School, week of Oct 8-11

I've decided I'm going to try to make a post each week about what the boys did in school. This blog is also serving as my journal (I plan on printing it out one rainy afternoon :), so it will be nice to look back and see what X and B were doing each week. I'm going to include any new things they learned, as well as art projects.

This week the boys returned our friend Poky to school and handed him off to 2 other classmates (a brother and sister team!) Ben was sad to see him go. Xavier had a great week, his physical therapist tells me she had the best session ever with him on Tuesday. I love hearing things like that! Ben is also doing well in PT. I stayed for their PT sessions today. Ben is working on going up and down stairs, jumping, running, kicking and throwing a ball, and most importantly, following directions. He's doing pretty well with all those things, his coordination is improving slowly but surely. In speech therapy, Xavier is working on connecting words with pictures/objects, in hopes that this will be a reliable communication tool for him someday. Ben is working on putting the right ending on verbs ("-ing", etc) and speaking his sounds more clearly.

The boys are working on days of the week (Ben stood by Mrs. Browning today and rattled them off during the special song!), talking about the weather, and the season autumn. I think they're also working on letter and the sounds they make, because Ben has been singing "A is for apple, ah-ah-ah!" Today, Xavier picked out "weather Bear's" clothing. I was so proud of him when he looked so closely and chose appropriately the sweatshirt over a t-shirt, and pants over shorts (its a chilly 50 degrees outside today). I could tell he was really thinking about it.

Some of this week's artwork followed the "fall" theme. Here's a collection of their masterpieces:


The one on top is a pumpkin, painted by Ben. He proudly got it out of his bag and placed it on the refrigerator yesterday as soon as we walked in the door. I said, "Benny, did you paint that?! I love it! Is it a leaf?" I asked that because the day before he had told me he made an orange leaf with paint. He frowned, and said, "no Mommy, its a PUMPKIN!" He looked at me as if to say -its big, orange, and round, ya big dummy...what do you think it is!? Anyway, of course I told him it was fabulous and that I loved it and wanted to look at it every time I came in the kitchen. That seemed to satisfy him and he said, "I made mommy soooo happy!" Yes you did Ben!

Below the pumpkin are 2 sponge paintings of fall leaves with a little book made by each of them at the bottom. Xavier's is on the left, Ben's on the right.

Last week the boys had a unit on self-esteem at school. We worked on a little project together about family and their favorite things. Unfortunately the posters we made were all but destroyed when I tried to unstick the tape that was stuck on the back of it from hanging up at school. But I was able to salvage these 2 paper plate faces representing the boys - can you pick which one is which?


Here's a candid of Ben helping Xavier hold a magnet to hang up his painting. Xavier always gets this unsure look in his eyes when Ben is "helping" him...as you can imagine, there have been some misguided (but well meaning) attempts in the past. One that comes to mind, "get off the couch, Xavier. Come play with me!" as he's dragging him off the couch by one arm. Like I said, not good, but with good intentions.

Last, but most certainly not least, the boys were very excited to have a visit from a fire fighter today. I was there for the very beginning of the visit, as Xavier was finishing up his PT. All the kids were sitting in a circle, and Ben ran up to the fireman and jumped up into his lap. He looked at him with a grin from ear to ear. After getting a badge sticker, he sat back in the circle...I'm sure he'll be talking about the visit for a long time. Both boys came home with fireman hats. Unfortunately, Benny has been on a photo strike as of late and I could not, for the life of me, get him to sit for a picture today. So here's Xavier, proudly displaying his artwork in the background, and showing off his fireman hat. That boy is such a ham, all I have to do is get my camera out and he turns into a big showoff.