A Tooth Lost

The day after Carly turned five she discovered her very first loose tooth. I was surprised. Is she already old enough to lose her baby teeth? Abigail lost her first tooth in pre-school too so I guess it’s time to start the cycle again. It’s been loose now for weeks, but there was still a lot of tooth hiding under her gums. But yesterday she asked me to pull it out. I’ll admit it wasn’t completely her idea. I’m a blackhead squeezing, sunburn peeling, teeth pulling maniac… I think it’s in my genes. We were surprised to find that the tooth fairy came by last night and left a dollar under Carly’s pillow (the tooth fairy has been known to totally flake in the past).

First tooth in:

6 months old – just peeking through the gums

7 months old

First tooth out:

In the Course of a Day

We decided to follow through with our pediatricians recommendation and get Jason’s speech (or lack of speech) evaluated. Jason and I met with two very nice therapists last week (a speech pathologist and an occupational therapist). They asked a lot of questions and observed his abilities in a variety of areas. But because they can’t watch him 24/7 they relied on me to answer many questions. Shouldn’t be too difficult right, I mean I spend all day, every day with my little guy so I should know the answers… but I didn’t. “Can he do this ________?”, or “Does he know how to ______?”, “Has he made the sound______?”, etc… I must have looked like the most disconnected mother as I struggled to answer their questions. I wanted to be as honest as possible and not just say “yes he can” because I think that maybe he can. One of the questions they asked was if he can point to his body parts. Finally a question I could answer with 100% certainty. I proudly listed all the body parts Jason knows. Of course they wanted to see the boy in action, but he ignored my request completely. Throughout the evaluation I tried (unsuccessfully) to get Jason to point to any part of his body… nothing. Today we had a meeting to go over his IFSP (Individualized Family Service Plan) and included in the assessment was the following statement, “Although Jason did not identify any body parts during this assessment, his mother shared (translation: insisted repeatedly) that he independently identifies his head, tummy, ears, nose, and teeth.” (She failed to mention he also knows his hands, feet, eyes, and tongue).

Another question seemed simple enough, “What does Jason do during the day?” I told them Jason plays with his sisters a lot, but they wanted to know details. I explained that Jason is totally into anything with wheels and that you’ll usually see him carrying around some sort of car or train. Today I decided to document Jason’s chosen daily activities.

Office Bookshelf – an obstacle course just to get there

Master Bath – passing time while I get ready

Kitchen Table – eating a snack before leaving for appointment


In the Car – “What’s with all the pictures Mom?”


TV Stand – pausing to look adorable


My Desk – “Hey Mom can you move over a little?”

Heading Upstairs

Bathroom – “Can you give us some privacy? Percy needs to take a bath (in the toilet of course).”

Living Room

While getting his diaper changed


In the Kitchen cupboards

Off Roading in the Pantry

Good Things

• Today is a no school day
  
• Abigail got Jason out of his crib so I got to sleep in
  
• When I got up the girls had already made their bed, cleaned their room, cleaned their bathroom and were putting the finishing touches on the playroom (I know you’re insanely jealous – I’ve got GREAT kids)
  
• I heard birds chirping this morning
  
• I made the kids pancakes for breakfast (they think I’m the best Mom. Don’t tell them other Mom’s actually cook breakfast without slave labor involved)
  
• The sun is shining
  
• I decided not to go to the gym (only made it once this week)
  
• The kids spent the rest of the morning outside playing with the neighborhood kids
  
• I did some weeding while making sure Jason didn’t run into the street and get hit by a car (he didn’t)
  
• The girls help straighten up the rest of house (earning Nintendo DS privileges)
  
• Justin and I have a babysitter tonight (and I didn’t have to call 15 girls to find one, the first girl I asked accepted)
  
• Justin and I get to see a family get sealed in the Seattle temple tomorrow (I’ve never been to sealing with children involved, it will be a great day)
  
• I only had to call two babysitters to find one available tomorrow
  
• Jason and Abigail are both napping
  
• Carly is cleaning up the shoes
  
• My house smells yummy thanks to the Scentsy my sister gave us
• Justin brought home Cadbury eggs for me last night (only one left... that's not a good thing)
  
• So far nobody’s sick today (although Abigail napping is a bit unusual…)
• and just now (an hour after original post) someone delivered cookies to my door with a sweet card... what a fabulous Friday the 13th!

Any Favorites?

I basically lived in the same house my whole pre-adult life (minus my first year). On the wall above our kitchen table my Mom displayed a current picture of each of her six children. We have a similar wall in my kitchen today. I’m having a hard time deciding what pictures to print of each of the kids… what are your favorites?

Here’s a few more to consider:

New Pictures

Jason hasn’t had his pictures taken since he was 7 months old so last month I scheduled a session. It happened to be a no school day for the kids so she took pictures of Abigail and Carly too. I just got the CD in the mail today and had to share my favorites. Jason was totally uncooperative… to busy to sit still and smile so I’m amazed we actually got some decent shots.

