Jan,. 15

I'd planned on us having family pics done this Saturday, but decided last night to reschedule them. Graham has a nasty runny nose and little cough, and we're still working on getting rid of the dry rash on his cheeks. He gets it now and then when it's cold and he drools a lot and it gets trapped behind his paci. A couple days of ointment usually do the trick. I rescheduled for Sat. Jan. 31, when I'll be just shy of 37 weeks. Hopefully we make it! lol Eric is most likely working next weekend, so that was out. Anyway, I'll be sure to post pics of that afterwards.

It's nasty rainy here today so that means it's a perfect day to get some housework done! Dishes are loaded, laundry is going, and there are messy floors all over this house with my name on them!

And I guess I'll throw this out here if anyone wants to offer up some suggestions. At the kids' last pedi visit I asked her about their speech. Natalie can still not say hard and soft th sounds properly, and it's starting to affect her reading/spelling. And Erica can still not say a lot of things correctly. I can understand most of what she says, but other people still have trouble. And I'm trying to teach her the letter sounds, which is not going over well since she can't pronounce many of them correctly. So... the pedi said it would probably be a good idea to have them seen by a speech therapist. I meant to make appts back in December, but didn't get on the ball. This week, I looked on our insurance website and there is not a single speech dr. in all of SA that takes our insurance. So my other option would be to go through the public schools. Even though we homeschool, my kids are still eligible for speech benefits. And it's free! The downsides are that it usually takes a long time to get in, and I've heard from other homeschooling families, that some schools will give you a hard time about using their services while homeschooling and just homeschooling in general. So I'm kind of stuck as to what to do. Do I just fork over the money and get them in possibly quicker with an actual dr, or do I go the free/slow route of the public school system? Quite the quandry.

And on the topic of speech, Graham does not say any words. He can say mama and dada but he doesn't always use them in correct context. He mostly just does caveman grunts. He *was* signing more, milk, and all done, but hasn't signed anything for weeks. He is almost 15 mos old, so I'm not worried yet at all, but just wanted to throw that out there as a reference to look back on.