Turned a corner...

This past month our little Aubrey has reached some major milestones developmentally. It has been so much fun to watch her as she discovers what she is capable of accomplishing.

And since I can, I want to take a minute to brag a little bit about my sweet little angel.

Just after Aubrey turned one, we had our annual early intervention assessment. This assessment was performed by a lady who works for the Davis Early Intervention program. She does not work with her on a regular basis so she was basing her assessments on everything she saw Aubrey do while she was at our home and how I answered the questions she asked. 

At the end of the hour she told me she felt like Aubrey was doing extremely well, which is how I always felt but had nothing to base this off of.  She also told me that she didn't think she had ever scored a child with Down Syndrome so high on their Cognitive and Verbal skills. High Five Aubs!

(Honestly I don't know how she couldn't be doing so well with all the love, attention and stimulation she gets from her sisters, family and friends)

In our last appointment with our nurse, we were able to see just how great Aubrey is doing.

On the assessments they look at a child's skills and rate it by age- For example, the average child is doing such and such at 10 months.

Here are her stats at 12 months:

Gross Motor Strengths: 10 months

Fine Motor Strengths: 12 months

Problem Solving/Cognitive Strengths: 12 months

Receptive Language Strengths: 10 months

Expressive Language Strengths: 10 months

Social/Emotional/Behavior Strengths: 14 months

Self Help Strengths: 15 months

When our nurse Joan came back 3 weeks later, she told me that if they were to do the evaluation again,  she would be scoring a lot higher now then she did then.

Right now I couldn't be more proud of my little Aubrey!

She has come so far these last few weeks. It's like all of a sudden she has realized what she really is capable of doing.

Gross Motor Skills:

Aubrey has finally started crawling!!! Or sort of crawling I guess...

It's not the conventional way of crawling, but it gets the job done.

As you can see in the above picture, usually she sticks her legs straight out to the side then pulls herself wherever she wants to go with her arms. Sometimes she will get up on her feet and do the Mowgli walk on her hands. And occasionally she will put one leg up underneath her and do a fancy walk/crawl.

Seriously not conventional... but efficient.

Receptive Language Needs:

Aubrey should begin to follow simple instructions, point and vocalize to indicate wants.

We have been trying to teach Aubrey some Sign Language lately but this sweet, little, stubborn child would never even attempt to sign. She would just shake her head and smile from ear to ear.

And then one night we were sitting on the couch and Aubrey started signing "more". I didn't know if it was intentional at first but she kept on doing it. So I took her into the kitchen and asked her if she wanted some gold fish. She started frantically shaking her head "no" and kept on signing "more". Next I grabbed her bottle and asked her if she wanted milk. She immediately got a huge grin on her face and started flapping her arms to tell me that this was in fact what she wanted. She has since learned the signs for "milk" and "food" so she can be a bit more specific about exactly what she wants. She still will not use her signs when you ask her to but is very good at asking for things when she is not already in the process of being fed.

So cool.

First day of Kindy-garten...

Maddie started school today.

Yes, you heard me right.

Maddie started school in July...

Ah, the joys of year round.

Since everybody does it...

Here are the traditional "stand in front of your front door before you go to school" pictures.

We attempted the front door scene...

...And found it was much too noisy (remember how we live in a construction zone at the moment?) and much too sunny.

So we tried the back door and had a lot more success.

A lot more success that is, until Brooklyn locked us out and couldn't figure out how to unlock the door...

(Can you spot the guilty eyes peeking through the blinds?)

For the first day of school the moms got to go with their kids...

So there was plenty more "mamarazzi" time to be had.

As we approached the school and crowds of people gathered around for the beginning of the school year flag ceremony, the nerves started to kick in...

But after meeting her teacher and the other kids, she started to feel a bit better about all this school stuff.

So day one was a success.

So what does day two have in store for us?

A bus ride to school and no Mommy by her side.

I wonder who this day will be harder on? Me or Maddie?

Superdad!

This picture was just too poetic not to share...

Speaking of super dad, I don't know if you have noticed but this Clark Kent has finally shed his glasses.

After many, many years of wanting and many, many months trying to convince me it was time, Karl finally won and was able to have Lasik done on his eyes.

When we went in to his appointment on July 2nd, without glasses Karl was seeing with 20/400 vision. At the beginning of this whole process this number meant nothing to me but I have since learned that this means what Karl could see at 20 feet most people could see at 400 feet. 

I found this picture on Google that helped me to understand a little better what life was like through his eyes...

Just looking at this picture gives me a headache.

With his glasses on I could read a sign on the freeway 4 whole seconds before Karl could.

After realizing all of this... I decided maybe it wasn't such a bad thing for him to have the procedure done.

