Bedtime Stories

After a very long couple days with some very cranky kids (stupid bad weather mixed with three kids on antibiotics for ear infections), I experienced a bit of a miracle with both Ellie and Owen going to sleep around 6PM.  It gave me the rare opportunity to spend some time with just Annie and Isaac, and I just can't get over how much I adore the two of them together.  Annie's at her best 'big-sisterness' with Isaac.  After cuddling together for awhile, telling stories of Prince Isaac who went to battle a dragon and ended up making friends instead, I told the kids it was time for bed.  "Wait," Isaac perked up as he dashed out of the room and called behind him, "But we haven't read 'Go Dogs Go' yet!"  We then read it in English, then in Spanish.  Where Annie kept 'correcting' my rolling r's  . . .Annie rolls her r's to an excessive degree -- and anything short of it she corrects in my Spanish :-)  So a book about 'perros rojos y perros negros' and you better believe she took over and read for me, so those r's would be adequately rolled.  :-)  Four whole videos of basically the same thing is pretty overkill, but I can't get enough of these two.

My adorable monkey's before bed last night . . .

This picture is from a week or so ago, but it kinda makes me smile -- I feel bad he felt crappy still last week (he's back to normal now, yay!), but he just looked like such an adorable and GIGANTIC baby when he laid down on the floor and crashed with his giraffe blanket one afternoon . . .

During FHE last week, Ellie decided she wanted to write a "Jesus Poem" . . . she had Greg help her spell the words, but she was solely responsible for all the content -- including the pictures of our family with Jesus, where she happily pointed out, "LOOK! We're all dead here in heaven with Jesus!" Yay? :-)  She also wanted to draw an ark, complete with all the animals.

With Annie, I've started to read the Children's New Testament with her (and we try to open the actual Bible to read one or two of the references for each topic) and she's just started her 'scripture journal'.  Each 'chapter' we have a little picture and question and she loves pasting it up, reading her chapter and answering the question.

My sister Talina volunteered to watch my two middle kids while I took Owen in to get his ears checked (after multiple ear infections that aren't clearing up with drops, as well as some other symptoms, we had to start him on oral antibiotics -- bringing us up to  three out of four children with Augmentin prescriptions in the fridge right now).  Anyway, cousin Bailey had fun with her older cousins coming to visit on her own turf . . .

This week Isaac came across his Halloween bag, and has been scavenging the house for candy ever since . . .

And lastly, what would this update be without a little facebook status regurgitation:

January 29, 2013

Took twenty minutes to get Isaac all ready to play outside -- so I should've known that he wouldn't make it off the back porch and he'd cry until he came back outside . . .

 January 28, 2013

The great thing about Annie learning a second language, is she now can boss around her siblings in two languages. She just walked into the room, sighed and called out to Ellie and Isaac, "Silencio, por favor!"

Even better -- rolling her eyes at Grandpa Robert's antics, "Mi abuelo es muy loco."

After weeks of bad weather and horrific inversion:
Isaac looked outside this morning, shocked and a little horrified, "MOM! Why is it SO bright outside?!" I told him that was the sun. He looked confused and said, "Why isn't it all dark anymore?!"
Thanks a lot inversion, for screwing up my kid's sense of reality :-)

We have to take Owen in to the see the doctor, so I told Isaac we needed to get him dressed to go. He ran in and got a U of U sweatshirt and a pair of khaki shorts and some socks and sandals. This boy is such a Utahn . . .
(I'm making him wear pants -- mean Mom.)

January 25, 2013

My poor kids . . . I am the WORST at time outs. I forget about 'em half the time (or better.) Ellie just yelled from upstairs, "Um, Mom? Am I done yet?" Crap, she's been in there like 20 minutes . . . it was just so nice and peaceful down here, with nobody being made to cry, that I didn't even let myself think about letting her out of time out :-)

January 24, 2013

Dear Owen,
I don't know where we got our wires crossed on this, but let me be clear -- waking up five times in one night is unacceptable. Following such a night by waking up at 6AM, for good, is even more unacceptable. And being cute and cooing makes it all the worst -- if you were in pain, sick or uncomfortable, I would be able to justify in my head our frequent nighttime meetings -- but when you're cute as a button, it makes me want to sell you to the circus.
Sincerely,
Mom

Annie couldn't be more excited about lunch today -- she's squealing and dancing around the kitchen. This is what happens when she gets a mixed green salad with pomegranate AND blueberries AND strawberries AND nuts. I wish I got as excited about salad as my six year old does . . .

