UPDATE: NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS

February has rolled into March and Easter is just around the corner.

Time flies.

While the world has much activity and heartache at this time (Ukraine situation), our lives in small town Wisconsin have been relatively uneventful.

The boys had GREAT progress reports from school to finish the 1st semester.

Jonah's IEP meeting in February was very productive and encouraging.  While Jonah's attentiveness continues to be an issue, he is moving forward in his IEP goals.  Not as quickly as his sidekick Ben, but that's ok.  Jonah has strengths in other areas.  He is his own little person who follows his own little trajectory.  

We are proud of both boys.

We are very excited that both boys got accepted into a speech device camp at UW Whitewater called "Chatter Matters".  This 3 day camp this summer will hopefully help the boys and us as parents with how to integrate the device into day to day living.  

Because we got this speech device in early March 2020, we had the unfortunate situation of school shutting down right after that.  Therefore we had no instruction on how to start using it with the boys until Fall of 2020 when school resumed.  But then, Jonah was sick with his kidney/bladder issues, and he was at home for a lot of school.  Ben also joined him at home as Covid became more of a concern in Winter 2020 so once again we were left with a device with no idea on how to implement it into our lives.  

So we are very hopeful that we will finally be able to get a "Speech Device 101" course for all of us.  Our goal is to use this device to help the boys communicate better with people outside their immediate core of family/teachers.

Other things we are hoping to look into for the boys for next year are Special Olympics basketball and track/field.  I would also like to try and get Ben into a social skills group to help him with basic conversation guidelines and manners.  And Jonah will hopefully be taking voice lessons this summer to feed his love of music/singing but also as a part of speech therapy.  We are excited about all these ideas!

So that's an update from the past few weeks.  

We are so grateful and blessed that Jonah's health has been BORING- we are really thinking his kidney issues are more and more in the rearview mirror!  June 7th is his next ultrasound.