Welcome!

Welcome to the UCLA Preschool blog. Following a meeting with Dane and fellow parents back in August, I agreed to set up this blog as another tool to move this exciting project forward. I saw this as an interesting vessel in which to provide a community for parents, teachers and caregivers and for sharing information on our individual fundraising ventures. It'll certainly be an easy way of keeping in touch with each other given some of the contributors will be parents who've already left the Early Intervention Programme and to foster communication between parents of the different Toddler Programmes. For me, there's a certain wonder and excitement in being empowered to help build a preschool.

Not knowing what will be in place when the preschool is opened, this will at least provide an interim base for interested parties.

To get started, please:
- create a Google account
- add yourself as a Follower by clicking on the Follow button top right on the side bar. It'll help if you upload a photo of you and/or your child
- add a New Post once you've created a Google account to introduce yourself and your child as I've done in the post below. There's an option below to add a label to the post. Write "Parent profile" so that all the parent profiles can be viewed together in a search
- forward this to other interested parties and let me know so that I can add them too as authors (I'm currently the Administrator of this blog)
- add this blog to your favorites so you can easily locate it

Any questions on blogging, ask away. I'll add some more basic instructions about blogging in time. In the years I've been using Google's Blogger, I've found it to be extremely user friendly.

Catherine Lacey Dodd
catherine_lacey_dodd@hotmail.com

Catherine, Jason, Reuben & Callum

Hi, I'm Catherine, administrator of this blog and mother of Reuben Dodd (May 07) and Callum Andreas (Nov 08). My husband is Jason. We're British and moved to the US in 2002. I'm passionate about photography, writing and music. Reuben was conceived after 6 years of infertility, abdominal surgery to remove 9 fibroid tumours, IUI and 3 IVF treatments. Reuben has CHARGE syndrome, a rare genetic disorder affecting 1 in 10,000 births. He has undergone open heart surgery, has a tracheostomy, wears a bone conducting hearing aid due to him being moderately-profoundly deaf and feeds through a Gtube. He spent an initial 7 weeks in the NICU followed by 3 months in the PICU. He has had a total of 9 surgeries. His predominant expressive language is American Sign Language (400+ words) and his receptive language is spoken English. Callum is his much longed for brother, his best friend. Reuben was trached in 2007 due to subglottic stenosis (a narrowing in his airway) and scar tissue acquired from the trauma of being on a ventilator. Whilst the endotracheal tube (ET tube) placed in his airway for mechanical ventilation saved his life, the inevitable damage resulted in the need for a trach to bypass the damaged area.

Like many of the children in the Toddler Programme, Reuben receives Physical, Occupational and Speech Therapy along with early education geared towards his hearing loss with LAUSD. He has low muscle tone in his upper body, chronic reflux disorder and no natural balance due to the malformation of his ear canals. That said, I see that he's utterly flourished in the 2 years since we took him home from hospital and completely loves school, moving from the role of an initial observer to a more active participant as he continues to warm to his environment, teachers and friends.

My own blog follows the boys from my initial IVF pregnancy with Reuben. I write on children's health, sign language and special needs parenting through my favoured mediums of words and photography.
www.reubenjackdodd.blogspot.com/
I recently launched my family photography business:
http://www.catherinelaceyphotography.blogspot.com/
and have photographed each of my boys every day of the first year of their lives:
www.callum365.blogspot.com