TARDIS Little Free LIbrary

Please visit the Facebook Page and give us a like! www.facebook.com/TARDISofSlidell

FAQ's:

What is a TARDIS Little Free Library? In fact, what is a TARDIS?
So first off, thanks for asking! Second, we now hope you will go learn about what a TARDIS is and why you too should love it. In a nutshell, The TARDIS--Time and Relative Dimension in Space is a time machine and spacecraft in the British science fiction television program Doctor Who and its associated spin-offs The Sarah Jane Adventures, Torchwood and more. So in a nutshell, for those who are not familiar with Doctor Who, the TARDIS is a machine that can travel through time and space. Now, finish reading this, and then go watch Doctor Who!

What is a Little Free Library? Well, it's a super awesome concept that you can read more about here. This is a wonderful organization that I highly suggest you support and tell others about. We are proud to be a part of this group and so thankful they came up with this idea! Basically, the premise is someone in the community maintains a small library where children can take a book, leave a book. So it is based on the honor system. You can take a book and bring two in return, or bring one to leave when you come to borrow. Or simply take a book, return it, and grab another! The point is for easy access, fun books and getting children to read!

But what about the local library? Let's get one thing straight. We LOVE our local library system. The St. Tammany Parish Library system is AMAZING and we are absolutely blessed with an incredible Slidell branch. This project is not done in any way to imply the library is not sufficient. But every librarian will tell you, the more access children have to books, the better!! We chose this location because it was in a location children frequent (an ice cream shop) and is within walking distance of many homes, a school, and a park. We hope the libraries will work WITH us and spread the word!

Why make it a TARDIS? So, you probably ask this question because you are not a Doctor Who fan, for if you were, you would not ask that question. So let me explain it like this, first off, this is not our original idea. I first saw it online, probably on Pinterest, and there is a super cool guy who I want to meet one day, who made one in his front yard! You can find them here.  There may have been someone before him who made one, but his is the first I found. I then met the awesome Paul of the Krewe Du Who who did make a full size TARDIS you can actually step in, and I realized...this man can do this. He can make this dream happen! So, I stuck my neck out, and approached the  man in the long scarf and we got the ball rolling! But I digress. So why is it a TARDIS? Because they're awesome.

Where can I see it? Well,you can't see it---YET. We are just getting the ball rolling and will update as we go along, but we have secured the location and the builder, Paul, is ready to get going. We do, however, need funds for supplies and materials. We will be creating a GoFundMe account soon with specific details on what the money will be used for. Once the TARDIS is built, yearly upkeep will be minimal and will run on donations and community support as well. Once it is built however, it will be inside the gate in the yard of the Old Town Soda Shop in Slidell, La at 301 Cousin St, Slidell, La 70458. We are very grateful to both Frank and Morris who are supporting this adventure. Without their support, we would NOT be able to do this. Details on accessing the TARDIS will come as she is built. (Yes, it's a she.)

How can I help!? We LOVE you for asking that question! Right now, the best way you can help is to share our Facebook page, www.facebook.com/TARDISofSlidell Once we get the GoFundMe account set up, we will alert you and we will start taking donations for the cost of supplies and materials, as well as stocking the library. In the meantime, if you have ANY books, we will take them! The focus will be books for children, non-fiction, and fiction but we will take any book that would be considered PG-13 and below. So chapter books, classics, picture books, banned books, we want them! So if you have any books you can donate please email Amy at mamaslittlemonkeys@Yahoo.com. If you are an author or publisher, we'd LOVE to talk to you and have your books in the TARDIS.

Who is doing this? I had wanted to build a Little Free Library for some time in our area. I am a former teacher, current homeschooling mom and I love to read! When I saw the TARDIS Library up north, I knew this would be an amazing thing to have down here, and would be perfect for Old Town Slidell. We have an amazing community here and we can make this an awesome project for all to enjoy! So thanks to the generosity of Frank and Morris at the Old Town Soda Shop and the awesomeness of Paul with the Krewe du Who, we will make this happen! So really, everyone who helps is doing this!!

**If you have any questions or comments please don't hesitate to email me, Amy at mamaslittlemonkeys@yahoo.com or via the Facebook Page!

Monthly Themes for Homeschooling

I am trying to do some monthly themes since E is in kindergarten and I loved doing themes as a preschool teacher. We are still following certain curriculums but I thought the themes would be fun to give us extra things to do and learn about. So here they are, in case you're curious! Themes change every two weeks and we do not do traditional holidays like Christmas, Easter, Valentine's etc.

I have ideas plotted out to go with each one and will post them as the time gets closer!