Although the expense was an issue, I think my resistance came from the fact that the concept of someone cutting your eyes open completely scared me. I know that Hoopes is one of the top companies for Lasik in the country and that they have never had anyone go blind from the procedure but we tend to be the family that beats the odds. I mean the chances for me at age 24 to have a baby born with Down Syndrome was what? About 1 in 1200. 

Anyway, surgery day finally arrived and Karl was one happy boy... despite what this picture leads you to believe. :)

After 24 hours Karl's vision had already improved to 20/20 with a whole lot of healing left to be done. 

I guess all that's left to be said now is,

Happy Birthday, Merry Christmas, Happy Father's Day and Happy Anniversary to you! ... for the next few years. :)

Budding Artist...

"The way I see you"

Interpretive drawings by Madison- Age 4

Mr Potato head... err I mean Daddy

Pay special attention to that facial hair daddy says he never has...

 Mommy?

 Maddie

 Another take on Daddy...

 Our friends the Lemon's came over to visit tonight so they too got some wonderful self portraits drawn for them.

Megan

 Anthony

So anyone else up for a visit???

Island Park...

This last week we were able to go to Island Park with a bunch of my cousins and their families. We don't get to spend much time together anymore so it was really fun to spend 4 days together.

We stayed at a family friends cabin on Bill's Island. Although it was somewhat crazy with 17 adults and 12 children all crammed in one cabin, resulting in none of us really getting much sleep- we had a wonderful time staying up late and playing together. 

The only problem is, I didn't take very many pictures. So consider this my plea for anyone that took pictures to please send them my way!!! Mom? Linda? I know you've got them. Seriously I couldn't believe how few pictures I actually took... I'm sort of disappointed with myself.

We explored Island Park all day Thursday... I think all of my pictures are from Thursday.

 We also thought it would be fun to take the girls river rafting... our experience wasn't quite what we were expecting. Brooklyn had not taken a nap yet and fell and scraped her knee right before we got on the raft. She wouldn't stop crying until she could no longer see the scratch. The problem: We didn't have any band aids with us! So we made a makeshift bandage with toilet paper so she could not see the blood. As long as the paper stayed in place, she was just fine... 

Despite the few bumps we hit along the way, the girls had a great time in the boat. We were just grateful for the wonderful people who put up with us on our raft. I'm sure you will all think twice before going on another adventure with us again. :)

This is just about the only picture I have from Friday when we went to Yellowstone. I guess we were having too much fun exploring to take pictures. Or maybe it was the rain the prevented me from taking more pictures? Yeah, I think I'll blame the rain. 

Thank you again Mitchell family for planning such a great getaway for all of us. Many great memories were made this week.

I'm Proud to be an American!

Can I just say I love the 4th of July?

Not only do we get to celebrate our country's freedom and honor those who have served and continue to serve our country, we get to spend the entire day with those we love enjoying good food and good company. 

Many years ago my sister Michelle and one of her friends put together a big 4th of July breakfast/celebration for our ward as a Laural's project. It quickly became a yearly tradition. It was a big deal. We started the morning out early with a big flag ceremony. All of the scouts would march in holding their flags high and we would say the Pledge of Allegiance then the flags would be placed in their stands. 

Me and my cousin's

(Kelli, me, Audrey)

The older men in the ward would cook a delicious breakfast of dutch oven potatoes, pancakes and eggs. 

After breakfast (I may be off on the order) all the children would line up their bikes in a line (that had all been carefully decorated in crape paper and streamers) and then we would proceed to parade around the neighborhood for everyone to see.

Me and my best friend Ashley

(I'm on the left holding up the flag, she's on the right looking to the side)

After the parade we would all head inside the church for a program comprised of singing, story telling and fun.

There were always a few traditional songs sung every year...

Scott Reeves singing God Bless America in his powerful voice

The affectionately named (by us little primary aged children) "screechy ladies"  singing This Land is your Land and many other traditional patriotic songs

A story was also always read by Pat Reese 

And of course the program was never complete without a wonderful song performed by all the primary children.

Don't we all look like quite the handful. :)

After the program we would all run outside to play all the fun games that had been set up outside...

Some of our favorites were fishing at the Fish Pond for toys and

Milking the cow for a Milky Way candy bar.

The party could never end without first breaking out into a huge water balloon fight where nobody was safe.

Ahhh... those were the days.

Although the celebration has been scaled back quite a lot, my parents ward still holds their annual 4th of July breakfast every year. So of course, we had to take the girls.

 Great Grandpa Clegg was even able to join us.

 This picture just makes me giggle. Joshua had just dumped his cup of milk all over himself. I love the look on his face. 

 Kelsey these pictures are for you. You asked for more pictures of me... Well this is what we get when we try to take family pictures. At least we are all in the pictures, right?

 Happy Birthday America!