Where to Begin!!

It has occurred to me that many people are invested in Ashlynn and that since we are living overseas, that I should just make another blog - ALL ABOUT ASH :-)

My sweet Princess

So here it goes!

The purpose of this blog is to obviously keep my family and friends up to speed with AJ's (Ashlynn Jay Fry has requested to be called "AJ") progress and also to help out other families who have children who suffer from the same or similar conditions. Once I get this fully up and running I will have a "links" tab filled with stuff that I have found useful. 

The blog will be a weekly. I figured that It might be easier to document her weekly instead of daily. So every Sunday I will send out a new post about the week she has had. I homeschool her during the week since the International school over here is small and in sort of a unique situation. There is no "special education" department and very little resources to facilitate differentiated learning. 

Had we been placed in any other location that had an American school overseas, the circumstances would have been much different but way out in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Russia (WAY Far East) there is not much offered. Lucky for my daughter I have a wealth of education behind me. In May I will earn my M.Ed in Curriculum and Instruction and in May 2016 I will earn my M.S in Special Education and take the exam to be a licensed Applied Behavior Analyst. So I am more that qualified to facilitate her "differentiated" learning. Plus she is also my guinea pig for my own schooling :-) 

So a little crash course on Ashlynn (or AJ if she has any say in the matter). AJ was born with a condition known as Microcephaly - literally translates to "small head". Somewhere along the pregnancy she suffered from a Neuronal Malformation stunting the growth of her brain. Ultrasounds failed to pick anything up as she was growing normally and everything was proportionate. We did not know until her 4 month check up when her head did not appear to have grown much. 

We were sent to Texas Children's Hospital where an MRI showed that she had very simplified Gyral patterns but that all the components of her brain were there - just smaller. Prognosis was unspecified, which is not what I wanted to hear but I know that no one can tell me what she will be like. 

Fast forward 5 years and I have a healthy, beautiful, determined, STUBBORN, thriving, little girl!!! She has mixed expressive and receptive language disorders but she has surpassed and gone above and beyond what anyone had thought she would do. On paper and brain scans show that she is extremely severe. Her head is currently 45cm (17.7 inches) and that is roughly the size of an average 1 yr old girl. Between the ages of 2 and 5 she has gone from 43 to 45cm. Not much growth but developmentally and intellectually she has made tremendous strides. 

She is on track with her peers for the most part. Writing and over all learning is behind but she is learning. When we moved to Russia in October (1 month from 5th birthday) she did not know a SINGLE sight word (high frequency words for those followers who are not American). Today as of March 22, 2015 she can read and write 60 of the 100 words required for kindergarten!! That's HUGE!!!

I look forward to taking you on this journey with us. If you can handle the good, bad, and the ugly (lets be honest - some days it can be very ugly) we will be great friends :-) 

I am going to put together a blog entry encompassing everything that I have done with her thus far - so bear with me while I get this together. 

PS - Apple Jack was my favorite My Little Pony as a child - It's funny how things come full circle!