Monthly Themes

September:
Angry Birds
Insects

October:
Fall/Leaves
Pumpkins

November:
Thanksgiving

December:
Snow
Penguins/Polar Bears

January:
Presidents
Dental Health

February:
Human Body
Dr. Seuss

March
Weather/Spring
Plants/Flowers

April:
Farm
Zoo

May:
Outer Space/Star Wars
Ocean

~~What are your favorite themes?? Feel free to share them and delight me with a comment!!
~~Amy

May Photo Purge

Been a busy and quick month here with us! The little finished preschool making us officially homeschoolers for both boys! We wrapped up school with the oldest, and we started our summer break. School session for us resumes late June for about 8 weeks then taking the whole month of August off. I figure that works wonderfully so that when public school starts here around the 8th of August, we can enjoy the pool at our gym in relative peace again!! Also, should another hurricane strand us for days again, no worry about making up days for school!

So here's a little photo purge of what we've done!

Mostly gardening, swimming, zoo, a little redecorating and enjoying life! The crazy days are crazy but the good days are great!
~~Amy

The Big 0-5

I can't believe my baby is turning 5. I know soon I'll be adding a 1, or 2, or 3 in front of that and saying the same thing...but still..my baby...growing up! Here's a little journey of my baby boy :)

Happy Birthday E!! I love you, even when you drive me batty and test my limits!
~~mommy

Semi--Wordless Wednesday

So much to be thankful for....

Three Weeks Left??

There are three weeks until school starts. THREE WEEKS? Perhaps you read that with a sense of dread and the sound of a mother on the edge.

Ahhh, but you would be mistaken grasshopper...I am actually saying that with a sense of disbelief. Summer has flown by so that there are only THREE WEEKS left until school starts!!?? Yes, summer is wearing thin...I'm running out of ideas that I WANT to do, let alone that I CAN do (Pinterest is great, but only goes so far...)

We've done some awesome things just in the past week!

"Magic Doorway" of crepe paper streamers.

Sponge Water Bombs.

Playing with a cheap, huge Frisbee.

But something great happened today...my older one..H, my "glass is half empty, this sucks" kid, said to me, "Mom, I like when you do all the cool stuff for us like the magic doorway and the water bombs and water bed. Thanks." He usually only shows appreciation when he's sucking up. That's when he walks up and hugs me and says, "you're the best mommy ever, I love you." I have to watch myself, I tend to be worn out when he does this, tired of his whining for something he can't have, or just overall "too busy"...and I too often look at this as his sucking up and say, "ugh what do you want NOW?"

How would I feel if I was on the receiving end of that? No matter his motivation, even if it is selfish and he's trying to get something out of me, I am a grown up, I can say no to whatever it is. But before that, because he said those words to me, I should stop, hug him back and say "Thanks buddy, you're a pretty awesome kid yourself." And I do, a lot of the time. But sometimes I don't...I'm human.

So it was nice to hear that he appreciated the time it takes for me to do the fun stuff. He knows I work from home and I cram a lot into one day. He knows he drives me batty but he's glad I try.

So I hope I make the next three weeks the best three weeks of his summer!!

Back in May I wrote a Pinterest Planned Summer. Let's see how I did so far!

Original List:

*Glow sticks in the bathtub

*Balloon tennis

*Plastic sheet cover your homework sheets=dry erase.

*Make an obstacle coarse with crape paper streamers. They crawl and step over all of it while trying not to touch the streamers.

*Go Dollar Store shopping. Give them each 5 bucks and they're in heaven.

*Tear drop volcanoes. Put baking soda on a tray. Fill paper cups with vinegar and food color. Use a dropper to create fizzy foam!

~~~~~~From my head~~~~

*Join the summer library reading program.

*Go swimming.

*Have Pajama Day, complete with blankets, pillows, a movie.

*Have a lemonade and freezie pop stand.  We made four bucks!!

*Discounted movie trips

*Visit the little local beaches on the lake.

*Sculpt with air dry clay

*Make rainbows and suns from paper plates and tissue paper (or crepe paper)

*Visit Culinary Kids

* Eat LOTS of snowballs!


~~~~~From Various Pins and Blogs~~~~

*Cup Race.

*Use pool noodles to hit blown up balloons.

*Nerf Gun Shooting Range

*Craft sticks and vecro for making letters and shapes.

*Tin Foil River

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So we've done a lot so far! Three more weeks to have a lot more fun!!! Also, a little time to stop and smell the flowers....

~~Amy

Blueberry Love

We visited the local blueberry picking farm the other day. I highly suggest this activity if you have one near you. Not only do you get a quick, fun, learning experience for the kids, but you get great, healthy food to make a plethora of recipes from.

