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Speech Study

posted Aug 24, 2010, 9:41 AM by Christine Merrill   [ updated Aug 24, 2010, 9:45 AM ]

Here's our report from a week-long road trip to Indiana.  Enjoy!

Monday morning, I stuck the kids in the car and drove to Indiana. It was not overly adventurous, the kids are good at the road trip thing, and we know the roads well (at least, once we get on I-70). We got to Lafayette about 7:00. We stayed with our adopted grandparents, the Svedins. I knew they were still our adopted grandparents when I saw Ellis curled up on Grandma Svedin's lap Tuesday morning, just like she used to. After a fun evening of catching up on all the news in town, we all went to bed. On Tuesday morning we went to Purdue for the speech study that brought us to town. Lige started his tests right away, and Ellis was old enough to see if she could get accepted to the test, so they did a speech test on her, and decided to accept her. This absolutely made her day. So she got to go off and do speech tests all morning, as well. For these tests, they basically play lots of games while hooked up to sensors that take measurements of their speech or watch little movies with a brain-wave measurement hat on. While some kids might be bothered by the cap or the sensors, my kids think that this is the height of fun and silliness, and enjoy the whole thing to the max. I mean, what's not to like about being the center of attention and playing games for 3 hours? So when we finished testing for the day at noon, they were pretty excited. Then, they got to pick out some toys for participating. Now we are in joy overload. But it still got better! Now we got to go to lunch! When we planned the trip, we knew that after we paid for gas and such, we'd have enough money go to out to eat once on the trip (from the stipend they pay Lige for participation) and the kids had instantly voted for Steak n' Shake, which is a very kid-friendly sit-down burger place. So we drove over there for lunch, and I told the kids that since Ellis was accepted to the study (and got paid the stipend) we had a little more money to spare, so they could order whatever they wanted for lunch. “Even a milkshake?” “Sure!” As we walked into the restaurant, I realized that my kids were in absolute and complete heaven. I have never seen them so happy. We had a really fun lunch, then Mom spoiled the party by making everyone go home and take a nap.

After naptime, we went to the park and met some old friends for a playdate. Lige and his friend Minnie had a remarkable find there – a fossil! Well, it looked like a really cool fossil, it was actually a piece of metal that was sorta back-bone shaped stuck in a chunk of concrete. Minnie got to take it home, she was very excited. I don't know that they understood that it wasn't a real fossil, but who cares? It was very cool!

Wednesday, we did more speech studies, then we drove to Dayton, OH to visit my sister Sandi. We got there sorta late and had to leave sorta early, which was sad. We would have loved to have spent more time there. But it was fun to get to talk to Sandi for an evening. And the kids had fun having a sleep-over!

Thursday we drove home to make it to Lige's Kindergarten orientation. We got caught in traffic on I-270 just north of DC and barely made it home in time (ok, we were 10 minutes late), but Lige has a wonderful teacher for this upcoming year. I'm excited for him. The kids did a really great job on the trip, and we had a really fun time. The only sad part was not getting to see more people and spend more time. But, since both Lige and Ellis are in the study, we'll probably go back for a few more years, so we'll get to see more people next year. Oh, I guess the other sad part was not getting to take Marriner with us. Lige and Ellis did an excellent job of being good helpers for me.

Our fun story for the trip is from Ellis, who was told by the speech study person that she was so good at playing the scooping ice-cream game that she could grow up and work at Baskin-Robbins.  "Oh, no," Ellis responded, "I'm going to be a scientist!"  Good girl! :)