Essary 4.0: Back To School

Korban started back to school this past Thursday. Everyone else started the week before, but we were waiting on his medical exemption for immunizations to return from the Department of Health

*A word about that, since people are likely to be curious. Korban got all of his vaccines on time as a baby. We were real sticklers for well-baby visits and all that typically go with them. As Korban got older he just stayed sick all the time. When his doctors first suspected something wasn't right with his immune system, they checked something called vaccine titers. Basically, this is a measurement of whether or not your body responded to the vaccines you got by making antibodies that make you immune to the diseases vaccines are ideally supposed to protect you from. Guess what? Korban had not built immunity to a handful of scary diseases that we naturally expected him to be immune to since we had made sure he got all his shots on time. The immunologist we were seeing at the time recommended that he get the shots again, and even though we didn't love that idea we did it anyway. Initially, he had an immune response but it didn't last.

We started seeing the immunologist we are currently seeing about that time. Then the hypogammaglobulanemia was diagnosed at age four, and we began treatment for it. All the antibodies for the diseases that vaccines normally prevent are in his monthly IViG treatment, so it isn't necessary for him to get vaccines while he is getting these treatments. Thankfully, he now has immunities to protect him from all those scary diseases and the only vaccine that they recommend for him is a flu shot, because what's in that shot changes seasonally.

So his dr had to write a letter to the department of health explaining this and they issue a formal exemption for him for the school to keep on file. I was just late getting it this year, so he had a slight delay in starting school. But it's all good! He was actually sick when school started anyway, so it worked out better for us to start late.*

He was happy to get to go see his teacher! We had missed her. She is still working with him one-on-one for an hour each morning and I stay with him. Here he is getting ready to go into school Thursday morning:

He had a good day and was glad to be back. Selah starts back to Head Start a week from Monday. She's looking forward to it.

In addition, I bought a little preschool program to do with them at home. It's called Raising Rock Stars Preschool and I found it on the www.1plus1plus1equals1.com website. It's awesome! It only cost $10 to download, and I've been working on printing out all the materials and getting things laminated, etc. It's a Biblically based 26 week program. Every week focuses on a letter, shape, color, sight word and a Bible verse that corresponds to the letter of the week.

I found that website on Pinterest and I absolutely love it. She has tons of printable packets in all different fun themes and they are all free! I had already printed out several of those for my kids and they enjoyed them, especially the Jake and the Neverland Pirates and Mickey Mouse packets.

This week the letter was "L." One of the things I did was write a big L on a half sheet of construction paper and have them sticker it with little stickers.

Then I flipped it over and drew another big L, which you can see bleeding through the page in the picture above. ;)

This time, I gave them a bingo dot marker and told them to stamp the letter L. They had never used a bingo dot marker before, so they were intrigued. Korban's looked like this:

You can see where he made one stray mark just to see how it worked and then followed the L pretty meticulously the rest of the time.

Here is Selah's:

Can you tell she was excited? I got so tickled. She's my little artsy girl, and she just went nuts with that marker. So funny.

Here's Korban writing his L's on a dry erase board. The top two lines were hand over hand and the rest was on his own. Writing is a pretty new thing for him (in the past we couldn't get him to even hold a pencil or a crayon) so I'm very proud of this.