Blue Harvest Farms uses no pesticides so you can eat RIGHT off the bush! How cool is that!?? Located in Covington, LA off Hwy 21, it's a reasonably priced activity for all. At 10.00 a gallon or 2.00 a pound, it's far cheaper, even with gas, than the 4.00 a pint (or more) price for blueberries in the store. And you picked these yourself, it sounds like work, but it's fun!

Check out Blue Harvest Farms site and Facebook page for details on hours and tips.

Here's our little bit of fun while visiting...

All images ©Amy Dutsch, 2012

Delight me with a comment and a repin! :)

~~Amy

Jenga Sentences

Since there are only 12 days til school starts here, I thought I'd do a few things to make sure my monkeys' brains don't turn to mush. We've done a few science experiments, but my dad just gave us a Jenga set. I doubted they would stay together as a set, nor would my children have the patience to play it, I decided to turn it into a literacy game!

What You Need:
Jenga Blocks (lego blocks would work too, particularly Duplo)
Address Labels. I used Avery 8160 size. Use what fits your blocks

What to Do:
Print the words you want to make sentences on your labels.
Peel and stick to the Jenga blocks. Print enough to do both sides if you want.

Make some sentences!!

Enjoy!

Adventures in ABA Therapy: Part One

So, we're 1.5 weeks into our ABA therapy. A little background if you're not familiar, my 2.5 yr old was diagnosed with Autism at 18 months. He's very high functioning and making leaps and bounds.

First off let me say, I am incredibly thankful for this opportunity. We were blessed enough to find a therapist in training who needs to complete her hours and is generously working with Eli for free! Granted, most ABA therapy is 15 or more hours a week, but I'll take what I can get! Mrs. M comes once a week and so far I'm happy! We had a good session last week. His homework for the week was:

1. When he pulls on me to lead me to what he wants, he must point and then give a verbal request, preferably, "I want _____."

2. Point at things he's excited about.

How'd he do? Well, he's done great!! For example:

He has seemed to gotten the knack of pointing and has pointed many times at what he wants or something he loves like school buses, flags and cars.

He's also done this several times,  lead me to the fridge/pantry, pointed to what he wants and then I asked, "what do you want?" and he said, "I want Milk!"!! Once he walked to the pantry and UNPROMPTED he said, "I want fish!" (swedish fish).

Last night as we were going to bed and I walked out the room and said, "Nite nite boys" He called out, "Nite Nite Mommy! Nite Nite Daddy!". Pretty darn awesome I tell you.

I am very confident that in time, when he's in school no one will ever know he had a diagnosis of Autism. In my opinion, this won't mean he never had it. The way I look at Autism is this, its much like cancer. You get a diagnosis and you work on a plan. Sometimes, you can put the cancer in remission and live a normal life...sometimes you can't. Either way, it never takes away the diagnosis...you had cancer. Now you're just living in remission.

That's how I view Autism. Eli will always be autistic. But with the right therapies, gluten free diet and behavior modificiations, he can live a full life in "remission" of Autism. I hope that makes sense.

So, we shall see how this week goes! I'm very happy to have made my decision to stay home with him and not work full time. I think we'll get a lot done in his progress so he can be more ready for the Preschool Early Intervention school he'll be eligible for in January.

I'll keep you updated! :)
~~Amy

This is a big deal, he hated coloring just a few months ago. :)

Eli's Story

I thought I would take this opportunity to tell my son's story. Of course it is not complete, but hopefully will explain where we are right now.

Eli was born Jan. 23, 2008 (a very strategically planned winter baby--I was NOT evacuating 9 mos pregnant again!) and a welcome addition to our family that also includes big brother Harrison, now age 4. The pregnancy was your typical normal pregnancy and his birth was actually enjoyable, so different from Harrison's very traumatic, long, nearly ending in C-Section, birth.

Eli hit all his developmental milestones just fine, give or take a few weeks, until around 14 mos. He had a few words at 12 months including mama, daddy, kit-kat (cat), milk, more and he also signed more and all done. He was breastfeed until 11 mos, so he never even got a bottle really until 12 mos, so he was late getting off the bottle. He started milk and gluten at 12 mos (we have Celiac Disease in our family so I was hesitant when to start wheat.) and seemed to be fine. Meanwhile his brother was complaining of tummy aches and his own (undiagnosed) sensory issues were still being dealt with.

We noticed around 14-16 mos that Eli had stopped saying the words he WAS saying, stopped signing and wasn't picking up NEW words. He also was suddenly not eating ANYTHING. I mean virtually nothing. I found this very odd because up until 14-16 mos, he ate EVERYTHING I put in front of him and I loved it because Harrison was SUCH a picky eater.

