Fishies

We've spent a bit of time at the local aquarium lately (we got the groupon deal last week, and it's right by Grandma Sharron's, so it's easy to just stop in for 30 minutes or so).

Penguin feeding time.

Max loves this little canoe. Can you imagine the tornado out on actual water - yikes!

Shark tank.

Piper has yet to build up the courage to pet a stingray. They also have baby leopard sharks in the stingray pool right now, so I touched both of them. Kinda gross. But hey - how many people can say they've touched a live shark?

Max thinks he's one of the big kids climbing up on the rocks. He came home with a big owie on his forehead.

Max loves this sound board by the toads.

The sea turtle was injured and rescued. They glued a weight to its shell so it can dive down in the water. The glue doesn't hold forever, so it can't be released back into the ocean. It has to stay where it can be re-glued every few months.



More aquarium videos

The videos came out much better than my pictures in the low light...

Lion fish... love these.

Max being Max...

A really dark video of Piper on a big toad.

And one more penguin video.

Happy Birthday Grandma Sharron

Piper painted this picture frame all by herself. I traced the cow on the card and she painted that too. She was so proud of her work. She told me, "Grandma's gonna flip out when she sees this!"

And yep, she liked it. I made her a cow print wreath. It didn't quite turn out like I had pictured. It looks more black and white and gray, not cow printy. Oh well.

Out-takes:

Thank goodness for Photoshop :)

New 'skills'

So proud of himself - he can use the stool and get dirty dishes out of the sink to throw on the floor :)

{somehow we've avoided broken glass up 'til now - knock on wood}

And old skills - still loves climbing on the table to swipe things off (although now he can move the chairs out by himself, so it doesn't matter if we remember to push them in or not) - a bag of Cheetos to dump on the floor today. I guess you gotta have a snack to watch Signing Times with. He's only in his diaper because he had just used his new skill to get something out of the sink that still had water in it and dumped it down the front of him. I returned from his bedroom with dry clothes to find this. He's fast.

When will we be out of this curious toddler stage?!?!?!? Love him :)

Speech Therapy - How do you afford it?

OK people - any advice would be great.
Max REALLY needs speech therapy. So far, as usual, I'm not that impressed with our early intervention ST. She's nice and Max likes her, but she just plays with him. Sure they repeat a sound or two, but really, he needs MORE than that (although he has started running toy cars down his leg making an oooh oooh sound - that's something I guess). I know he's only 2 1/2, but he only makes d and b sounds, doesn't really sign, or point to things he wants.

We would LOVE to take him the Sandy PCMC clinic. Courtney got more out of him in the hour evaluation than anyone else has ever! But we can't afford it. Our insurance doesn't pay a dime toward speech therapy.
Medicaid kicked him off over a year ago (after we finalized the adoption). I reapplied giving a statement that he is the only one who needs the disability medicaid, not the rest of the family. A case worker was really helpful and said if we put in that statement, it's like he's applying on his own and he has no assets, so he would qualify. Nope. I just got off the phone with them again. I wanted to reach through the phone and strangle the lady. How come every time you call that office you get a different answer!?!? I wanted to scream at the lady. Instead, I just hung up on her. Ugh. So anyway, there is no way he's gonna qualify for medicaid at this point.

Any suggestions? Anyone have insurance that actually covers speech for Ds kiddos? How do we get this kid speech therapy?

I've been dreaming of this day...

Trying for another Adventure

It was so nice up at Silver Lake, that we decided to head to the mountains again to cool off.

We opted for the playground up at Snowbird. Up we drove.

And it was closed for some reason :(

So we decided to go up to the tram building and play on the bouncy house they usually have out for the summer.

It wasn't there.

So we got ice cream and sat and watched the tram and the kids bungy jumping.

Then we decided to try a little hiking. But I didn't have the stroller, and it was a bit steep for Max. So we went about 100 yards and walked back to the car.

Then we decided to just go to a park back down in the valley. We drove through the neighborhood where I grew up back in the 70's. Here's my old house. I think it was dark brown when we lived there :)

The park was fun, but REALLY  hot. So we didn't stay long.



We finally gave up on an adventure for the day and hit 7-Eleven for slurpees :) I guess we ended up having a little adventure just looking for one.

Silver Lake in the Summer

There's still a little snow up at Silver Lake, but not like last time we drove up there and couldn't even get to the lake.

 The water level is the highest I've ever seen.

Piper dressed herself in a cute pink skirt to match her Camelbak - perfect for hiking and playing in the snow :)

Mickey Mouse rock...

Here ducky ducky...

Poser.

Thoroughly enjoying the cool mountain air. It was in the 90's when we left Salt Lake. Thirty minutes later - 72 degrees at Silver Lake. Ahhh.

The nature center. Piper loves looking at the plastic animal poop.

My cuties :)