Bitter Sweet....

I'm not really even sure what to post tonight, but here goes my babbling...

We had Madelynn's last speech group today. The changed their minds and decided to retest her today rather than wait until the school year began. She tested completely in normal ranges for her age in both receptive and expressive language. Her expressive is still a little lower than her receptive, but she should continue to make progress. The decision is that she will not return to her speech group once the school ear starts. She will continue to do toddler group with her brothers and a couple months down the road, her speech teacher will come to toddler group and retest her again. If she shows that she's still making improvements, then she'll be officially graduated from speech services. If her scores show no improvements, we'll dicuss the options of getting her back into a speech group. We suspect she'll continue to make improvements, but it's nice that we'll be able to wait a few months before being discontinued from the program.

It was kinda bitter sweet leaving today knowing it would most likely be the last time we'd get to work with Maddie's speech therapist. Not only has Madelynn grown to love her, but she has also been an advocate for Malachi too. When we are being pushed toward only one option for him, she would let us know what else was available that we could push for. I feel like we had someone on our side that was being completely truthful to us regardless of what everyone else wanted us to do. Besides that, we owe so much to her for helping our little girl. At the beginning of summer, Madelynn struggled to get any of her words out, now she's easily talking in 2-3 word sentences and sometimes even using 4-5 word sentences. It's amazing how far she's come. To me, I owe her speech teacher the world! There is no amount of thanks that shows how I really feel.

Today was also Malachi's last home visit for the summer. We discussed what I'd like to do for the start of the school year. This is not definite, but it's a start at creating the plan. Josh and I will take the kids to an evening toddler group once a week and then Malachi will have two separate teachers offer him home services that will **hopefully** be more "sit down and study" speech therapy rather than play based like toddler group. The play group is great and he needs that for the socialization piece, but he has started doing some of Madelynn's homework cards for her speech class so i think he would benefit with some more of that rather than more play. The home visits will be mostly when our nanny is here which will be great because it will teach her some of the techniques that we've learned so she'll be able to be consistant with all of the kids while they are with her. Once the kids turn 3, we'll have to make some more decisions about what to do because the services available will be different and toddler group will no longer be an option, at least from what I'm being told. We'll see.....I just don't know how comfortable I am with sending him to preschool four hours a day four days a week while the other two are at home. It's certainly going to be a hard decision to make. Many prayers would be appreciate for that.

In other news, our house is no longer for sale. We had it for sale for 6 months with only one couple coming to look at it. We had two open houses where no one showed up. It just isn't selling. So, we decided that we'd take it off the market and continue to live close and cozy in this house for another year. We've lightly talked of some other options so we'll see what the future holds for us. Certainly not anything that will happen soon. I'm okay with this except for one thing....our DREAM HOME recently was lowered to $84,900 which is right where we wanted to be for houses. It's perfect in everything we wanted in a house. Unfortunately, we can't afford two house payments except for maybe one month, especially once we start paying child care costs again. So, if our house doesn't sell, there is no way we can purchase that one and chances are very likely that it won't be around in a year when we may try to put this one back on the market. I try to think about what God has planned for us, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't completely heart broken to not be able to have a chance at that house. In my head I already had it decorated and I could imagine us living the rest of our lives there, but now those images are broken. :( It's hard to accept, but I know that there must be something better in our future, so we'll just try to get over it and move on.

That's all for tonight. I'll try to take some more pictures tomorrow. I haven't had my camera out since we got back from the U.P. :( I'm sure you all want to see how much the kids have grown in just a couple of weeks! Besides, isn't that the BEST part of this blog???? :)