The Vance's: August 2013

I've put off this post for a while now, mainly because I don't know what I want to say. I think I'll start off by saying that I have the greatest kids in the world (as one of them screams at me because I took away his coveted Peter Pan doll) and parenting is the hardest job ever.
Every week I get those lovely little emails outlining my kids' developmental milestones. I read books. I research child development. I take them to well child checks. And I watch them grow. Each in their own little way.
But then one day I started to wonder. I had just taken Lucy to her 18 month check up and realized as I was filling out another screening form that in the "communication" section she wasn't hitting every milestone. No big deal, she was still fine.
Another week went by and I then noticed she stopped saying words she had earlier spoken and wasn't really saying any new words. She completely understood (and still does) everything we said, followed directions and commands and "communicated" just fine non-verbally. But, I wanted to hear more out of that sweet little mouth!
So I decided to call Early Intervention Services and have her evaluated. Nothing like having 2 people come to your house to test your 19 month old on her social, emotional, physical and verbal skills. I was obviously more nervous than Lucy was. Of course, my little girl was amazing and charmed the pants off them. She smiled, ran around with her baby doll and "answered" each of their little test questions almost perfectly. But, she still didn't say much. After an hour they tallied up their test results and gave us the news. Our daughter was a quiet genius! There were no physical or social concerns but expressive language was delayed. She tested at a 4 year old level for cognitive understanding but because she was really only saying about 2 words (mama and uh oh) she was at a 10 month old level and would need to begin speech therapy.
Now, I realize as I type this it's really not that big of a deal. It's just a little help in one tiny area of her big world that we are treating early and will move on. But for me it's all been a bit overwhelming. A few days later we received a letter from the Division of Developmental Disabilities essentially labeling her with a speech disorder. Ugh. I hate labels.
The good news is it's only been 2 weeks and 1 therapy session and she is improving greatly. We have already learned so many great skills to use to help her communicate with us. Matt is taking a 3 month night class on speech techniques, we are reading books and weekly in-home speech therapy should get her back on track.
Of course, it's never just a simple issue with one child. Carter wanted some speech help too. :)
For the past few months we've noticed Carter has a hard time pronouncing common words (more than just your average child at 3 years old). After the SLP heard him talk when she visited Lucy and speaking to a few other SLP friends, they all encouraged he get evaluated as well. I've seen a few kids at parks make fun of him for not saying his name "right" and it pretty much broke my heart. So I'm now busy working with the school district to get him weekly services, researching articles, tips, books, anything I can to help both kids and somehow juggling our normal everyday lives.
I'll say it again. I'm overwhelmed. I'm the pregnancy and baby expert at work. I don't know much about speech. This is a whole new area I have suddenly found myself in and although many of the tips seem like common sense, they are thoughtful, well-studied techniques to help both kids. And there is a lot to learn.
I'm so thankful it's this and not something worse. But for us, right now, it's a lot. We can only encourage them along the way and wait for them to talk on their own, perfect schedule. In the meantime I've learned to appreciate the simple activities during the day and to slow down. It's been so good for me to really sit down and concentrate on their activities, slow down and focus, watch their actions and show real interest. It's often easier for me to see them happily playing quietly and go unload the dishwasher or fold some laundry but creating little teachable moments throughout the day is teaching me more about them, which has been the greatest blessing of all.
So, speech therapy....here we come!

We ventured out on our first family camping trip last weekend. Matt decided he didn't want to go too far, in case it was a complete disaster and we wanted to drive home at 2am. So we took off for the weekend to the exotic city of Mt. Vernon!

We were gone for about 22 hours and this is what we packed. Ridiculous.

We started out with a hike through Little Mountain Park. It had great trails not too intense for Carter but still fun to explore and see new things. Lucy wasn't too fond of the backpack but stuck it out for a while.

Carter kept saying this was the best hike he'd ever been on (and really the only "real" hike he'd ever been on).

It had some beautiful look out points with stunning views of Skagit County.

We had a picnic lunch, explored a little longer and then headed over to our campground at Bay View State Park.

I've always heard that kids will get dirtier than you could ever imagine while camping. I packed 200 wipes and 6 changes of clothes for each kid. And within 5 minutes Lucy was covered in dirt....head to toe.

We got out our stuff and set up camp. The kids were excited, even though they look a little less than thrilled right here.

In all of our packing we completely forgot to bring toys for the kids. Luckily we grabbed a bucket and ball at the beach house before we left so the kids had to be super creative over the weekend. Our campsite was surrounded by blackberries, which luckily kept the kids occupied for a while too.

And then it was play time. They desperately asked Matt about 87 times when they could finally go in tent. The second the air mattress was blown up they rushed in and giggled, jumped, fell and bounced all over the place!

We headed down to the beach for a bit and ran into 596 Canadians (we were surrounded by a huge family reunion!). Luckily there was still plenty of room to play on the beach. Carter even got to fly his kite for a bit.

The tide was in pretty high that afternoon so the kids mostly climbed on rocks and dug in the dirt. The next morning the tide was out for miles (literally). Matt and I had never seen such a low tide, it was pretty incredible.

There was a burn ban across the state so we quickly changed our dinner plans to cooking hot dogs on the camping stove instead of roasting them in a campfire. Wasn't quite the same but we made it work.

Lucy loved to just watch everything. She refused to wear her shoes which just added to the filth that covered her little body.

We tried making smore's but roasting marshmallows didn't have the same effect on the stove. And once we finally made one for Carter he complained the graham cracker and marshmallow were touching and just wanted it right out of the bag.

Lucy was content with eating animal crackers so we were left with a huge box of graham crackers and about 4 extra Hershey bars to take home!

Lucy liked using the campfire as a step stool.

Getting the kids to fall asleep in the tent was probably the most unpleasant 3 hours of our lives. Lucy finally went down but Carter was a mess. He was a huge mix of emotions ranging from excited, nervous, extremely overtired, a bit confused and just plain difficult. We battled over and over again and tried several attempts to get him to sleep before finally giving up, putting him the car and having Matt drive around until he fell asleep and then transferred him into the sleeping bag. Because we couldn't have a campfire, it was pretty cold and dark with not much to do other than fall asleep ourselves at 9:30pm!

The kids slept fairly well for their first night in a tent. Lucy had a 12am shift from the pack n'play to my sleeping bag, Carter had a meltdown because his sleeping bag wasn't zipped up right, Matt ended up with no sleeping bag and we somehow managed to squeeze all of us on a queen size air mattress for the rest of the night. But, we did it!!!

Early the next morning Lucy woke up at 5:45am so we ventured out for a 1.5 hour walk together while the rest of the campgrounds slept. Then it time for a graham cracker snack!

We ate a quick breakfast and headed back down to the beach.

Because most normal people were just waking up we had the entire beach to ourselves for over an hour! The kids had so much room to run and play....and get ridiculously muddy.