 

Sunday night we all got together to celebrate my sister Talina's birthday together -- with a bunch of sick babies in tow :-)  Owen was miserable, barely able to keep his head up.  My niece Bailey was sick, but fortunately the Ibuprofen kicked in and she perked up.  Isaac wasn't feeling well and was pretty grumpy.  Even more so when we had Grandma give him a (much needed) hair cut.  I'm gonna miss those curls though!  I need to get a picture of him with it all done now and get it up here, 'cause I can't believe how grown up it makes him look!

 Just a reminder of what it looked like a couple days ago . . . and yes, he does occasionally wear shirts.  Even more often than he wears pants . . .

And, what blog post would be complete nowadays without my most recent facebook updates . . . what can I say, I'm a sucker for instant gratification -- facebook's so much quicker and interactive than the blog!

January 21, 2013
My children are very intelligent. Choosing to wait until exactly 10 minutes before Dad was going to be coming through the door to PAINT MY ENTIRE KITCHEN FLOOR WITH ACRYLIC PAINT was probably a good move on their part and quite possibly saved their lives . . .
Dad is now dealing with the repercussions to their actions and now that I've cleaned the floor, I'm sitting up in my room in quarantine taking deep, cleansing breaths. I think Dad's going to be handling a solo-FHE tonight, all about respecting our home and property.
Follow up comment:
I got it all up, mainly 'cause it was still pretty wet . . . the clothes they were wearing are RUINED. And they've been informed that they will be doing extra chores to make money towards the cost of those skirts . . .

Now they are folding clothes. After they cleaned the front room and Annie straightened the toy room. And Ellie straightened up the boys room and helped wash the bathroom floor. I was pretty determined that the time I spent cleaning the floor was going to be made up for . . . 

(Thinking about this now -- I wish I would've gotten a picture.  At the time though, all I could think of was my floor being potentially permanently destroyed and just making it 'til Greg got home without killing the kids -- the thought of a camera never came to mind . . . )

 

Just made chicken noodle & quinoa soup and the most gratifying thing in the entire world is the baby just lapping it up after refusing any solids that weren't graham crackers for the past four days . . .

 

January 20, 2013

Took Owen into Instacare tonight.
Turns out there was a three hour wait.
Is it bad that I looked at him, decided he didn't look THAT sick and we could just take him in tomorrow to his regular doctor, and we just headed home?
(To my credit, I did have a nurse I know listen to his lungs to make sure he wasn't having a hard time breathing, like Isaac has been, and with them checking out, there wasn't anything that couldn't wait 'til tomorrow. 'Cause, seriously!? Three hours in a waiting room with other urgently sick people -- he'd catch more bugs in that three hours than he already has!!) :-)

 

Isaac just put away the silverware, and Ellie is dusting the blinds (you know, kinda, not really, but she's trying) -- each day is a day closer to having trained minions to do my housework! Mwah ha ha ha!

 

January 19, 2013

Watching Annie and her Uncle Cody play Monopoly (as he's made her banker and talking her through handling all the money -- in English and Spanish) just totally melts my heart :-) How did I end up with such a cute little brother and an even cuter little girl!?  (This was after their ice cream date to Arctic Circle, and before Ellie joined them at the Rec Center to go swimming, then came home and hopped into the big jetted bathtub, still in swimsuits and filled it up with bubbles!  The girls really, really love Cody coming home from college.)

January 18, 2013
Five minutes before bus was going to be here, Owen threw up all over the carpet -- so I yelled down to Annie to watch out the window for the bus, and then got to work bathing the baby and carpet shampooing (best purchase EVER) -- at 8:13 Annie came upstairs to tell me she'd forgotten to stay by the window and had missed the bus. The baby was in the tub, and the toddler was running around without a diaper and Annie's near tears 'cause she's going to be late to school now (Ellie was oblivious to all the drama and was just happily watching 'Veggie Tales'). How grateful for am I for AWESOME neighbors like Carolynn who came by and picked up Annie and took her to school for me so Annie wouldn't have to wait for everyone to be ready and be even later for school. Thank you to everyone who's helped us out over this last couple months -- hard things are way easier to do with good friends!

January 17, 2013
I'm impressed by Annie getting 100% on her accelerated spelling lists -- but even MORE impressed by her awesome handwriting!

Pictures

I have a bunch of pictures, and of course, a couple facebook updates.  'Cause that's about all I'm good for when it comes to blogging nowadays, plus nobody wants to hear about my crappy nights sleep all week, with Owen puking last night, Isaac puking the couple nights before, nobody sleeping . . .

Anyway, cute pictures of Owen!

