In Which Connor's School District Could Use Your Help And Connor

Everything is fine, I swear!

I came home from three hours of awesome roller derby practice last night to discover that I had no Internet.  Some people are installing a fiber optics cable in the street outside our house and they keep getting into our box and messing with our telephone line.  Since it was well past 10:00pm and I am kind of lazy, I didn't want to go out to a coffee shop that late at night.  So here I am today, letting you know that all is well.  I'll be blogging before practice in a coffee shop until they quit messing with our Internet, so expect blogs a bit earlier in the evening.

What I was going to be talking to you about before my portal to the outside world was so rudely cut off is the technology grant that Connor's school district is applying for through the Pepsi Refresh Project.  Puyallup would like to win a 50,000 dollar grant to help expand their library of assistive technology for students with special needs; kids with learning, speech, reading and physical disabilities like Connor.  The grant would supply assistive technology devices, software and teacher training and would help the 2500 students (incuding Connor!) who receive special services through our school district, many of whom could really benefit from this grant.

Now you know I'm not normally big on plugging things, but this is a really, really good cause!  I know all you parents of kids with special needs know just how expensive this sort of technology can be, and this is such a fantastic opportunity to make a huge difference in the lives of a large number of kids who may not otherwise have access to this sort of technology.  Please take a couple of minutes to stop by and vote for Connor's school district here-- you can vote once a day and voting is open until November 30th. 

Assistive technology is pretty awesome; Connor's been using the iPad for a few weeks now in our outside speech therapy and I think he's really starting to get the concept down!  We tried out a story on him yesterday and he was fascinated-- the kid loves books so that's not really very surprising.  We're shopping around right now to get him an iPad of his very own; we think it's really going to open up a whole new world for him.  We'll have to find him a better version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears than the one he read yesterday, though.  It was disgustingly moral-- at the end Goldilocks apologized to the bears and then actually fixed Baby bear's chair-- I'm not sure who let the six year old have access to a saw and wood, but then she's wandering around in the woods by herself and breaking and entering, so parental responsibility is probably a rather large issue in the Goldilocks household anyway. 

I know Jeremy wouldn't be able to resist adjusting the end to reflect what he calls "appropriate predator-prey relationships" and Goldilocks in our house would end up divided by the bears into three equal portions, which would all be "just right."  So I'll be trying to find slightly less didactic books that he can resist tweaking for our very own iPad when we get it! 

Anyway, go vote!

~Jess