Special Connection Homeschool

I will be doing a series of posts on ways that we have helped to foster independence in Gess over the years. I have found that sometimes when she was being destructive or disobedient it was simply because she wanted more freedom and power then she had. It's really tough on a special needs child when their mind wants the freedom they should have at their age, but their skills will not allow them to exercise it. While we have had many steps leading up to what we do today, I will start with the here and now. Gess wants to be able to fix her own food and get her own drinks. So to help her to do that I try to buy things that she can do by herself. For breakfast we started with getting the individual sized variety packs of cereal. This way she can pour her cereal in the bowl by herself without having too much come out of the box. Plus it gives her more options to actually "choose" which one she wants that day. First we make sure that we keep things like her bowls and cup...

Gess is still on a "stay home" directive from the doctor. Not because she is still sick, but because there is so much sickness out there right now. We are seeing numerous amounts of confirmed influenza cases in our area, so we feel it is just better to keep Gess from getting exposed. So it's not about staying inside, it's about staying away from people. Well this weekend, we had the opportunity to visit daddy's office because no one was there. My husband, who is a computer programmer and an IT guy, had to go into work this weekend to move some servers around and fix up his new office. He let them know he would be bringing help to carry stuff around, so he got permission for us to go with him. Since no one was in the office to expose Gess to germs we tagged along and helped daddy at work. It was not the first time Gess got to go see daddy's place of employment, but this is the first time she got to do more than actually see it for a few minutes and then ...

We have been unable to do school for 2 weeks. My little one got sick about the time the blizzard came through. We got her medicated before it hit and during the storm she reacted to the antibiotic by not being able to walk! One of the allergic side effects was muscle and joint pain and she had it so severely she didn't want to use her legs at all. When she did use them, you could tell it was very difficult for her. We called the ER and took her off the medication but it was another day after that before we could get her to the doctor to get new medicine because the clinic was closed due to the storm. The new medicine seemed to be improving things, but then she started feeling poorly again. So a week after it all began we headed to the ER. Gess had pneumonia at this point and spent 2 1/2 days in the hospital. She handled the stay really well and finally overcame her fears of blood pressure cuffs and xray machines! She handled the breathing treatments well too! I think we ar...