serious problem, and one I hope to start to change by teaching others about life with autism. So, some of my posts will be the upbeat, silly, and beautiful side of autism, and some will be about the challenges. My hope is that by the end of the month, everybody who reads them will have a better understanding of what our lives are like, and will have experienced a glimpse into the world of autism.