She was only able to take a couple pictures of the kids together before Jason was done for good - I love this one!

Ready to take off...


The photographer really liked this one and posted it on her blog. His expression is adorable, but his head looks ginormous.



This one just makes me happy!


Near the end we headed outside for some outdoor shots. This is the only picture she took. Jason is pulling Abigail’s hair cause he wanted to get down and play.

Enough Already

I’m tired of this…

Snow again, what’s with this winter? I don’t mind snow, but Seattle is not equipped to handle all the white stuff we’ve gotten this year.

And I’m tired of this…

Until this year it seemed our family rarely got sick. Sure we get a cold now and then, but this year it seems like not a week goes by when one of the kids isn’t sick. Thankfully, it’s never lasted long and it’s not as bad as all the icky flu stuff going around. Abigail didn’t feel well over the weekend (symptoms included tiredness and being either too hot or too cold). Then Carly threw up this morning. (I know too much information). The one day I actually needed the snow to cause a 2 hour late start of school I didn’t get it. To be safe I kept Abigail home from school (always such a hard call to make) and by 10am the girls were playing perfectly fine, Abigail was begging me to take her to school and Carly was begging to play in the snow. Both requests I denied. But now Abigail’s snoozing on my office floor with a blanket wrapped tightly around her… what’s the deal?

Carly Turns Five!

My little girl celebrated her fifth birthday yesterday. In a way it seems hard to believe that five years have already passed by since Carly joined our family. She was by far my smallest baby, weighing only 7 lbs, 2.5 oz at birth and getting as small as 6 lbs, 5 oz. (Abigail and Jason were both 9 lb-ers… BIG difference!) To me she was so tiny and fragile. Her little arms and legs looked like there was just skin needing to be filled.

Still so tiny at 3 weeks old

Carly was the most jaundice of my babies and needed phototherapy treatment for nearly 48 hours. It was heartbreaking to only get to hold my new baby when she needed to be fed. Thankfully she didn’t seem to mind her nice warm bed one bit.

Carly started sleeping through the night before she was three months old. She’d occasionally wake up around 5 or 6 to eat, but always went right back to sleep. I’ve been SO blessed with such great sleepers!

People often say that Carly most resembles me, although I don’t really see it (she is getting freckles like her mom though). I think she’s adorable! Just look at those big beautiful eyes!

3 months old

First ponytails - 14 months old

Halloween - 20 months old

The older Carly gets the more I see (and hear) myself through her. Her Carlyisms remind me of my Dad and how he often referred to my comments as Hollyisms. Carly started talking well at a very young age. She is full of inquisitive questions, many of which we can’t even answer. She definitely keeps us entertained with her spunky personality.

"Flying" on the Beach - 2 years old


I’ve also recently noticed that Carly will talk to me while she watches herself in the mirror… did I do that too? I think I remember denying it, but my parent’s dresser mirror was positioned just so…

As lastly, we’ve noticed she has become my strongest supporter. She tries to keep her Dad in line and make sure he’s doing what he’s been asked to do. There are times she’ll say something with just the exact tone and mannerisms as me… isn’t that scary. Two nagging wives!

Our birthday gift to Carly was going to the Great Wolf Lodge earlier in the week (see post below). To celebrate her actual birthday we had Justin’s family over for cake and ice-cream. I thought it was cute that before they got here she commented that she doesn’t need anything new and that she is “spoiled” by her grandparents.

Carly got to pick out how she wanted her cake decorated. She didn't want it to say Happy Birthday, but she did want her name and a heart on top.


Carly said our family prayer last night and thanked Heavenly Father for her great birthday. She was so excited to take cupcakes to her pre-school today and wear a new outfit from her Grandma Fletcher. (and Mom, she dove into the ice-breakers immediately)

Happy Birthday Carly! We are so grateful to have you in our family!!

Great Wolf Lodge

I have cabin fever. Which is weird because I love to be at home. But this winter, more than any other I’m ready to go somewhere. So a few weeks ago I suggested to Justin that we go on a little mini-vacation to the Great Wolf Lodge (an indoor waterpark and hotel). Since this is Carly’s year to have a family birthday, we decided to suggest it to her as an option. She of course was thrilled to accept. So on Monday we pulled Abigail out of school early and an hour later we were ready to dive in and have a great time. We were there just over 24 hours and the girls spent 12 hours of that time playing in the pools and going down the waterslides. Lots of fun, but too short… where to go next?

Abigail was awesome crossing the lily pads

Carly was fearless (as usual) she wanted to try everything and was disappointed she wasn't tall enough to ride the Tornado

Jason loves the water and had no problem laying down in the wave pool and getting water splashed in his face

All dried off and ready to head home

Updating the Blog

My Mom has this idea that the bloggers in my family haven’t been blogging as much lately because of facebook. Which I think might be true for some people, although not us. We've just been busy. My Mom’s been on a cruise this past week (I’m so jealous) and I know she’ll be checking our blog when she gets home to see if we’ve been updating. So here’s what we’ve been up to.

