FW: Ruan

Check below to see Ruan marvellous progress!!!!

 

Best regards

Sheila Belcher
Projects Administrator
Spectrum Communications (Pty) Ltd
Tel. 021 551 5800
Fax. 021 551 5809

Cell: 076 318 8319
e-mail : projects@spectrumcom.co.za

 

I may not be there yet, but I'm closer than I was yesterday - Authour unknown

 

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From: Sonja Higham [sonja@speak2me.co.za]
Sent: 26 March 2012 05:06 PM
To: Sheila Belcher
Subject: Ruan

Wish you had seen your big man today!!! He was just wonderful, you would have been so proud.
We did loads of different things but what really amazed me was when I put 6 letters (letterland snap cards)
on the table.

h                                        a                                                c


b                                       f                                                   t

He would, just by looking at one after the other start writing words. I would ask him to write "cat" and he would
look at "c", "a", "t". I would pick them up as he was spelling and put them together to make a word. He did so well
that, when I once corrected him he laughed at me. On further inspection, I realised that I had made the mistake
and got things all messed up!!            

We did that words fat, cat, hat and bat and he managed to spell them all correctly. And often first time too.

Look forward to seeing you tomorrow.

Sonja                    

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AAC Talk

We had a fabulous talk on Saturday by Liezl about AAC - Augmented and alternate communication.  Liezl discussed the various forms of communication with our special non-communicative children stressing the point that each child is different and the requirements for communication will differ greatly depending on each child's needs.  We had a great attendance - about 28 in total with 6 being from our group and the rest being a mixture of parents and teachers/therapists from various schools.  I hope everyone found the talk informative and helpful.  I will post a few photos later on today.  If anyone would like to get any more information on this subject please leave a comment on this post.  A big thanks to Sheila for organising the venue and to all those who brought eats.

As you can see I have been very slack at updating this blog but would like to get it up and going again.  If any of you have any ideas for topics or would like to do some updates yourself please let me know.   Our next meeting is scheduled for 8 September, venue still to be decided.

Next support group meeting

The next support group meeting is on Thursday 19 August at Sandy's house.  Please leave a comment with contact details if you need the address.  We will be having a guest from Iris House which is a hospice for children with life-limiting/life-threatening illnesses.  Sue will be chatting to us about caregivers and the training of caregivers specifically around dealing with disabilities.  We are also hoping to have some researchers with us (but it has not been confirmed yet).  They are doing research on the provision of services to disabled people in the Western Cape, which I know is a matter very close to many in the group's hearts.

Last meeting

Well, a big thank you to everyone for attending our last meeting. We had a record attendance. A big thank you to the ladies from SARS for the talk. I think everyone got something out of it.

In summary:

Basically everything you spend money on which is related to the challenge/disability of your child can be used as a tax deduction. You need a letter from you doctor to prove that your child has a special need. Then whatever you claim for you need to be able to prove that the reason you bought it is because of your child's special need. For example, if your child is 6 years old and needs to wear nappies or has to drink a certain type of formula then you can claim for it. There was some discussion around whether, for example, you could claim for yoghurt if that is all your child can eat most of the time and the consensus is that you could have a problem proving that this is related to the child's special need.

So the rule is to claim for everything(medical and other) but within reason and bear in mind that you may be called on to prove it. You must keep all slips relating to any claims for at least 5 years.

You can also go back for the last 2 years(could be 3) and claim for things which you did not know about then. You just need to contact SARS and ask if you can be reassessed for those years.

How deductions work: let's say you earn R100 000 in a year and pay R20 000 tax. Your medical/other expenses for your child amount to R20 000. So then your tax calculation will be based on R100 000 less R20 000 ie R80 000. So (if the tax rate is 20%) your new tax amount payable should be R16 000. Therefore you will get a tax refund of R4000.

If you have any queries please contat me and I will put you in contact with Lindsay at SARS.

The other topic at the meeting was our proposed fund-raising initiative. Myself, Louise and Maxine (possibly Deonette?) are thinking of climbing Kilimanjaro in order to raise funds. Lou and Maxine need to raise funds to send their kids to SNAP which is extremely expensive. I thought I would raise money for the group as a whole. There was some debate over how good a method this was of raising funds as a whole lot of money needs to be spent first as it is not cheap to climb Kili. What do you think? Should we rather look at other ways of raising the funds? Any ideas on how to go about it? We are hoping to get some publicity through maybe Carte Blanche and thereby get sponsorship from some large companies for the actual climb. Are we smoking our socks? Do you think it is doable?

In order to raise money for the group I need to get as much information as possible from everyone about their kids. I need pictures and stories and I need to know what you need and why. Bear in mind that this is a selling exercise. We have to make the people want to give us their money. Please send me as much as you can preferably soonish.

Walkers

An interesting post over at Better than normal about the different types of walkers.

Also found a blog that links to CP blogs.

Meeting July 2008

Ok, I've not been very good with updating. Sorry about that. Our next meeting is tonight(3/7/2008) at my place at 7:30 and I have a lady from SARS coming to talk to us about taxes and what we can claim for. We are also discussing a fundraising idea.

Next meeting

Next meeting is at Glenda's place on Thursday 6 March at 7:30pm. Please pop me an email if you need directions.

Next meeting

Our next meeting is on 7 February at Sheila's house. If anyone wants to join us and needs directions please let me know via a comment. We are hoping to get as many people together as possible so that we can discuss plans for future meetings and outings.

I promise to update the blog more regularly this year. I wasn't really in the right space emotionally last year to do very much. Watch this space. Billy has some interesting insights on raising special needs children. Go and read her blog, you won't regret it.