School at home

After the school year beginning with some of our kids (Owen, Krassi, Reuben, and Bobbi) in our public school district's hybrid model (two days of distance learning, one day at home with no formal stuff, and two days in class...though for Owen, his start date was the last to be phased in...) we are now in a fully distance learning scenario, which started the week that Owen was supposed to finally get to go to two days of classes in person! Poor guy. 

Our academic goals for this year are pretty simplistic:

1. learn something (by spring 2021 know *something* more than you did fall 2020)
2. do stuff you wouldn't normally get to do in a normal year.

For our physically capable kids, item number two has included some nice long bike rides, ranging from 6 miles (in which the younger girls did all of their own biking) to 29 miles (in which we left the younger two at home, put Ebby in the trailer, and Mom, Owen, Leah and Rinnah biked to Hudson, WI!)

One thing we all learned from that experience (so goal number one!) is that a 12 or 13 mile bike ride is really nothing, so we did that with Gloria and Evania along as well, though Owen rode Huckleberry so the little girls could swap back and forth between riding with Owen and riding their own little bike so their legs had a chance to keep up! After a few technical difficulties...

...we were back on the road. There they are - six of my ten, clambering all over a little trickle of a stream running under an abandoned railroad trestle.

As much as I treasure these days together, they are not without a pang of longing for the ones I've left behind. And not that it's not *possible* to get more of them out with us - Krassimir can ride Huckleberry, and Reuben has a bike that can be converted to trail behind me or Owen, but it needs adjustments that didn't make it to the top of the list this summer, and some days it's just more work than I can get myself geared up for.

The accomplishment of this year's goals is still happening for the others, but it just looks different.

Here's Krassi doing some of his homework: self-feeding! For a guy for whom eating is still a hateful part of the day, having him participate is pretty fantastic. As you can see, he requires a lot of coaching, but he can do it! I'm particularly proud of the way he manages to finish each bite in such a way that he can get every last bit off the spoon - that's not easy to learn!

Tsvetomira's days are still just a back and forth between her cozy cushion corner and her chair, between contended sleeping, and the sometimes-agony of voiding and stooling. But she's been enjoying her once a week trip to PT, and Dad has learned a few tricks that every now and then he has time to put to use with her. Here she is doing some weight bearing on her elbows at the table.

Ebenezer continues to take great delight in Mira's nurse who comes in four mornings a week. "Hi, 'tine!" he says, "Check on Mira, check on Mira?" They have a daily routine of him helping her "chart" while Mira gets her "shake shake" (vest treatment for respiratory function).

Bobbi's obviously had an interesting year with starting her new job - it's already been two months that she's been working at Kwik Trip! Also new just last week is a Foods class she's taking at the local technical college through her post-high school transition program. Even though all of the students have been transitioned to full distance learning with the increasing cases of COVID in our state and county, the technical college students are still able to do some of their learning in person. Here she is making a pumpkin pie. She still needs a lot of help, but has also continued to develop her skills. My favorite thing lately is when she's helping to bake anything and we're practicing math by having her work with the quantities, she almost automatically doubles or triples everything...because that's just how we do it around here!! Multiplication skills, here we come.

And I realize that this has turned into a little update on almost everyone except Reuben, so in the interest of him not being left out, here's a recent shot of Reuben:

Twinning with Dad. :) Although we've seen a lot of good changes since the introduction of his new diet in Feb and March, he's still just got a lot of rough spots that he deals with. We'll have weeks (like this one) where vomiting is a daily (or more!) occurrance, and nights where his default-tooth-grinding is nearly non-stop...and he insists on sleeping in our bed...with his head resting on my skull...and we let him because sometimes you get more rest with a tooth-grinder on your skull than you do when he keeps climbing out of his own bed and needing to be put back in. It's also easier to monitor for seizures when he's on top of me. Hard to miss.

One of his new frequent words is, "river." We've taken as many chances as we can to get him to a variety of moving bodies of water over this unusual fall where winter keeps pretending to come and then fall returns. It's so good for him to have something to do that is active and doesn't involve his iPad.

So there's a little view into some of what's happening around here!