This month was Pappy's (my Dad) birthday. Jude made him a wonderful card, the best penmanship yet! Jude also has done more money budgeting and price comparisons. He still isn't interested in doing any workbooks though. He has taken a shine to the building games and Blockland in particular. We did feel it necessary to set a limit on time of play each day. After about an hour he tends to get aggressive/angry with the other players in the game. He seems happy with the hour limit. He has Legos as well as other building toys but he wanted an Erector set. We got him one as an early Easter gift. He loves it. What a great opportunity to strengthen his fine motor skills! Our Bible study every Sunday has been going very well! I chose the first book- Ephesians and we just finished it this past Sunday. Jude chose our next book- Acts, and we will begin it next Sunday. It's so heartwarming to listen to him read aloud from God's Word.
This is the card Jude made for Pappy. He's never made letters like this and did a great job!Our area, like many on the Midwest/eastern part of our country, was hit by flooding this month. Though the kids and I did not venture out, Chad did. He took many pictures to share with us, we chose just a few to share here.
This is a lamp post.
Four hours later- same lamp post, base fully submerged.
Canoe route now!After a trip to the ER with heart arrhythmia and near fainting, we believe I had a reaction to MSG. We are now trying to eliminate as much chemicals from our diets as we can. This means a lot more homemade everything. I've always loved cooking from scratch but after moving to this apartment, it has faded. It's mostly due to the tiny kitchen but also because of bouts with Fibromyalgia. We are getting back into the swing of it though! Jude is LOVING reading all the ingredient labels and finding out how much "not food" was in our food! It will be a challenge for us but we will be encouraging each other.
Our first attempt at homemade soft pretzels. We made another batch today and I still forgot to get a pic of Jude making them :-/ lol.
Jude received a "gross and messy" book for his birthday that contains all kinds of things to make. This is him making what they call slime or goop. 
It has more a texture of really soft silly putty than what we consider slime! He's played with it a lot. So much fun. He wants to see how long it lasts before he makes another color. Lainey had a check-up at the Orthopedic Surgeon for her spine this month. Since her growth rod surgery in Oct 2010 her curvature has increased 6% (it was 36%post op and now is 42%). We knew it would increase but were surprised it had so much so quickly. At 10% increase is when they will adjust the growing rods to pull the spine straighter. We will go back in June for another checkup. Dr said ideally an annually surgery is best because it decreases the possibility for hardware malfunctions from being adjusted so much.
Lainey has officially gotten to big for most shopping carts :( So we will be using her wheelchair everywhere we go. She's happy in it but we miss the face to face interaction during our shopping. But someday she'll be walking in town and we will be chasing her everywhere! She had a blast the other day at Wal-Mart. I parked her in the aisle as I looked and Jude took the buggy and zoomed past her over and over! She would yell out and clap and jerk her body. I'm sure to others it might have seemed she was upset but we knew she was tickled beyond belief. Another reason we love homeschooling, Wal-mart in the late morning isn't super busy :) and the kids can enjoy themselves ( and us too!)
