Joni & Friends Family Retreat

I do not talk about it much but our oldest child has Autism and I was listening to Nancy Leigh DeMoss'  radio program and they were discussing Joni Erickson Tada's Family Camps. These are camps where the entire family gets to go and your disabled person (child or adult) is matched with a short therm missionary who tends to the needs of the child all day.

picture from Joni & Friends webpage..no McVays are having fun in this picture :(

I cannot even imagine spending a day without thoughts of 'what is she doing?', 'where is she at?', 'is she okay? are they okay?' etc.... Or a day with out the eye of judgement but instead of acceptance and even love???

Anyway, here is the information I hope your family is able to go and if you do get to go please let me know how it was! For those of you that know families with disabilities encourage them to go if they are financially able.

• Family Retreat Page
• Camp Schedule

Please let us know if your able to attend, how it was.

Encouragement in Christ!
RH

Homeschooling Journey: Speech Therapy

An ongoing issue...
It's not uncommon for someone to bring Sweetie to me and ask me what she is saying. And it's not uncommon for her to have to repeat herself to me a cuople of times before I have any idea what she is say. I was really hoping that after few years more people would be able to understand what Peyton was saying. But unfortunately it just seemed like it hasn't gotten a great deal better. Sugar Pie is also hard to understand and has an overbite due to her thumb sucking. So we recently took both Sugar Pie and Sweetie in to get evaluated.

The good news....
SugarPie passed the evaluation and it was found that she had speech irregularities within the norm for her age. But that her vocabulary and her comprehension were above average.

The rest was a welcome back to Speech Therapy ...
Sweetie, however, did not pass and she was found to have a very low range of speech ability and we are again doing speech therapy at the local Rehab place. Recently, I knew Peyton was in store for a frenectomy when we had braces put on her teeth in the future. But what I have recently learned is that this condition can cause speech delays. So now I've called the dentist office to dissucss Sweeties situation and it has been determined the speech therapist Brianne needs to make the determination of whether she thinks it's interfereing with her speech. Sp we may have a physical limiation to deal with in regards to her speech delay as well. 

Why not do it at home?

As a homeschooler it's hard to go outside the house for help, we tend to want to solve our own problems. We are an indendent bunch. So I of course considered using osme of the programs that I've found to teach your child speech therapy at home. But just like Piano lessons I think speech therapy  may better be left to other folks. I was very concerned I would not be able to do it well and that a problem that could be improved wouldn't be.