Hello all! We hope this finds you all recovering from the holiday season! This is a new page about the family and not just Dylon though most of the information about Dylon may be news to some of you! I will try to keep this more updated because I dropped the ball last year. Oops!

We shall start off with the head of the house, Dylon. He is a mess! :> He is doing really well in school and loves going to school. He is in a diffrent class this year than he was in last year. This year his class is the blended pre-K class. There are 16 children in the class with a teacher and an assistant. It is more like a pre-school class than last year. The class consist of some typically (normal) developing children and some children with an IEP (Individualized Education Plan). A child with an IEP does not have to be autistic they can also be children with down syndrome/ behavior management problems/ etc. I would say that most the children in Dylon's class who have an IEP have some form of autism. We can really see Dylon developing. Even though there are still struggles with him, like potty training, he really has a lot of strengths. At least with potty training Dylon has learned to give encouragement. We were at therapy one day and I took him potty before we went to check in and I had to go really bad also. With it being just Dylon and me I had to have him in the stall with me. After I was done peeing Dylon looked at me and said, "Good job mommy!" and even danced a little bit. The good news is that we were the only ones in the restroom at the time! For those of you who don't know, Dylon is reading sight words and can spell things like dog, cat, boy, elephant, Dylon, Donnell, and ball. Any word that has a "ll" somewhere in it he spells the word and says eleven for the double "l". For Christmas he received the Leapfrog Tag Reading pen. It is a really cool gift for those who like to read or are just learning to read. He hasn't been sleeping through the night since October. We took him to a Neurologist in the middle of this month and had our initial visit with him. It is determined that is sounds like Dylon is having night terrors. Before going to the appointment I knew that research showed that children with autism do not produce enough Melatonin to help them go to sleep and stay asleep. This is not causing the night terrors but it is something that the neurologist would like to look into also. Dylon does snore a little bit so the neurologist wants to do a sleep study to see if there is any apnea there. If there is no apnea then we will trying giving him Melatonin. We will see how that goes. Right now we are all tired and ready for these little spells to be over!

Michael is still teaching Bible 2 to 3 days a week at White House Christian Academy. He is also working at the Grand Ole Opry which has just finished the year with the Radio City Rocketts. He is still working on his Masters of Divinity at David Lipscomb but it will be like 2020 before he graduates. No. It will take him a little longer for he is only taking one class a semester so I can go back to school.

I am still working at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital and I have started back to school. I still have pre- requisitions that I need to work on before I start my masters. Within the past two years with Dylon being diagnosed with autism and us going through therapies and such I have decided to go into early childhood education. I hope to teach a class like he has been in the past two years.

I hope to keep at least one current picture of us this page and some current pictures of Dylon for those of you who don't see us much or at all. Have a great day and may God Bless you all!