Sunshine

The weather was great last week. Although it was still cold, the sun came out so we were able to play outside a lot. Since there wasn’t any school the girls spent nearly every afternoon outside playing with the neighborhood kids. Their cousins played with us at the park one afternoon. Justin’s sister, Tami took some great pictures of the kids.

All the Fletcher grandkids

This guy loves his Mom!

Zoo

On Saturday we went to the zoo with our newly acquired Topeka Kansas Zoo membership - thanks to Tami’s research (see here for more info.) This was Jason’s first trip to the zoo. We thought he’d be super excited to see the tigers, walruses, and elephants - he loves animals, but instead he was quite reserved and saved his excitement for the boring, stinky fish in the disgusting aquarium. He also thought going down the slide was really cool.

Trying to keep up with his sisters

Abigail recently finished a whole penguin unit at school so she was really excited to see the penguins and tell us about that particular species.

Fire Station

On Tuesday Carly had a pre-school field trip to the fire station. Little trivia: Does anyone know the difference between a fire truck and a fire engine? We do. The firefighter that gave us a tour was awesome. The kids got to sit in the fire engine and even try on his gear. Carly was too timid to do either, but I did get a picture of Jason standing on the back of the fire engine.

Carly's pre-school class (minus the little guy in the middle) - there's only one other girl in her class.

Tis’ the Season

The sunshine disappeared this week and today we woke up to snow. The ¼” we had was enough to delay the start of school 2 hours. That combined with Jason waking up sick resulted in canceling all our plans today. I spent the morning sitting on the couch cuddling my little guy… definitely a perk for having sick kids (staying home & getting some cuddle time). Thankfully he’s still sleeping awesome; hopefully he’ll wake up from his 5+ hour nap happy and healthy.

Mid-Winter Break

This week is mid-winter break, not to be confused with spring break that will be in only six weeks. While I typically look forward to no-school days I would much rather trade mid-winter break to get out of school before the end of June. It seems only logical, right?

We don’t have any fun outings planned this week. We’ve worked on a few organizational activities (cleaning out the craft cupboard and shredding massive amounts of old documents from the file cabinet), but other than that it’s just nice to have the kids home and not have to wake up before 8am.

Last night I was sitting on the kitchen floor feeding Jason some leftover mashed potatoes. I have always loved potatoes; in fact my Grandpa called me the potato girl. To my shock, my firstborn detests potatoes (unless they’re fried or in the funeral potato form). None of my kids are picky-eaters so for potatoes to make the short list of disliked foods is disappointing. Anyhow, so I was very pleased that Jason kept wanting more and more mashed potatoes. He was acting goofy so I got out the video camera. Of course he insists on watching himself on the screen (way up close), leaving me to hope I’m pointing the camera in the right direction.

We’re very excited that Jason has started to make out some words. He’ll copy us now when we ask him to say Mama and Au-O. We’re still a ways from the 20+ words he “should” have, but we’re making progress.

This second clip was actually filmed first, but Jason got so excited watching himself that he stepped in his dinner.

Facebook

When we were in NYC in December, we had dinner with my favorite roommate from BYU. We’d hadn’t spoken in years so we had a lot to catch up on. She told me I needed to get a Facebook account so I could keep up with her busy life. I’ll admit to being somewhat reluctant. The idea of having 100’s of “friends” isn’t quite comfortable. And I worried about being mean by declining a request for my “friendship”. Do people really want to be your friend, or are they just trying to up their friend number? And what if you change your mind, can you really de-friend someone? I’m all for reconnecting with people I grew up with or knew in college – I love that. But if I’ve never had a friendly conversation with you than I probably don’t want you reading about my life. That’s why we ask people not to create links to our blog. You can’t find us unless we tell you where we are. Our blog is “private” without the hassle of being private. So if anyone reading this is a lurker (i.e. you’ve never left a comment or told us you read our blog… now is the time to fess up).

So I created a Facebook account and in my first day I was reacquainted with some of my closest childhood friends. Amazing. I haven’t used it much (I only have 10 friends, mainly family), but Facebook is definitely a great way to find people. I do have a question though: when writing to your “friend” do you use the wall-to-wall which everyone can see or send a message through their inbox?? I’m thinking I’m more of an off-the-wall kind of person, any thoughts on proper protocol?

Anyhow, my purpose for this post… Today I was looking through pictures so I could update my Facebook profile with a picture I’m actually in (I previously had this one). I quickly realized that Justin needs to take more pictures (I’m always behind the camera – which I typically prefer) and that we need a new family picture.

This was taken in November of 2007 (Jason was only four months old). I can’t get over how tiny Jason looks. Justin’s hand could totally palm the kids head. Abigail’s lost so many teeth this past year that she looks completely different now and Carly had her hair chopped off. My little family is growing up too fast.