I mentioned in an earlier post that we had some new bike riders around here. And he is so proud of himself!

Someone guessed it was Li’l Miss and while she did recently start riding, she is not the newest two-wheeler.

She began riding in the early Spring without training wheels, but her same-aged brother had no interest. At all. No amount of coercion was working, until one day when his next two older brothers Mo and Larry just kept plugging away and encouraging him to try again.

And he got it! And his sister was genuinely happy for his new-found ability. I have to say for him, this is such a HUGE accomplishment. Our little guy struggles with gross motor skills and balancing a bike seemed like an insurmountable goal for him less than a year ago.

I am so proud of him for not giving up, for his sister not giving up on him, and for his two big brothers for genuinely helping him and gently urging him to try “just one more time” again and again. It is nice that 5 of the 6 of our children are riding bikes with only 2 wheels now!

And our three-wheeler still calls upon her brothers to give her a ride as she still hasn’t figured out the pedaling just yet.

One morning I helped Li’l Bro and Li’l Miss build clocks on paper plates as a fun intro to our Clock and Time studies. Now that they have the days of the week down (YAY!) and are really understanding the calendar …

… I thought we would go into time and clocks. So far, they are very interested, so we will continue exploring and talking about time and gently learning about it.

The next few photos are of everyone eating those delicious berries I mentioned us picking in the last post. We picked on Monday and by Friday, the last of the 10 lbs. of berries were being eaten. 🙂

OK, so last not but not least: Building!

We went camping last weekend in the large city nearby and also happened to be near the mall where the new LEGO store just opened. We took everyone there along with Grammy and Papa.

A certain little guy picked out some sets for his upcoming 7th birthday!

And a few other someones chose some bricks with their own money and a bit of extra from Grammy and Papa.

While the girls liked the LEGO store well enough, we decided a visit to Build-A-Bear would be more fun. It was Li’l Bit’s first time to make a bear and Li’l Miss took one of her two bears in for a refluff and added sound. Grammy decided it was so much fun, she might like to make a bear herself … but thankfully, she refrained and just bought new outfits for each of the girls’ bears instead!

Speaking of building, Li’l Bro and Li’l Miss are building their vocabularies and words too. While we practice reading, I often ask them to explain the meaning of the word too. The following video shows how they thankfully do NOT know what all C-V-C words mean. Li’l Miss just picked up the G and added it to the F-A and said the word. We quickly found something else, but you’ll see how I tested her knowledge of what the next word F-A-R means. This is one area she has always tested delayed in–expressive language or being able to recall verbally the meaning of a word. She has shown great improvement in recent months!

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Li’l Bro is doing great with C-V-C words but I’m trying to slowly introduce consonant blends. He can make the sounds, but putting it all together is a real struggle. I (and his speech therapist) am not ready to believe he has apraxia of speech especially given his hearing deficits, but he exhibits some major markers for it.

I have since made some lowercase letters on the blue caps after getting a big bag full from my neighbor M! Now that they can identify both the uppercase and lowercase of the letters, this will be useful for putting together words as they are more likely to see them in print.

This video will show more of the apraxia sign I was speaking of above. I hope someday to look back and see progress. I know it is hard to see the strides he has made in the every day, but he will get there eventually!

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Here is another one. I hope I don’t sound too mean! It is just another example of how Li’l Bro can say the sounds, but really struggles to put them all together.

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Well the next few pictures are just some cute ones I took one evening while we went by Papa’s house to check on the chicks, who are growing by leaps and bounds. Now if they will just provide us with some eggs …