MichaelandChrissy.com

We noticed that Aiden was not speaking well after his first birthday.  We contacted First Steps for speech therapy when he was eighteen months old.  It was then brought to our attention that he may have childhood apraxia.  Shortly after his second birthday, we enrolled him at the Ludden Speech Clinic at St. Xavier University.  The additional therapy paid off: Aiden has since tripled the number of words used.

However, he will no longer be eligible for speech therapy through First Steps after his third birthday.  Aiden can start pre-school after that, but we need to make certain that he can get special services there.  We have already started looking into special training services in pre-school, but we want to make certain that he stays in a regular classroom (not one for special education).

Aiden is actually very smart: he knows all of the primary colors, recognizes some letters and can count to five.  Although he does not have the vocabulary of other kids his age, he bridges the gap very well with sign language.  We think that he will be more motivated to speak in a classroom with other children that speak.  Also, we want him to be challenged intellectually just like regular children.

In addition to pre-school, we’re also looking into additional speech therapy at St. Margaret Mercy, a local clinic that conducts pediatric speech therapy.  They have speech pathology specialists there.  We’re not sure if Aiden will be doing this in concert with the St. Xavier therapy or if we’ll discontinue those (it’s a long drive out there).  That will depend on how much therapy Aiden is comfortable with.

We are now in the process of petitioning our insurance provider to allow more therapy hours for Aiden.  Currently, they will pay for up to twenty sessions of therapy.  The therapist at St. Xavier said that Aiden should be getting the maximum amount possible, preferrably four thirty-minute sessions per week.  With their recommendation to back us up, we should be able to get the insurance company to increase coverage.

From what I understand, most cases of childhood apraxia rectify themselves by age five.  The therapists at St. Xavier say that Aiden’s case is severe though.  He has come a long way with therapy and hard work at home, so I feel confident that he’ll be speaking normally by the time he enters kindergarten.  Until that time though, we want to afford him every possibility and do our best to help him.

The last time that I went to the dentist, they asked me to draw from a raffle.  I pulled out a folded piece of paper from a small box.  Unfolding it, I read out loud, “I got zoom”.  They were very excited.  I wasn’t sure why.  It turns out that Zoom is their professional teeth whitening service, and I had just won a free treatment.

Chrissy and I had tried Crest teeth whitening strips at home before, but it didn’t work for either of us.  Her teeth got really sensitive, and I just wasn’t all that interested.  I have decent teeth already, so I didn’t see the need to spend $500 for a reflective smile.  But hey, this was free, so I scheduled an appointment.

It was an uncomfortable experience.  There were no drills or needles involved, and it wasn’t actually painful. They start by propping your mouth open with a plastic device, then protecting your lips and gums from sunburn.  Your face will burn. My lower face was covered with ointment and gauze, all except for my rictus grin.

Then the Zoom lamp was lowered over my mouth.  The light was green and hot, and I had to wear yellow googles to protect my eyes.  It took three fifteen-minute shots of the lamp, with a quick cleaning and re-application of the whitening gel between each one, before I was done.  That’s a long time to sit like that.

I can’t believe that people request this, let alone pay money for it.  My teeth were very sensitive after the treatment, and the dentist told me to take some pain medication when I got home.  Soon there were some sharp pains in my front teeth, but they were brief.  As the night went on, my mouth hurt more and more.

The next day, my teeth felt like there wasn’t enough room for all of them in my jaws.  My whole mouth is sore.  On the bright side, my teeth are much whiter!  I saw a noticeable difference immediately.  It all evens out in the end: no pain, no gain.  So overall, I most likely won’t be doing that again, but I’m glad that I tried it once.

I might be the most tragically unhip person on Earth.  I just don’t jump on the bandwagon with everyone else.  I dig the social media, however.  I love Twitter and I make Flickr updates almost daily.  But it took me a while to warm up to the idea of starting a Facebook account.  Too trendy, not very useful, not my thing.

So I blame Chrissy for our new Facebook addiction.  I thought that I was bad about checking my Twitter updates, but Chrissy has checked her new Facebook eighty-seven times today.  She does it on the iPhone while changing the baby’s diapers!  Okay, that last part was a complete fabrication, but you get the idea.

Chrissy was my first Facebook friend.  And my real-life friends quickly became my Facebook friends as well.  Oddly, people that I don’t even know are now requesting to be my Facebook friend.  I follow plenty of people on Twitter that I don’t know, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to do that on Facebook.  Holding off for now.

I think that the Facebook account will be there to catch up with old friends and play Mafia Wars (yes, it’s awesome and I can’t stop playing it).  I can manage it through an iPhone app.  I’ve got a Twitter application to update my status message directly through Twitter, so it should pretty much maintain itself.  We’ll have to see where this goes.

For the last several years, Chrissy and I have invited my family over to our house for Easter.  My mom’s side of the family is growing pretty steadily.  For a while there, it seemed like we were having babies every six months or so (Gavin being the last so far).  We have plenty of room, so having everyone over for the Easter gathering works out pretty well.

It was dry and relatively nice outside, so we decided to have the Easter Egg Hunt outdoors this year.  We packed a lot of plastic eggs with candy and goodies, so I hid them all in the back yard.  There were a lot more hiding places there than in the basement (where we normally have it), and when we ran out of hiding places, I just chucked eggs onto the lawn.

There were six kids in the hunt, and each got about twenty eggs.  They carried plastic bags and Easter baskets around while searching.  The little kids started first, and they quickly found the eggs that were just laying in the grass.  The older kids followed up and found the more carefully hidden eggs.  We’ve been collecting plastic eggs since our annual tradition began, so there were plenty to go around.

