Valentines Day pictures

Ellie with "Greatgrandma"

Rorey sitting on "Nana Sandy"
Riley being....well Riley!

Rick the life of the party!!
Ellie's first Valentines Day

On Valentines Day, we headed to T-ville to visit my Grandma in the nursing home, and then to my parents house to visit them! We went out to dinner with them and my cousin Tony joined us also. As you can see our family is easily entertained, the kids had great fun wearing the ice cream cone covers on their heads. The kids got candy from Nana & Papa, along with some other fun items, and we had a nice afternoon .

School districts...ugh

I have to say that I have heard many horror stories from many families about dealing with school districts. And I had my own when it took me 3 months to get a return phone call from our special ed provider(SASED) regarding getting Rorey into speech therapy.(nearly 3 years ago) BUT I have never been more disgusted than I am right now, since we received a letter from SASED and I had to tell Ellie she can't go to school anymore. Apparently they changed their minds about her eligibility. Now how in the world am I going to explain to a 4 year old who speaks limited English that it isn't her fault, that she didn't do anything wrong, but...even though it was the highlight of her week, even though she drastically needs this, even though they let her come for 3 weeks, it's done....no more. What makes me most upset is that apparently they have been using these "sessions" to further evaluate her (which we were never told) and have now concluded that she doesn't qualify. If I had known that, I would have approached this differently, I would not have told Ellie it was a long term thing. I would not have called it "school ...like Rorey and Riley." Now I have a devastated child who I can't console because she can't speak English. BUT she doesn't qualify for English as a second language.(ESL) Does anyone else see the irony in this?

OK I'm done whining, even if no one reads this I feel better just getting it off my chest.

Play day at the library

Rorey and Ellie in the play house
Rorey's awesome "castle"

Since I've been such a bad blogger lately thought I would throw in a couple of pictures we took at the library last week. These kids love to go to the library....

play house, Lego table, loads of books, DVDs to check out....What else could you ask for? The only problem we have there is the very loud voice of Ellie reverberating from one end of the building to the other!! She does not understand the concept of an "inside voice"!!

School Rocks

First day of school pictures

Ellie has been kind of jealous that the boys are going to school and she is stuck at home everyday. So finally after much "discussion"(I'm trying not to be sarcastic) with our special education provider, Ellie has started going to English as a second language class (ESL) twice a week. She is sooo happy! She is very proud and she tells us all about it, shows us her stickers, gives us a 2-3 paragraph explanation of what she did(..most of which I can't understand!!) HAHA! The teacher goes to our church, and she is super nice...Ellie loves it! She is learning more English everyday, but we still have trouble understanding some of it!
On the other hand Ellie has been teaching Rorey more Chinese everyday, and they seem to have their own language going on......I like to call it Chinglish. Who knows what in the world they are talking about most of the time! Next year Rorey and Ellie are both going to go to Kindergarten. Ellie will only go half days, and take the ESL classes while she is there. Then the next year Rorey will move on to First grade and Ellie will start into a normal all day Kindergarten. We have decided that is the best plan we have available to us, and we don't want her to struggle in school because she is still learning English.