Signs of Life : The Brownie Chronicles

Back in January, I sent this email out to a select few of my homeschool friends regarding my oldest son:


I have a question and decided to ask you few ladies. My son has struggled for years with penmanship. He writes very neatly and very well in his handwriting book. If he writes on his own, on a blank sheet of paper, he just can't do it.  If he writes anything, it's a mess. He can't express his thoughts on paper because he struggles so much to remember how to physically form each letter.  I've tried keeping a penmanship alphabet in front of him, but he will look up for almost every letter.    I've been putting off dealing with this for the past two years. I have said, "He'll snap out of it." "One day it'll all click for him."  But he's close to 10 years old now and he's feeling "stupid" (his own words) because he "can't write." Today, I sat him down to try to find out the problem and he said he simply can&#…

The last week of school at TSD was an exciting one, filled with some very cute programs and field trips.  Both boys loved their teachers and made several good friends.

Tian amazes us daily with his ASL and spoken English skills.  He loves us to read books and doesn't care if we sign ASL or read aloud in English.  He'll pay close attention either way.  Tian is completely on-track with his peers and will do great in pre-k in the fall!  We just gotta work on his "obeying" skills.  At home and at school, he often thinks it's cute and/or funny to disobey, then produce a huge ear-to-ear grin.

Travis will be moving on to Kindergarten in the fall!  Ken and I were prepared to keep him in pre-k one more year due to his language delay, but the teacher and counselor feel that he can move on to Kindergarten since he is academically ready.  Travis is counting, identifying letters and numbers, writing letters, sequencing, and all the other things kids need to be doing to be re…

The first third of 2013 was fairly uneventful.  Ken changed jobs, but otherwise, the kids all rolled along with school, TJ turned 10 and I worked part time as a Video Interpreter for ZVRS, and we actively sought out a church home.  Otherwise, there wasn't much to report.
(We did have stuff going on. You may not guess the way I sometimes blog, but I don't share everything on here; probably not even a 5% of what's going on in our lives.)
Ken has always been an entrepreneur at heart.  He has some pretty amazing product and business ideas.  (He had the idea for this service, which we now happen to use and highly recommend, way back in the mid-1990s.  Certainly before its time.)  He's innovative.  He's forward-thinking.  His co-workers both in the law enforcement community and in telecommunications industry have called him a "maverick."  One person meant it as an insult, but he always saw it as a compliment.  Some of his friends call him "Deaf MacGuyver,&…