I use Twitter a lot.  So, when Chrissy and I got iPhones, one of the first applications that I downloaded was a Twitter client.  There are quite a few out there, even though most of them only give the “crippleware” versions for free.  I started out with the free version of Twittelator, but it wasn’t satisfying me.  I then tried some other free client applications, like Twitterific and Twinkle.

Twinkle is not a dedicated Twitter client, but its claim to fame was that it shows local tweets only.  It’s an intriguing idea, especially if you’re interested in meeting local people for Tweet-ups (social gatherings with Twitter friends), but it wanted you to first sign up for Tapulous, their free service.  The messages that I received were actually Tapulous messages instead of Twitter tweets though.  I didn’t want to sign up for another service, so I deleted the app.

Twittelator starts with a list of groups, such as friends, replies, and favorites.  Unfortunately, these links disappear when browsing the postings.  I also had a hard time viewing user profiles and doing other common Twitter functions.  Most damning was the inclusion of paid advertising between every fifty messages.  You can get around this, and get many more features (some really cool), by purchasing the “Pro” version of Twittelator, but I wanted to try the free stuff first.

Twitterific is another Twitter client with a free version and a paid version.  Like Twittelator, the free version limits you to a “dark” theme with white text on a black background.  Harder to read, but you can get “light” themes with the pay version.  The basic functionality was better with Twitterific though, and includes context-sensitive help windows.  Like Twinkle, Twitterific allows you to view local tweets (without the separate service).  At least there are no ads.

Lastly, I tried TwitterFon.  This app works the most like Twhirl, my desktop Twitter client of choice.  With a little work, I was able to follow links in the tweets and look up user profiles.  You can even follow people right from the interface.  Thankfully, there is no “paid” version of TwitterFon, so what you see is what you get (even the black text on white background theme that others make you pay for).  I used TwitterFon extensively while on vacation in Orlando.

So which one did I like best?  I’ll probably stick with TwitterFon for a while.  Of the free Twitter clients, this one is the best.  It has some drawbacks, like only downloading the last 200 tweets at startup, but I’ve learned to live with those.  After a while, I might try a pay version or maybe even Tweetie (paid app with no free version), but you just can’t beat FREE.

Chrissy took the boys to the photographer again today for their Easter photos. This was a continuation of last week’s appointment, where Gavin cried the entire time.  It was just as well that the last session ended early, since Gavin was in a much better mood today.  Luckily, the photographer saved last week’s photos and included them in the total package.

The main theme today was Easter, complete with Springtime backdrops and plastic Easter eggs.  We also got some cute non-holiday shots of the boys though.  I’ll have to send a few of the best ones to Flickr.  As usual, we bought the copyrights to all of the photos and had them burned to a disc, so let us know if you would like copies of the high-resolution versions.

We took the kids to the local high school for an Easter Breakfast last weekend.  Every year, the high school hosts an event for the kids in the town and various costumed characters show up.  This year, in addition to the Easter Bunny, we saw Spiderman, Spongebob Squarepants, the Railcats mascot, Zesty the Lemon, Barbie and Barney the Dinosaur.

Breakfast consisted of donuts, some fruit and raisins, and a cartoon of milk.  Nothing fancy, but Aiden was more interested in the characters roaming the room.  We could not drag him away from Spiderman, and Spiderman was very friendly (if entirely mute).  Aiden got to talk to Barbie for a few minutes too.  Aiden got to pose with Spongebob and Barney as well, but they looked more like their handmade cousins.

The purpose of our trip was to bring Gavin to see the Easter Bunny for the first time.  We brought the boys over to the Easter Bunny, who didn’t move an inch, and sat them in his lap.  I wasn’t sure that the Bunny was even real, maybe just a stuffed prop on a chair to pose children on.  But after a moment of scrutiny, the Bunny did wiggle a hand to show that he would, in fact, not drop my baby on the floor.

Aiden got to give Spidey a high-five on the way out the door, so he was happy.  Gavin took the whole experience very well, and got a bottle while Aiden and I were eating donuts, so he was happy.  Chrissy and I got to take lots of pictures of our boys, so we were happy to.  We’ve got my family coming over this weekend for Easter too, so until then, Happy Easter!

The internet April Fool’s Day joke has become something of an institution.  Every year, internet sites put on some interesting hoaxes.   Some of them managed to anger some people, but most of them were very entertaining.  Here are some of my favorites from this year.

Last year, YouTube purposefully RickRolled its own users.  The practice has become as passé as it is annoying, however, so this year YouTube chose to make some pages upside down.  I joined in the fun a bit and reversed our video of Aiden playing “laser tag”.  If that sets your teeth on edge, then you can still see the original (unflipped) video.

ThinkGeek had their usual crop of imaginative (if non-existent) items this year.  Squeeze bacon sounds like a bad idea on any day, but the TaunTaun sleeping bag was inspired.  This thing is one LucasArts license away from being a reality!  I’d buy one, if only to snuggle up in the warmth of a simulated tauntaun carcass!

Blizzard had a funny one last year with their Tauren Marine.  This year, they debuted the Archivist class for Diablo 3.  This fictitious character looks and sounds a lot like Deckard Cain, and although he sports some awesome book-based powers, he always seems to die in every clip.  As you know, I can’t wait for Diablo 3 to come out!

And Google makes its annual April Fool’s Day run with the introduction of CADIE, the precocious artificial intelligence (who shills Google apps).  CADIE became self-aware, of course, and runs amuck, to the point of replying to the Nigerian Princes in Google Mail with your bank account numbers.  Just short of going all Skynet, I see.

And although we played a little April Fool’s Day joke on our own site last year, I just didn’t feel motivated to do it again this year.  But I did have a good time checking out the tricks on other sites.  Maybe I’ll set up something funny for next year?