So at his 18 mo visit I addressed my concerns with his pediatrician and for once she didn't blow me off. Having taught Head Start and worked in Early Intervention, I knew what I had to do. I called Early Steps, Louisiana's early intervention service for children under age 3 and scheduled a screening/eval. As I suspected he tested about 6-8 mos behind on his language, slightly behind on social/emotional and slightly behind on fine motor. He also failed the autism screening.

Now, granted the 'cut off' score for the autism screening was 20 and he got 23, but still. It was enough to warrant an evaluation. Of course, Early Steps does not actually COVER the cost of diagnosis and I was advised by a few people to just let it be and let him get the speech and OT Early Steps was suggesting.

But do I normally just do what people say? Not so much.

I knew from my years of teaching that if there was even the slightest chance he DID have autism, we needed to know now and get therapy started immediately. So I did some digging and found a developmental pediatrician, the fantastic Dr. Susan Fielkow at Ochsner and scheduled an eval.

Dr. Fielkow is great and doesn't really do 'scores' on young children, which I appreciate, because someone needs to really look at the whole child to see what's going on. Eli did receive a diagnosis of autism, albeit mild.  Now this is where most people think I'm crazy or a hypochondriac looking for sympathy! They say, "but he looks you in the eye!" "He hugs you!"

Yes he does. He looks ME in the eye and he will look some strangers in the eye. And he hugs ME on HIS terms. Can I pick him up on my own and get snuggles? No, not usually. That usually sets him off. He will play games like Peek a Boo and other baby games, but that's the point, he's behind. If he's hungry, I wouldn't know other than knowing his cries because I am his mother. He does not take my hand and lead me to the fridge, or say hungry, or eat. (Although he IS making strides and does now stand in the kitchen and fuss.)

So yes, at first glance, he looks totally 'normal'...whatever that means anymore. His stims are fewer and farer between since starting therapy and they are not very noticeable--mostly visual stimming with a toy or an inanimate object. Lots of vocal stimming also, whining, crying, strange noises but little real language. He can usually be easily diverted from his repetitions and stimming with some major gross motor pressure, flips and games. He is currently obsessed with circles and loves everything circle! He is a sensory seeker so he loves the wild tossing, flipping and other fun things an OT would do :)

My son has autism. Many children do and there are tons of myths surrounding it. I encourage you to never judge that someone is making something up, or that their child does or doesn't have a certain special need. The faces of autism are drastically different but still adorable and deserving of a chance.

What are we doing for Eli?

At the moment, once a week speech therapy, occupational therapy and special instruction. We're looking into applying for a pilot program for autism therapy through Early Steps because we cannot at this point afford the ABA therapy that would benefit him.

He has also begun the gluten free diet. This is a no brainer due to me having Celiac Disease and Harrison being gluten sensitive. It remains to be seen does Eli REALLY have autism or does he have severe Celiac Disease showing as symptoms of Autism? It doesn't really matter because the treatment is the same for him, Gluten Free diet and therapies.

A recent study in Pediatrics showed that children of mothers with Celiac may be 3 times more likely to have Autism. This does not surprise me at all. The statistics speak for themselves...1 in 150 have Autism, 1 in 133 have Celiac. Do the math.

Many children are helped by the GFCF diet. Some are not. But I feel it is an easy, (mostly) harmless way to help your child. Never start the GFCF diet without professional guidance. Some autistic children are SO picky about food that if you went cold turkey they literally would dehydrate and starve themselves. Go slowly and seek help through professional organizations and your doctor/nutritionist.

My advice for parents who suspect a problem? Don't take no for an answer. Trust your gut. Maybe you're wrong and your kid is just fine. Wouldn't you rather look stupid then wait and find out later there WAS something wrong and you could have helped? You always have the final say in your child's health. Do you want to delay or not do vaccinations? Then do your research and speak your mind. (For the record we do not do shots for personal religious reasons, and Eli still has autism.)

Do you want to try the GFCF diet? Do your research and try it! Do you want to try other biomedical techniques? Again, great, do your OWN research and see what you can do. You are the authority on your child and you know what's normal and not normal for them! I personally vote for trying just about anything once to see if it will help!

I can tell you by now I know what sets Eli off and what makes his symptoms worse. Don't be afraid to be an advocate for your child. No one else will be.

We paid (or will pay) about 1000 dollars for Eli's diagnosis. It was worth every penny. It set my mind at ease, let me know what we were up against and gave me a professional to help give me guidance. So, no Eli is not your 'typical autistic child' (again, whatever THAT is supposed to mean.) but he is who he is and we'll help him learn to be the best he can be.

My child may have autism but autism does not have my child.

Please feel free to share your stories of autism and how you are coping!!

~~Amy