The fair!

The highlight of this week, by far, was going to the State Fair. I’ll get to that more in a minute, but first let’s talk about how Elijah is doing physically.

It turns out that his physical therapy appointment on Friday was his last. Actually, it could be extended, but only on orders from the doctor. We go see the doctor tomorrow afternoon for another checkup. I’m sure they’ll take some more X-rays, and check to see how he’s doing with his walking and moving, but it’ll probably be a pretty quick appointment like normal. I know the physical therapist was pleased with his progress, but I’m not sure that he should be done with it. We’ll see what the doctor says tomorrow.

Homeschooling is going well, though there were some challenging spots this week. I think that will be normal, though. I really believe he’s making a lot of forward progress, and at a much faster rate than he would at Public School. Really, that should only make sense, given that he’s being given one-on-one instruction daily. I helped out with his schooling sometimes, and we get to have fun doing activities. This last week I set up a little grocery store or he could come and buy groceries with a certain amount of money, and then we would trade places. We would create receipts to do the math. It was a lot of fun, and it’s things like that, that make homeschooling unique.

Homeschooling is also allowing us flexibility to be able to do things that we wouldn’t necessarily do if he were in public school. For example, we went to the state fair on Thursday. I took the day off work, and we met some friends there in the morning. It was actually a day where homeschoolers could get in free. So, we all got in free. Then, on top of that, kids can do a book report and turn it in at the fair for free ride coupons. If the kids can’t write, they can draw pictures as their report. Elijah completed one of these, and I helped Abigail complete one as well. So they both got coupons for free rides. I also just want to throw out that we were able to pack a lunch and take that in, so we ended up doing the whole thing for free, which was great!

The first thing we did was went around and looked at the animals, which is one of our favorite parts.

Next, we went to the special exhibit on King Tut, but that one was a bit scary for Elijah. After we finished with the exhibit we found a spot to sit and eat our lunch. Then, we got our ride coupons and started looking for which ones we wanted to do. Elijah’s top choice was to do one of the big slides, which he had done last year. He went with some of his friends, though he had a hard time making it up all of the stairs to get to the top of the slide. Just to clarify, he could make it to the top, but it was a slow process, and difficult because the kids had to carry up a mat while climbing the stairs. This man is about as big as Elijah is, and since he already had a hard time walking without holding onto the rails, it just added to the difficulty. Another girl, we don’t know, helped him carry his mat up to the top, which was really nice of her. His friends are the first ones down in this video, and then he’s the last one down on the green slide right in the middle. I’m afraid it wasn’t as fun this time, because he got a little wobbly coming down and tried to steady himself with his hands. In doing so he ended up burning one of his hands from the friction. He was hurting pretty bad after he came off of that ride and had some skin peeling off his palm, which took him a little while to get over.

After that, we headed over to the big ferris wheel, where we could ride in one unit with our friends. Actually, it was the dads with the kids. Julia and her friend Olivia stayed on the ground with our belongings. This was a fun ride, and gave us a great view of the fair and a phoenix.

After this, Elijah still had one more ride, but Abigail had a few. She was much more limited in the types of rides she could go on, so I took her to go find some rides she could do, and Julia stayed with Elijah and our friends to finish off his pass. Here are a few pictures of Abigail riding her rides.

Elijah chose a Hall of Mirrors for his final ride, and I think that was a good choice since he didn’t have to wait long and it was a fun thing to do.

After we were done with our rides, we separated from our friends and went over to the arena where they were doing some high school rodeo. We watched a bit of goat roping and bull riding.

That was a nice relaxing way to finish off our day at the fair.

Besides that the week was mostly normal. Our garden is starting to sprout, which is exciting to see. maybe I’ll take some pictures of that this next week, though it’s not much to show off.

Anyway, we’re doing well, and Elijah is continuing to make forward progress. Here’s to another week!