The Weekly Review: Week 79

SLP Resource of the Week

Organizing materials is a huge pain. I think Jackie at Teal and Lime has come up with a perfect, compact way of organizing card decks. She uses index card holders in a tray. Click on the link and take a look. It is adorable. If you're using full-size, commercial decks, you'd fit one deck per index card holder. If you're using my free decks, you could probably fit all the decks that go with a particular phoneme in a single index card container. I would probably take the step of labeling the top of each index card holder with the phoneme of the cards inside so I could grab the one I want in an instant.

Ava this Week

I believe I've already mentioned pneumonia 2.0. What impressed me most about my little girl this week is how she just doesn't let much get her down. Even through five straight days of 102.5ish fever she still woke up at her usual time, played (in a low-key manner), and was relatively cheerful. She was handling it so well we didn't even give her a fever reducer most of the time. I need to keep her fortitude in mind the next time I'm trying to decide if she's "sick enough" to make a pediatrician appointment.

Weekly Michael

Michael: "Mama, there's a girl at school and Guess What?!?, she wants to marry me."
Me (thinking-not saying): You've got to be kidding me! It's preschool!
Me: "That's nice sweetheart. Maybe when you're grown up. What's her name?"
Michael: "I don't know."

Weekly Weight Loss

This week I'm down 3.2 pounds. That's exactly the same as last week. Everyone's got a unique set of genetic, dietary, medical history, exercise patterns, etc, but here's the evidence for me. I used a strict calorie-in/calorie-out method of dieting for 11 weeks and lost 9.5 pounds (0.86/week). Then I eliminated carbs from my diet. I eat as much as I'm hungry for, as long as it isn't carbs. (Ok, there are a few here and there in veggies, but not much.) I've been eating low carbs for 2.5 weeks and I've lost 7.9 pounds (3.16/week). That's a pretty dramatic difference. For whatever reason, drastically reducing carbs in my diet works really well for me.

Weekly All Consuming Obsession

I have been working every spare minute on getting the books ready for opening the store next week. My mother generously offered to watch the kids a little bit a lot of extra time and my husband is helping out with some of a lot of the technical coding. The pieces are coming together. My proofreaders were amazing. It looks like the store will go up sometime next week and will have two books available at opening: /s/ and /s/-Blends. Once I take a break, I'll be working on adding more books regularly. (One a month or perhaps one every two months? These things take a lot of time to put together.)

Pneumonia is Contagious? Imagine that.

As you may remember, Michael walked around for a couple of weeks with a cough. He never ran a fever or had a runny nose, so I figured he has some sort of mild cold that would work itself out. Eventually it got to the point that he couldn't play because every time he tried to run he'd start coughing uncontrollably. After two weeks of a cough I decided a visit to the pediatrician was in order. Diagnosis: Walking Pneumonia.

A week or two later (last Friday), Ava started running a 102 something fever. Her appetite was non-existent and she was a little more tired than usual, but there were no other obvious signs of illness. Michael hadn't been showing symptoms for well over a week, so I thought it was more likely that Ava had picked something up at school than that she'd come down with his pneumonia. I decided to wait it out assuming it was a cold or virus. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday passed in a very similar manner with fever, fatigue, and lack of appetite. Monday a cough began to creep into the mix.

I looked up fever in the pediatrician office's handy manual Monday night and it said to call for an appointment if a fever lasted more than three days with no obvious source. Oops. So, I finally called Tuesday (Day 5). Bottom line: pneumonia. Lovely.

The silver lining to this mess is that they prescribed Ava the same super-effective on this particular bug antibiotic they gave Michael. 24 hours later and she's already much better.

Hindsight is always 20-20.

As a side note, Ava is a serious trooper. The times in my life that I've run a high fever I'm completely wiped out and pitiful. Ava pretty much went about her daily activities in a relatively cheery manner. She didn't want to eat and was a little more sensitive than usual, but other than that she was fine. The pediatrician commented on how cheery she was. It reminds me of the time when she was a baby and we took her in for something (I don't remember what) only to find she had a double ear infection. We never would have known. The child is amazing.

Great Source of Free Speech and Language Worksheets

Heather's Speech Therapy has an amazing list of free speech and language worksheets to download. She has syllable wheels, most consonants in multiple positions in words and phrases, grammar and vocabulary worksheets, and some reward charts. All worksheets include color pictures of the target words. Most target words are 1-2 syllables and vary from simple syllable shapes and phonemes to complex ones. You should definitely check these out!