Ella & Lily update

I don't have much exciting to report. They have settled into school. Lily claims to not want to go in the morning (this is said through one statement put mildly--not too much drama in it), but seems to enjoy herself while she's there. She usually gives me an energenic "yes" when I ask her if she had fun at school today. We'll see what her teacher has to say next week at her conference. We have back to back conferences with their teachers and then a speech conference for Ella after that. So while we spend an hour and a half hopefully hearing how wonderful our children are, they'll be happily running around like crazy at a My Gym day camp.

Ella is still loving school and really seems to be picking up her letters and numbers more. I know you say she's five and she should probably already know all that by now. But it does seem like its been a bit harder for her to grasp it. She tries so hard though! And she stills LOVES books and really wants to read on her own so badly.

We got their school pictures last week. I didn't order very many because they are expensive and I figured they wouldn't turn out very good anyway. But to my surprise, they are adorable! (At least in my biased opinion). I honestly don't think we could have gotten better pictures out of them.

Ella still attends private speech sessions. They tested her in September and she's at about 80% for her intelligibility, meaning a stranger who has never heard her speech can understand about 80% of what she says. I think we were at less than 5% when we started all this a year and a half ago! She is now at a 4 year old level. So just a little behind. She gets three days of speech help at school and then one day a week private sessions. We have been working on initial F (fork, four, five) and final F (surf, golf, wolf) sounds and just started the initial th- sound. This is the perfect time of year for the th- sound because Thanksgiving is coming up and we can say things we are thankful for. She did one activity with the speech therapist where she had to pick things out that she was thankful for. Here is what she picked. I don't know how much you can read that. But the first one she picked was Lily! She is thankful for Lily! Isn't that the sweetest thing ever! And I would say that's the last thing I would have guessed she'd say. And her speech therapist didn't prompt her at all. She also picked coloring book, candyland, Berenstain Bears books, hugs, and family. I loved the hugs one. I just thought the whole thing was neat to see what she came up with.

I think that's it for now. I'll update about the girls again after their conferences. As for the Andrew update, I'll do that tomorrow. We're still discussing which pictures would be appropriate to post. We're a little worried about security issues and don't want random pictures of sports celebrities to get out into cyberworld. Not that the photos are embarrassing or bad, there's just something to be said for a celebrity's (of any kind) privacy. There's a video I would love to post that Andrew's co-worker put together. But there's no way to ensure that it won't end up on youTube. So I'll put up some photos tomorrow of Andrew at work.