School Pics 2014-2015

This year was Sara's first time getting school pics done, I would say it turned out pretty good and she is an absolute doll. She really likes kindergarten so far and started off going for just a couple hours. We extended it by another two hours to get her adjusted and in a month or two will be going a full day.

Masha is always our smiley girls and is getting so big its scary, I swear she grew several inches since last school year. She adores school and has a best friend in class named Fifi, we get to hear about her every day when she gets home. I can see a ton of progress for her in first grade and she is maturing so fast.

Our Lera is never without a smile either and this year she is showing off her super long hair. This is the first year of middle school for Lera and the first time not being in a class with Caelia. Mixed reactions so far on how that is going, Caelia tends to keep Lera in line at school. We have seen a bit more of "flirting" from Lera with the boys in class which usually means she is trying to hit them. What can I say, she is Ukrainian!

Our Caelia never quite wants to co-operate with the smiling but is a cutie either way. Here she is with her latest fashion statement her scarf, she has a pretty big collection and is rarely found without them. Although she misses having Lera in the same class she is doing very well in middle school and loves her teacher Ms. Amble and her friend Latrice.

Bad Bloggers!!

For those of you who follow our blog you already know we are not very good at keeping up to date. Several of the reasons include laziness, having 5 children, jobs, home improvement projects and a general lack of belief that anyone is really that interested in our lives. With that being said we also use this as a communications tool for the families of a couple of our kids who live in Russia and Serbia. To you we apologize for the lack of updates. I recently discovered many of our pictures went missing as well and we will work on updating those, we switched from using Dropbox to Google Photos and somehow it deleted a bunch from the blog, but luckily not from our files.

We've been back from Serbia over 6 months now and a lot has changed and happened. We are over the moon with our Sara and look back very fondly at our time in Serbia, it is a country I hope to visit many more times in the future. Sara has gone to pre-school this year and grown taller and gained a bit of weight. She is very well integrated into our family with only a few areas of concern, primarily her desire to scratch people really hard or hit them. The hitting has slowed way down and we are working on the scratching, she seems to get a little over stimulated with certain situations and seems to do it because she thinks it is funny. Lots of progress but much more to come!

My big girls Caelia and Lera are wrapping up their time at Fraser Academy and will be moving onto middle school. We of course are extremely nervous about the transition since they did so well at Fraser and had some wonderful teachers and paras over the years. We have been very lucky and although excited about the next step, very leary about finding the right school and situation.

Masha has changed so much this year. She is finishing up 1st grade and matured a ton, not to mention grown much taller. I think with the exception of Sara all of our girls are incredibly tall by Down syndrome standards. Masha has also seemed to find her place in our house, she adores Sara and plays a lot with Lera and bit with Caelia. This is a great thing for her because at first she was not well liked by her big sisters, but they have all bonded really well.

Michael graduated from High school and is ready to go into a transition school where we will work on his basic college classes and also some life and career skills. Its so hard to believe he will be 18 soon, it seems like yesterday he was our only little baby, then a big brother to Caelia and now he has 4 little sisters. They love Michael so much and we know he loves them. We are lucky parents to have such a fine young man as a son.

Hopefully more posts and pictures to come....