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After 25 days of vacation we are finally home!  I missed home but there's nothing like visiting friends and family.  Between Kevin's full fledged family reunion in Florida and my mini-family reunion in Denver, I saw family members I hadn't seen in 15 years and got to meet many new family member additions.  As always I was a little nervous about seeing and meeting people and how they would react to Jackson.  And as usual I had nothing to worry about.  Our family members show us nothing but support and love for Jackson.  They were all so excited to see and meet him and we must have answered a hundred questions about him (which I loved, who doesn't love talking about their kid!).  One of my favorite instances was with my family in Denver.  Jackson was rolling around in the grass at my uncle's house while we sat by visiting.  My cousin Tanya's husband Kevin (yes we both married Kevin's) got down in the grass and was playing with Jackson.  Jackson was laughing and having a grand old time.  Then Kevin asked if Jackson liked water.  You see the other little kiddos were all playing in the cooled down hot tub, all of them except Jackson.  When I said he did, Kevin ran and got a swimsuit on and got in the hot tub with Jackson, who had a blast being around the other kids.  It's little things like that that really touch my heart.  I barely know Kevin but after that I will be eternally grateful to him for his kind heart towards Jackson.  Thank you Kevin! 

Our vacation allowed us some time to work on a couple of Jackson projects.  The first one was working on getting Jackson to hold a sippy cup without handles.  Jackson needs to start working on holding things better with his hands and his hands are getting big enough to hold a cup.  So Operation Goodbye Sippy Cups commenced once we arrived in Florida.  After a couple weeks I can say we have a fairly decent success rate.  He is able to hold a cup and drink from it but not when it is full, the full weight is a little too much for him.  But once he drinks about half of the contents then he is able to pick it up and drink.  So we will keep working on it.  My next goal is drinking out of a straw!

The other project was one that Jackson's speech therapist assigned.  She gave us this device that is a large button that you can record words into.  The purpose is to use this button as a way for Jackson to communicate.  He hits the button and it "speaks" for him.  The word we were using was "more".  We were using the button mostly for eating.  During feeding Jackson would hit the button which would say "more" and we would give him a bite.  The first time Jackson's speech therapist used this with him he hit the button 14 out of 20 times.  Let's just say he got the button down fast.  Too fast!  Here is what would happen - he would hit the button, at a normal pace I would spoon up some food to feed him, it would be to slow for his level of patience so he would start hitting the button over and over.  MORE! MORE! MORE!  Honestly, after a week I was sick of that freaking button!  But I was impressed by how quickly he caught on.  We see the speech therapist next Wednesday and hopefully we can get a new word assignment.  In the meantime I am thinking of recording my own message into the button.  It will say something to the effect of “Mommy needs a spa day!”