We are Back

 JD and I are back from brain camp. We left Monday morning and spent the afternoon in downtown Philadelphia. Brain camp started bright and early Tuesday morning. The days were supposed to be 8:30-7:30 with a semi-working lunch, but they often did not end until 8:30-9:00.

Duck tour of Philly

Brain camp is my term for the training at Family Hope Center. It is a unique place in that they assess and treat children for a multitude of issues in one setting, so that the team of doctors and therapists can access and discuss on all levels. If you have lived a life like mine, it gets weary to go to multiple doctors and therapists that tell you different things or give you a diagnosis with little help in what to do with it. Family Hope Center helps you diagnosis any issue in the brain from trauma or injury and then form a therapy plan for you to help them. The parent is then the primary therapist. I have not decided if I am going to return with any specific children for the two day testing, or if I have enough to work through the obvious issues, but the three days of information is going to radically change the way we attempt to improve our children's lives.

certificate time

Julia stayed with a family from church while we were gone but my father and sister successfully held down the fort at home and even pulled off a swim meet. Once I got home last night, I knew my garden was desperate (in a good way) for some attention. The plants are growing everywhere and things need to be weeded and staked as well as mulch put down to outline the garden and help with weeds. While that was on my mental planner for the day, it has rained all day, so we defaulted to rearranging beds for Tori. I had purchased her one from a friend that was waiting in the basement for time; so we have spent most of the day moving furniture and making it all work.

First I told her to unload her dresser and shelves and move all the stuff out of the way; she choose the bathroom as out of the way.

good thing there is a bathroom just across the hall!

Now we are shuffling to make it all work - I still need to do this same process with James and Ben's room, but it will be worse since I will need to paint. We are going to move the boys out of bunk beds and into captain beds with drawers under the beds. It's always amazing to me how working on one room can destroy the entire house.

Heading back to work.