we've been doing......

This is my big girl in her brand new bath seat for the first time today. She looks so grown up sitting up like that and liked playing with some new duckies too. I turned the car seat around today too cause she now weighs enough and is sitting well enough to do it. Will be interesting to see what she thinks next time we take a car trip!! Don't know what happened to my teeny tiny bubba, so much change in 6 1/2 months.

We've had lots of unexciting appointments lately and Friday was our annual trip to the tic clinic at Westmead. It usually takes hours but we were out of there after only an hour and a half so I did something spontaneous (which is not a trait that's normal for a planned out, organised control freak like me) and we headed to Rouse Hill park for a picnic lunch. I already had our lunches packed cause I figured we'd be out all day, but it was much nicer eating it at the park than a clinic or hospital. Jaden loves Rouse Hill park and had a fabulous time on some of the equipment, his only complaint was no-one to play with so we'll have to take a friend next time.

One of the other 'fun' things Jaden has enjoyed in the past few days was getting creative with some clay. He was doing Australian landmarks....

his version of Uluru....

an interpretation of Cradle Mountain.....

and then this which he decided was Mt Everest, even though it's not Australian, because he wanted to do the tallest mountain in the world.

Something else we've done in the past week is go back to eating food as pure as possible. It's how we used to eat, a way of life that God showed me years ago, obediently eating what He created for our bodies instead of filling them with man made rubbish. Yet every now and then I get off track and since having Bethany and then moving house not long after I was busy and tired and started relying on convenience foods and take away. But my health is suffering, I've been getting pains and nausea again like when I had gallstones but this time it's my body trying to digest food without the help of my gallbladder, I've also put on heaps of weight and my menstrual cycle is all haywire again complete with extreme pain, plus some other issues I'm sure no-one wants to hear about. My body is telling me what God's been trying to remind me of for a while.

So now we mostly eat fruit and veg with some wholegrains, lean meat and low fat dairy thrown in. I found these huge mushrooms and stuffed them with spinach, capsicum and topped them with a tiny bit of low fat cheese, and instead of making a creamy sauce for the chicken like I would've before, I just lightly cooked some cherry tomatoes and a little bit of avocado (which I don't even usually like that much, but mixed with other stuff it tastes ok). I'm working on portion sizes too, still feeding Brett bigger meals for the moment but have cut my sizes down heaps and yet I feel quite content. Can already tell the difference in how I am feeling too :-)

As part of helping Jaden get on board I'm trying to involve him in helping with dinner. I bought a cookbook from the oxfam shop while we were at Rouse Hill the other day (I love the shopping centre out there!!) which is full of easy foods for kids to cook and it's looking at dishes from around the world. So tonight we made some spicy lamb and veg kebabs and he loved helping stab everything onto the skewers. We also made some home made wedges of sweet potato and then a dipping kind of guacamole sauce thing, all totally experimental and all low fat and nice and healthy. The amazing thing was that Jaden ate it, although he had salad and just had meat on his skewers cause he reckons he doesn't eat mushrooms, capsicum or zucchini, little does he know he actually eats them in plenty of things I cook, they're just either cut small or grated and he never notices LOL.

He's actually been quite helpful around the house lately because he's trying to earn rewards as part of this new system we've implemented with the help of his psychologist. Things like tv, computer time, a new book or comic or even a playdate are all privileges not rights and he has to earn them by his behaviour. Certain things are worth an amount of tickets (eg. to watch 2 hours of TV or a DVD he has to earn 5 tickets in that day)and he gets tickets for obeying our house rules and doing as he's told. Some days it works a treat, others not as much, but it's definately been helpful so far. Yesterday he brought in all the washing and he's never even done it before so he got a bonus for that.

With our bookwork I'm finding that Jaden is actually a lot further behind where he should be than I thought. Obviously with all his emotional struggles at school and attention difficulties he has missed a lot of the basics and I am finding that a lot of maths and grammar stuff that he should be able to do he doesn't know how to. So I am adjusting what we've been doing and going back to some basic stuff before we keep going on with year 4 work. Things like spelling rules, basic maths concepts etc. I wonder how far he would have slipped through the cracks in the system if I hadn't brought him home and realised how much he's really been struggling.

Anyway that's us, long blog post but I haven't had a chance to get on here for about a week and there's always plenty to share :-)