Our Little Gym party

Our Little Gym party went very well considering I booked it for Memorial Day Weekend without noticing! :) We had a nice group of 11 kids + the triplets. In total there were 3 sets of triplets there. It was Liam's first time at the Little Gym and he looked super happy. Duch was a bit scared with the happy bday singing, but she did not hide in the bathroom :) Liam and Duch were tired after about an hour which was understandable after a morning at the beach, but they were good sports. It was great to have Cari, Kaffie, Kristen, and Bensy there, too! Thanks for coming. If you have some nice pictures, send them to me :)

The games were going to start

Liam loved the games with the parachute

Standing in the center of the parachute

Group picture

Happy Birthday Song time

This is Miss Bianca, who is frequently the teacher on Saturdays and has been super nice to Duch

A closeup of Miss Bianca and Duch

Visit to Jordan's house at the beach

The kids did amazing today at the Galveston beach. They were so anxious to get there, but still were super patient after all the "are we there, yet?" questions. Liam was a star with the waves! The pictures say it all!

Reminders of games

Please keep in mind all the ideas for games with Liam:
-          Joking with his intonation and our intonation (like when he says “let’ s bounce on the ball” or “give me baby pop corn”)

-          Guessing games

-          Clue games

-          Scavenger hunt games (hide things and give clues of how to find them)

-          “Hidden pictures” (print them from the web)

-          Cross words (creative crosswords from the web)

-          Word search

-          Tangled puzzles

-          Hang man

-          Teach language through modeling with pillow pets, puppets, dinosaurs,

-          Scrabble for kids

-          Charades

For Duch, remember the idea is to explore “If I did nothing, what would Duchis do?”  Monitor Duch’s initiations:

o   Does she propose things she has played in the past with you?

o   Does she propose things she has played in the past with someone else?

o   Does she propose something she has watched in TV or computer?

o   Does she propose something from her imagination?

Give choice without talking. “There are lots of thing on the shelf” or just say: “Oh, what can we do today?” 

Fantastic Outreach with Megan

We had a great outreach with Megan. She was very happy with the kids' progress. Specially, she was blown away by her sessions with Liam. In the first session, she was there for 2.5 hours and there was really very very little joining. Not that there is anything wrong with joining, but she was really excited about his attention and observation of everything she would do. Her words were: "he was turned a corner". And she said Liam is like an endurance runner. He may not be a fast sprinter, but he keeps running the marathon and making progress. With Duch, Megan had great ideas to inspire her to the next level. We will work lots on Duchis' initiation skills, which will require us to change our game with her, but we can do it! Megan told us that all we had been doing had been working and had brought them to this new level. So, we have now new challenges for our summer sessions.

Thanks to everyone who came to the outreach and the group meeting even if it was the end of exams week. Megan was really happy with the team and she got to observe Kristen, Jordan, and me.

Also, we realilzed that Jordan, Mary, Kristen, and Molly will all be graduating from UH in May 2013, so we have a new visualization in our mind. We are visualizing Duchis graduating from her SonRise program, too, in May 2013, so that Jordan, Mary, Kristen, Molly, and Duch all belong to the class of 2013! Wouldn't that be so exciting?  Enjoy the pictures!

Almost five years of playing!

Kaffie and I were remembering this week that it will be 5 years in August that we met and that she joined our family. She met the kids when they were 2 years old. After 5 years of lots of playing, look at these great pictures! Thanks, Kaffie!

Tony the Tiger

Got to take these wonderful pictures of Tony for one of his assignments at school. Very proud of this sweet wonderful boy! And, he is a fantastic SonRise sibling, too!