Sickly pictures of poor Isaac -- he's totally getting his butt kicked by this virus (sick all week -- fevers, Instacare visits for multiple breathing treatments (that was a bit scary), sore achy body, and a snotty nose).

 

His feverish naps brought out the best in his curls though . . .

 

 January 12, 2013
Poor Isaac has Annie's fever and cough now, and he's miserable. He kept me up all night long with his whimpering, coughing and general grumpiness. The one highlight of being woken up all night long was when he suddenly sat up at 2AM and shouted, "Mom, I need agua! Agua Mom, now!" So, Annie's Spanish is rubbing off on her younger (possibly delirious) siblings . . .

January 10, 2013
Ellie is my amazing bundle of energy and joy, exuberant and spastic -- which is something about her I admire and am in awe of -- it's unfortunately, also something that often tries my patience and is fairly destructive :-) This morning she bounded up the stairs with a half gallon of almond milk in hand -- "Mom!" she bellowed, "I need help opening this!" I opened the lid, took off the seal, and screwed the lid back on (though not tightly, since she was taking it right back downstairs for breakfast). She happily skipped off, got to the top of the stairs, then proceeded to THROW THE ALMOND MILK DOWN THE STAIRS. I heard it crash down the stairs onto the landing, and by some miracle it did not explode, spill or even leak. But it was just SUCH an Ellie thing to do. No thought of consequences, just exuberance that threatens to destroy my home :-)

 Woo hoo! I returned my heart monitor today! Thirty days of monitoring done and they never called me into the hospital, so at least they never saw anything really scary or dangerous! They'll still need to look over and analyze the thirty days worth of information they got about my heart, but the fact I was never told to come in immediately means we've most likely ruled out anything major! So glad that part of this medical drama is over with -- my skin is raw from all the places I've had leads stuck to me the last month, and it's awesome to not have wires all over the place for the kids to pull on! :-) Isaac seems to miss it though, and keeps asking me where my "heart onitor" is. :-)

January 9, 2012
Isaac was in the backseat, just chattering away, when he suddenly started to tell me a story about some frogs. "These green frogs, they were just sitting there. With bugs all in their mouth. Most delicious bugs. They said "yum yum" on their log. It was speckled. Then they jumped in, but there were more frogs, with bugs in their mouths. Delicious bugs. And the frogs were speckled and just sitting on a log until they jumped into a pool. They had bugs in their mouths, and they were speckled. Then when they jumped in they said, 'Glub, glub'." The whole time Greg and I are laughing, 'cause Annie's listening to Spanish kids song, and the CD is playing the Spanish version of "Five Green and Speckled Frogs" and it must've clicked in Isaac's mind on one level, but he just sat there telling me this story, never realizing that the song was playing in the background. Funnier if you were there, but Greg and I could not stop laughing.

 
 

Owen's One Year Appointment

So on Friday, June 4th, we took Owen in for his one year check up.

Good news -- he's grown!  Not a ton, and he's still not on the charts yet, but he's actually bigger than Ellie was at a year!  He weighed in at a whopping 17 lbs. 10 oz. (a whole 7 oz. more than Ellie at a year), but it wasn't enough to get him back on the charts yet.  But most of my babies shoot up half way between their first and second birthdays, so I figure he'll grow sooner or later. :-)  He is up to 28.35", which puts him at 9% on the height charts.  His biggest growth was in his head size, where he's steadily gone up on the charts at every appointment (unlike height and weight that goes down at every appointment), and went from 57% on the charts at 9 months to 68% at a year.  This is still much smaller than my other kids (who's heads usually range from 85-98%). 

The funny thing, is at a year I talked about our lazy, practically immobile baby.  Apparently he caught wind of my blog post and set out to prove me wrong, because within two days of his birthday he's become a crawling machine -- up and over obstacles (still won't tackle the stairs) at a speed at least twice as fast as he was just days before.  He still won't stand up and push a push toy.  He's also suddenly more accepting of anyone besides Mom and Dad holding and playing with him.  And he's babbling a bit more.  He's trying to buck his reputation as perpetual infant . . . :-)

Owen's First Birthday Party

I was too tired and wiped out from Christmas to celebrate Owen's first birthday with a big party last week, so we put it off 'til yesterday.  His first birthday and already he's suffering for having a birthday surrounded by holidays!  Poor kid :-) 

But it was a lot of fun getting together last night with all the family and eating good food and watching Owen open presents (his first he was interested in opening -- we made it all the way through Christmas without him so much as ripping his own wrapping paper, but he was at least involved with the unwrapping of all of his presents yesterday (although, his siblings did prove to be very, um, helpful with all of them after the first.) 

