Friday Free-For-All

We've had a great week around the Colony homestead.

Well, all of us except for Jude:(

He was diagnosed with RSV on Tuesday.

But by Thursday he got his smile back!

When we got home from his follow-up at 10am on Thursday morning he was exhausted.  So exhausted, in fact, that he slept until 5:30pm!  I had tried to wake him up two different times with no success, ha!  He woke up a different kid.  My sweet kid!  My happy, content little Jude:)

Then there was Valentine's Day.  You would have thought that the kids were waking up to Christmas morning with all the energy and excitement!

Zeke kept calling it Thanksgiving, haha.  After dinner he said, "Now what can we do?  Can we play some fun Thanksgiving games or somethin'?"  Oh to swim around in his little brain for a day!

Speaking of Zeke...
His special resources teacher called me this week, almost in tears.  Happy tears!  She told me that he came to school in mid-October, hardly able to recognize a single letter and with maybe 3 sounds, which were inconsistent at best.  She did a test to see this week to see where he was with his IEP goals for the year and he is now up to 46 out of 52 letters for sound recognition (capitol and lower case), and has 24 out of 26 letters that he can consistently recognize!  We are thrilled beyond words.  The letters he cannot get are "a" and "g" and that is his dyslexia.  Also, the only letters that he would mess up with sound recognition are because of his dyslexia as well!  It's amazing how his brain works.  He still doesn't know his letters to write them without a reference, and they are backwards and upside down a lot of times, but as soon as his teacher convinced him to move past the "but I don't know my letters" to thinking only sounds to make words, he has taken off!  Now she will be focusing on his dyslexia to help him write from memory, not by references around the room.

What a confirmation for us!  When people ask if I homeschool, I say I "half-n-half", and we are seeing our kids thrive from both Public and homeschooling!  Alethia and Cai BEG for school and never want it to be done when it's over:)

Josh and I planned on keeping Valentine's simple, so we opted for an at-home-date-night, and boy did my baby rack up!  He did a little research and came home and cooked up a feast!  Let's just say that he had the grill going with juicy goodness on the racks AND a pot of boiling water with google open:)  We also had bread, salad, twice baked potatoes AND a SWEET dessert, all for under $50!  Talk about shouting his love. Home cooked goodness that I didn't have to prepare, and within our budget, now that is SEXY!

Well, that's about all I got today.
Hope ya'll have a GREAT weekend!
Happy FRIDAY Ya'll!