Matt ROCKS my socks!!

Not only did Matt get back ALLLLLL 7,000+ pictures of the kidlets...he got my Mother's Day/Birthday gift early and let me open it last week! :) Oh...and he is just special in general so that makes him rock even more!

So, I don't know what he did but it seems as though he took the hard drive out of the laptop and just hooked it up to HIS computer and got all the pictures. Every last one of them is now back - Phew! So now I will be able to post a few more pictures for you all to see!

On to my gift. I had been asking for a certain kind of present for well over a year now. Probably close to two. I had the car one day last week and before I went to pick him up he calls to say that I can't look at what he will have with him when he gets in the car. So I pull up to him and he has a big box with a blanket over it. I shut my eyes and let him shove it in the back. He makes me go inside when we get home and sit with my eyes closed on the couch. I think he was excited for me to get it, too. So I open my eyes and what do I see?

NEW POTS AND PANS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now, the guys at his work gave him a TON of grief for buying me a set of pots and pans. But I have been asking for this FOREVER! I told him for Valentine's Day, my birthday, Mother's Day, our anniversary, Christmas, New years, Flag Day, Boxing Day, April Fool's Day...(you get the idea) that I wanted - no needed - a new set. But the day finally came when I would be able to rest my eyes upon a brand spanking new set.

He got me the Premier Professional Circulon 11-pc. set. I used it the other night to make chicken stir fry and it was fabulous. It didn't dry out the chicken like my old set did. And I made scrambled eggs last night and didn't even have to spray the pan! I could take a napkin and clean them out if I wanted to. They are super pretty, too. Here is a picture from the WWW:



Yes, Matt rocks my socks. :)

Other news that has happened since the last update:

Christian had his second speech therapy session. It went well. She is still really strict on him finishing up with one activity before moving on to another. And getting him to ask, one way or another, for something of hers. I have noticed that during the day I give in pretty easy to him so I have been making an effort to make him ask for almost EVERYTHING during the day. He isn't liking that too much today. We are working on some new signs - open, book, help, and up. We'll get there...I hope!

And Sarah has a tooth! I knew she was working on one for what seemed like over a month now. But it finally popped through two nights ago and I noticed it Wednesday morning. She seems to do okay with me not giving her pain meds all the time. Check out her toofer!



Do you see it?! It's on her bottom left side (right side looking at the picture). I hope that second one is soon to follow so I can just get them over with. Little Sarah Bear is growing up. :)

All for now, Christian is wanting up on my lap and I keep telling him no until he says 'up, please'. Not thrilled I'm making him do that but he needs to start talking and telling us his needs. :) Bye!

Updates without pictures :( *long*

I wasn't going to update at all because I wanted to add pictures to what I was saying. But I better do it now before I FORGET what I want to update on! Forgetting is becoming the norm lately. I can't remember right from left most days. Two kids deplete the brain power pretty fast!

On to our kidlets -

Christian - Oh, what a joy a 2-year-old brings. Joys of tantrums, hitting, throwing, kicking, screaming, and downright bawl fests! He is trying to perfect the art.

His entire life he has always been pretty easy to get to bed. During the occasional bout of teething, growth spurt, or sickness he is otherwise very nice about going to bed. We have a routine, ever since Sarah came home:
1. Eats dinner and has some milk
2. Watches some cartoons or plays quietly then reads a few books and cuddles with either Matt of me
3. Then we change his diaper
4. Put on pj's
5. Brush teeth
6. Grab a few cars and his blankies
7. Blows kisses on his way up the stairs
8. And to bed he goes

But what have the last two weeks brought? All systems Go until #8. He gets in there and is fine but then all of a sudden throws everything out of bed and cries. Not sure what he thinks he will accomplish. It has gotten so unreal that we now go in there, swat him on the butt, sternly tell him he has to go to sleep, and then leave.

He even throws a fit when we get onto the roads leading back to the house!!! No joke. I was out with the kids one morning for almost FOUR hours. To me that is a long time for all of us to be away from the house to be running errands. But sure enough, we pull onto a street that we go home on and Christian starts to cry from his carseat. It's seriously the strangest thing to witness.

Coming home from the park or outside. Lord knows we will be met with more cries and shaking his head No. He tries to run the place. He got in trouble for throwing something one day and I told him to come to me so I could spank him...and he did!!! He literally came right in front of me and leaned on my legs so I could spank him. Then he went to the wall for timeout all by himself. This, too, shall pass. I'm not worried about him. But he sure tries to see what he can get away with.

Now don't get me wrong. He isn't all bad!!! We love him to death. He is just so sweet. He loves to give hugs, kisses, and high fives. It's adorable to look at him play with his cars - so cautious with how he 'drives' them. He will even take them and drive on our arms or legs. He loves to look at his flashcards with animals and scream out the name (although we have no idea what he is saying with about 95% of them - but he can pick out every single animal if we ask for it!!). He will hold our hands when we are walking in the store and swing the other one as hard as he can. I'll have to get a video of that some time. He laughs when people on TV laugh. He waves and friendly faces when we are out of the house - even waves at characters on TV! Christian is our first baby and he will ALWAYS be our baby. Nothing he does will ever change that.