New Years Eve

We spent New Years Eve at our house, with my parents, Star and Cody.  Greg made his famous homemade pizza, with the world's cutest sous chef . . .

As is standard at New Years, we played lots of games (cards and otherwise) . . . here's Annie with Grandma Karine and Grandpa Robert playing Qwirkle, a new family favorite . . . 

The girls went out with Uncle Cody to try out Isaac's new sled . . . it was cold :-)

Isaac wanted to put on boots to go out and sled too, but refused to put on pants . . . 

Grandpa and Cody watched "Alvin and the Chipmunks" with the kids.

 Then we all turned in around 10PM.  Yay!

Money, Money, Money. Money.

So, I was just whining about our flex spending account situation for this year on facebook, and decided I'd move it over here as well -- just so the whining is as far spread as possible, I guess :-)

Each year, it feels like I'm making some big gamble as I try and see the future and figure out how much money to put in our flex spending account for the next year.  This last year, I feel like I won the flex spending account jackpot -- I just submitted my last receipt for last year, and it was $200.  We had $145 left in the account.  With every single medical thing that came up this year (including Owen having surgery for tubes), we were only $55 short at the end of the year.  That's some kinda miracle, in my opinion.

This year though -- looks like I've already blown it!  :-)   When I set up our flex spending money for 2013, none of us were on a single prescription, all the kids have functioning tubes in their ears (so that shouldn't be an issue), and there should be no new baby this year (in theory -- I've learned I don't have quite as much control in this area as I think I do, but there are no plans of any new additions!)  So, I put half as much money into our account this year.  I might've been playing it a little safe, but I couldn't see anything really big happening that I should plan ahead for.

Since everything was finalized and no more changes could be made, my health situation blew up into a big old mess, and all the sudden I'm on a 24-7 heart monitor for a month, I'm on five different prescriptions, and each of the boys are on prescription iron now too.  I have countless appointments, labs, tests, etc. still to come as they try and answer more questions and take care of the already uncovered issues. 

I'm gonna burn through this money by like February.  :-)

Oh well.  But you know what should come with that whole packet of 'how to plan you health insurance for the next year' they send each October.  A CRYSTAL BALL!  :-)

Then, just for fun, more stuff I'm stealing from my facebook page . . . 

Recent video of my cute, cute family.

Isaac a couple days ago, while watching "The Little Mermaid":
"I love this movie!" Isaac explains when 'The Little Mermaid' comes on, "It's the 'Little Friends Under the Water' movie! It's about a princess, who lives under the big sea. It has dolphins, birds, a little bird, and a fish and she lives in not a castle, and it's called 'The Down in the Sea Little Princess'. There's a fishy under the water, and it's about fishies and other under the water things." Ellie adds, "I don't know what it's about, really," and Isaac adds, "It's about water, really, I don't know, mermaids, I guess." This kid cracks me up! It's so funny to me that Ellie was in speech therapy around this age because she was using so few words, and he's the exact opposite, and just talks non stop, constantly narrating his life and everything going on. Funny how each kid develops so differently, and yet you'd never look at Ellie and guess she'd ever been at a lack of words :-) "I love this," he just added, "It's called "Down in the Sea", and there are lots of singing mermaids. Oh no, the Daddy is mad now . . . "

Earlier the same day:
About an hour and a half ago, I gave Owen a bowl of oatmeal for lunch. Then he snacked on some Cheerios while I made him chicken. Which he followed with corn and beans. Which he followed with more chicken. Then I strained some homemade chicken noodle soup for him and he ate up all the potatoes, carrots, celery, onions and chicken. Now he's fussy and I think he's still hungry. For a one year old who's barely cracked the 17 pound mark, you sure are a hungry little thing Owen! 

Potty Training, December 31:
Earlier today Isaac was walking around the house talking about his "Incredible panties." He was wearing underwear that had Disney's "Incredibles" on it, but it was just funny to hear him talking about his 'incredible panties' all morning :-)

Earlier that day:
Dear Isaac -- while I appreciate the amazing potty training skills you've busted out lately, for the love, can you please just pee in your diaper at 5AM. Mom and Dad love you, we just don't want you coming in during the wee morning hours asking us to help you take off your pajamas, diaper, then having to clean out a potty. We're tired, you have a diaper on, why don't we all just stay in bed 'til morning. Okay?

And lastly, some picture from a couple days ago when Annie became obsessed with playing "Nativity" and spent a whole evening moving people around into different 'roles' in the manger.  She explained at one point, "You know . . . Mary and Joseph didn't get a lot of sleep . . ."