Hooray!

We have something big to celebrate this week. After five years of speech Dawson has been released and no longer needs the help. He has officially graduated from speech! Yay!!! It has been a long journey for him. It was right before this 2nd birthday that he first started with speech therapists coming to our home. He wasn't speaking at all. He has had speech 3 times a week since. It's been lots of work. It's been very frustrating for him when he would speak to someone and have them not understand him. And it made us sad as parents to see him struggle. There have been countless prayers said on his behalf. We have worried and stressed and tried our best to have faith. Right before kindergarten the speech therapist and I had a talk and she told me that he wasn't progressing as fast as she had expected and that she thought he may be in speech all through elementary school. I prepared myself for that. After that talk with her I never expected for him to be released in the middle of first grade. But that is exactly what just happened. I recently had a talk with his speech therapist and that was when she told me that she was ready to release Dawson from the speech program. She told me that as a teacher sometimes you hear success stories where a child has jumped 2 - 3 grade levels in one year. She said, Dawson is that child. Dawson is a success story. She said he had done just that. He tests 2 - 3 grade levels higher than he did just one year ago. It's been exactly 5 years since this journey began. This week he will turn 7. He did it! He graduated... and he has a certificate to prove it! We are so proud of him. We know our prayers were answered. We couldn't be more happy for him.

When he came home from school with his certificate I was so happy for him. I told him that he and I were going to have a date night. I would take him to dinner to celebrate and we would have some one on one time. Lucky for him there was someone making cool balloon animals at Chili's. He had her make him a spongebob and he was very excited about it! Here are a few pics from our date and a pic of his certificate of graduation.