The Silcock Family Newsletter

October 2008

 

Hello!

 

Well we made it through summer, whew!!  We always love the end of the school year.  Summer means freedom from the rigid school schedule, the tons of homework, short days, and I.E.P. meetings.  Summer also means we can sleep-in another hour, we get to wake-up at 6:45 instead of 5:45 in the morning!  Summer especially means the boys have a variety of exciting and interesting experiences that we have carefully researched and spent hours filling out camp forms so they can attend.   Most of the boys even get to attend a couple of sleep-over camps.  Now not to say that we aren't working as hard in them summer as we do the rest of the year.  In fact, most of the time we work much harder!  Since every day for every boy is different, transportation alone can be a logistical nightmare,  We have lots of scheduling challenges with kids going to activities all over the community and at all different times. We use our own seven vehicles, which is easy as long as we have enough drivers and, of course, we can go broke paying for the gas.  We also use the city bus which requires patience  and  tenacity to get from one place to  the next.  Of course we rely on ACCESS, our local door-to-door transportation system for people with disabilities and their attendants.  The ACCESS service requires special tickets costing $2.25 each way and three-days notice to book a ride. Then there is organizing day packs and packing duffle bags and rolling sleeping bags for sleep-over camp.  We have lots to remember with formulas and feeding equipment, medication, medical and adaptive equipment, and car seats.  Even making lunches can be a challenge... Dylan only wants jelly on his sandwich, Jordan only likes peanut butter on his, Marc wont eat crusts, David wont eat wheat bread, Alex wont even eat a sandwich at all...and so on!  While the boys LOVE camp and all of the wonderful experiences that go along with camp, you can only imagine the dirty laundry when six of our boys arrive home from sports camp!  We can spend hours at the laundry mat just trying to catch-up. While we love that the boys get opportunities to go to a variety of camps focusing on such individual interests as film making camp, acting camp, sea camp and spy camp to sports camp, bike riding camp, science camp and cooking camp and even cruising with Grandma Sue by the end of summer we are exhausted and are ready to start the regular and predictable fall schedule! 

 

During the summer we added another teenage son to our family.  Andrew is 17-years-old and joined our family in July from the state of Washington.  In September we were able to finalize Yanny's and Kyle C.'s adoption.  We also signed adoption placement paperwork for Patrick and Parker.  We understand that Michael's adoption, as well as, James' adoption should be finalized within the next several months.  Also the county continues to work with us toward getting enough support so we can finalize Alexander's adoption.  We have waited a long time for his adoption.   We are also excited to announce that we have been matched with a handsome 14-year old boy.  Steven has severe physical and cognitive disabilities and has been in the foster care system for many years.  We are thrilled to be selected as Steven's family and we are hoping to have Steven placed with us before the holidays! 

 

The boys have been working on their third CD with our friend, Dave Nachmanoff.  They have the final mixes completed on eight of 20 songs.  After the new year the boys will be back in the studio recording some more of the remaining songs.  Several of the boys even play guitar on drums on this CD.  Every album we make is definitely better and more rich than the previous album.  I think people will be surprised to see how the boys have developed their song writing and singing skills over the past several years.  Keep a look out for more details about this CD in 2009.

 

Our holiday letter will be out in early December!  Thanks a lot for keeping in touch.  We love to get e-mails.

 

Ann