Possible new blog adress/name

We may be moving to a more inclusive blog title due to some... not completely unexpected, but wrenching news for our family.

Our youngest, Rowan, has just been diagnosed on the spectrum as well. Things moved very quickly as we knew straight away where to go. Following a mutually-requested teacher conference where we learned of the teachers' concerns (our concerns had been about her loss of skills since last year and concern about the curriculum), we made an appointment with the speech path to have her speech evaluated. She ended up testing as having a mild speech issue, but the path referred us to the developmental pediatrician in the practice from observing her in combination with the teachers' concerns that I related.

We have only been told this week that she is "on the spectrum". We still have a meeting and more paperwork to do with the child psychologist, and the teachers' Conners and other forms had yet to be done scaling.

I had hoped that some things I was seeing were simply her copying Caitlyn, but she has presented several things that Caitlyn does not at all, and is not presenting others that Caitlyn is (such as the meltdowns). She is now at the exact same age, however, that Caitlyn's issues became truly apparent in school.

We have been recommended to have our oldest, Ashton, evaluated as well and to have genetic testing done (in hopes that perhaps in the future the information gleaned may be helpful to our own family or someone else's).

Our household is going through a .. paradigm shift right now. My husband and I decided to hire out some of the housework to take some of the pressure off our schedules and stress levels, in hopes of increasing our family time (or at least making things not quite as rushed.)

We are also renovating/redesigning much of the house to accomodate more of what will work better for all the children, including the PECS schedule and similar things. We are also continuing to declutter and reorganize the entire house so that we are not trying to deal with so much stuff in the middle of so much "stuff".

If you or anyone you know would be willing to design a new blog template, please let me know.

Very positive news, Caitlyn made A/B honor roll again this 6 weeks. We are very proud of her!