And Sarah Bear - our Princess. She has gotten so much better at night. This last week she has only gotten up once during the night to nurse. Only a few time has she gotten up at 5:30am and had to come into bed with us to get some more sleep before Christian wakes up. I am feeling more refreshed when I only have to get up once a night!! Now naps on the other hand? - she still needs a little work on those. Christian doesn't help with all the screaming around the house he does. One of these days I'm going to have to get her to fall asleep on her own. I don't remember for the life of me what we did with Christian.

She went SWIMMING for the first time this past Sunday!! One day before her 6-month birthday. I got a picture but of course it isn't on this computer....but wait! I might have added it to Facebook...let me go see....

I found it!!! Click Here!! And here is another. She did well. I dipped her toes in and she made a small cry but didn't make a single sound for the 30 minutes we were in the water. So I have NO clue if she liked it or hated it. She just...took it. I got her to smile a few times while dipping her in and out and talking to her but she just let me do whatever I wanted with her. She splashed her arms a few times and kicked in the water when I had her more on her tummy. So we'll have to go again next week and see what she does. We'll be trying the beach next month when we go to Bellows for a family day with Matt's work.

Sarah is also attempting to try and roll over..or maybe not. I really don't know if she wants to or not. She just gets to her side, kicks up a leg, and reaches. She doesn't really try much more than that. HERE is a picture of that. Hooray for facebook! I didn't think I would have pictures to share with this update!!

Sarah's solid foods have now consisted of avocado, bananas, applesauce, and peaches. But I think the peaches made her bum a little red...and the avocado made her #2 smell HORRID. haha. Not looking forward to when she starts to have more solids added to her diet. Ick! But she has liked everything I have let her try. She might be a good eater unlike Christian. So far they seem VERY opposite in everything they do.

Oh, about speech therapy: He is saying more words than we thought. The list of words he says on his own grows each day. It's amazing to be honest. I really hope that he gets all that he can out of these speech sessions. :) His next one is tomorrow (Wed) morning. I'm going to ask her what the coming weeks will be like as far as what she does with Christian. I also want to ask her why types of toys/activities would be better to promote more speech. I bought a few place mats at Kmart the other day. They are laminated so you can draw on them and find the shapes, count objects, name colors, trace letters, etc. I think that might help him more than the big tote or toys we have at the moment. :)

Well, that is all I can think of at the moment for the kids. I'm sure there are more things I could write down but this has gotten quite long and I am getting the munchies!

Nothing new with Matt or myself. Just counting the days until we MOVE! :)

Love you!

Laptop is dead....

Of course...the week that I have lots of pictures to add and updates to make, it takes a poo and dies. It turns on just fine but then it goes to a black screen of death. :( And just days after buying an external hard drive to back up all of our stuff on! Thanks, Murphy! So now we have to figure out how to get the stuff off the laptop - which is a MUST. All, and I mean ALL, of the kids pictures are on the laptop as well as every other picture we have ever taken.

AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm just super frustrated about it. I don't know what I'm going to do if we can't get the pictures. I know that we have the website, but it doesn't have every single picture we have taken of the kids. Say a prayer for the laptop please, and that Matt might be able to salvage it.

So, you can expect more delays with my already way overdue updates. *sigh*

Speech Therapy Session

Today was Christian's first speech therapy session. It went MUCH BETTER than I ever expected. He did very well with Allison (his speech therapist) and enjoyed playing with her.

Well, it wasn't necessarily REAL playing by just letting him loose and have at it. It was Allison taking out an activity and getting Christian to use the toy correctly while trying to get him to name parts, movements, actions, wants, needs, etc. Just what ever applied to it. One of the first toys was putting shapes into a puzzle type thing and then putting pegs in holes. We tried to get him to use his signs of please, more, and all done, as well as show him new ones. We are going to work on open, help, and up.

Allison said she is very strict on getting the kids to put toys away before playing with new ones (Yay, because I have been trying to get Christian to do this with his puzzles), as well as not grabbing for toys in her hands. Christian needs to sign or say please/more to get them.

I need to write down the words that he says spontaneously throughout the week and give the list to Allison next week when she comes for the next session. This will help us all get an idea of what he is actually saying and what we can possibly work on. We also need to ask him questions that require an actual answer, not just a Yes or a No. That is too easy for him and we need to help get some words out of him rather than a shake of the head.

