Following the Red Thread to my children: I am the luckiest mom in the world!

So the Jones clan has been just a tad bit busy lately. What, with home schooling the crew and following a specific curriculum... Yikes! We do manage to get in a field trip or two a week and this week it was the Botanical Garden. Comes in handy having the weather be 80 and sunny.

Scarlett has been growing in leaps and bounds. One day she is talking 1 and 2 words and then the next she is speaking in complete sentences and we can actually understand everything she says. That isn't to say that she doesn't still slur her letters and words, but we are amazed at what a smart and talkative child we have.

She is in pre-school 2 days a week. This has been a God send because it gives me one of one time with the older crew. When Scarlett is here, the kids are all over her. So we have 3 hours, twice a week, to really buckle down for the hard stuff.

I still do the PT with her every morning and every night. She is doing beautifully with her right hand. When we brought her home, she didn't use her right hand at all. There was no strength in it. She couldn't move any of the fingers even an inch. Now she can pull up into the car with her hand, pull her socks and shoes on, lift objects and put coins into her piggy bank. The fact that she can pinch her fingers together to pick up a coin and then hold it while placing it into the bank... huge!

She loves to look at books and is finally more content to sit and listen to me read to her. No more turning the pages to get to the end as quickly as we can.

Her favorite food is still banana yogurt, only now I add crushed flax seed to the top, so she's getting her calcium and omegas all in one.

She really isn't a picky eater. Eggs, burritos, corned beef, Indian food, you name it.

We had our 6th month eye appt a little late, but the outcome was wonderful! Whereas we thought she would need eye surgery due to her extropia, because she spends so much time looking at books and focusing on things, her eye has healed itself. In fact, we aren't even patching any more.

All this from a child who was passed up over and over again, for more than a year on the shared list, all because of two little words, "Cerebral palsy". What a shame that there are so many children out there, right this moment, on the shared list, with the same diagnosis. And what a shame that family after family passes them up because they are scared of the unknown.