And she said that even an attempt of any word is good. If he makes a 'P' sound when we ask him to say apple then he is making some progress. He actually said 'nana' after she left! I was impressed. :)

She also said that his cognitive level was higher than what the report was. I figured this would be the case because Christian had quite the 'tude during his actual evaluation, thus making me worried about today. But he sat right in front of her with her bags of stuff and wanted to dig right in! :)

It wasn't too in depth today. Played with some flashcards to try and get him to say the word of the picture or the sound that it made. Fed, brushed teeth, combed hair, and put Ernie to bed. I would imagine it will get 'harder' as he adds more words. Allison said we will start to work on doing two-word sentences together in the coming weeks.

So here is a list of what we know he says so far, although what actually comes out of his mouth isn't an EXACT match to how us adults say it. ;-) Some of these are on his own, most are prompted.

No
Oh no
Bus
Butterfly
Turtle
Wawa (water)
Where are you? (but it's all one big blurb of a word)
Here you go (again, a big blurb of a word)
Nana (banana)
Woof
Duh (duck)
Oooo (moo)
Bur (bird)
Choo choo (for the train)
Mama
Daddy

That's all that I can think of at the moment. I'll add more later if I can think of them. :)

Looking forward to more sessions!! His next one is the 29th.

Mmm, Avocados!

We tried avocado yesterday with Sarah. She LOVED it! She ate it up and probably could've eaten more but I didn't want to push it. I wish I didn't have to wait 3-4 days between new foods because she REALLY likes to eat. She seriously could eat whatever I feed her, I think. She had more applesauce today and I think it was a little more than 1/2 a cup.

Anyways, here is a video of her eating some avocado. Yum, yum!

Sarah's First Solids

This past week Sarah has been a bit unsettled while nursing. She just hasn't seemed fully satisfied, especially in the mornings and evenings. So on Thursday I decided to try some natural applesauce that I had in the pantry. She didn't do too bad for her first try! I wasn't going to start them for a while but with how she has been acting and the way she follows our food when we eat, I figured I wold give it a shot.

She still has the tongue thrust going on and wants to suck on the spoon like she is nursing but she is getting better! I gave her a bit more applesauce on Friday and she was SO excited to be eating it. It was super cute.

So here are some pictures and videos.






This is a video from Thursday:


And this is Friday's video. You can she how excited she is to be eating! haha

Christian's Second Birthday

I know it's weeks past but I wanted to add a few pictures here. I'm not going to add them to the website.

Careful with the candles!


He pretty much just stabbed at his cake. He didn't want to even touch it with his hands. :(



What does a cow say?


Testing out his new puzzle. It's a tow truck with a magnet that picks up the cars that 'crashed'. :)

I did it!

TEN WHOLE PAGES of pictures and videos are up!!!!! HERE

Big Boy Swing!

I have always tried to put him on the swing at the park but he seemed scared of it. But something sparked his interest last night at the park and he wanted on it. So we obliged and I snapped a ton of pictures! :) He swings his torso back and forth and not his legs. I'm assuming that is normal for the first time of ever being on a swing for any kid. But he had fun and greatly enjoyed it. At one point he fell off mid swing because he saw a bus, screamed, then pointed! hahahahaha I wish I would have gotten it on video. :)

4-4-09 - Sarah's Big Night

Have you ever left the kid(s) with somebody so you could go get something done alone, be it the grocery store or to get your nails done, and then you feel like you have forgotten something the ENTIRE time you are gone? Well, this was my Saturday night.

I wasn't going to post this before because I didn't want to completely screw it up and have it all backfire on me. But, according to Matt, the time and come and this was NECESSARY.

You see, since Matt came back home from Korea he had been sleeping in the living room. He brought down the mattress from the spare room and plopped it in the middle of the floor. The reason? He was sick and coughing his head off (along with being germy) and we didn't want him in the bedroom with Sarah and me. His coughing would be keeping all three of us up and none of us wanted that.

BUT, the big but...he continued to sleep on it once he was no longer sick. The reason? I have been quite the - what's the word? - I've been a meany when we go to bed at night. With Sarah in our room it was quite the task to get her to sleep and to stay there. She woke 2-3 times before she was sleeping for good, and at each feeding at night it seemed like it would take her another 2-3 times to get back to sleep and stay there. Made for some very long nights.

Anyways, Matt said that Sarah was moving out so that he could move back in. Saturday was the day. And I felt like I was forgetting something..... It was comforting to know I was there, five feet away, if she needed me.

But, three nights later, I'm totally okay with it. She still wakes up around the same times each night but EVERY SINGLE TIME she has gone back to sleep and stayed there. I don't know if it's a fluke or what, but I'm liking it. And only once did it take me another round of nursing her to sleep at 8pm when she goes to bed.

I'll call this one a success. :)

Adding pictures!

Slowly, but surely, I'm getting there! I added another page of pictures today and got quite a bit resized to be added later. I still have some of Nancy's visit, Sea Life Park, and the egg hunt we did today with Christian. :)

Go take a look at the new page! GO HERE!!