Erin's first report

Erin had her first official report for school. Tomorrow is D for Dinosaur day and each student had to choose a dinosaur and find some facts about it and write a sentence about it. It really hit me hard when we were sitting at the kitchen table doing this together. I can't believe she is writing words and not asking me how to spell them and looking through books for information. I know this is the first of many school projects, and I hope I can keep my patience with her as well as I did with this one! She is just thriving in school and sometimes I'll ask, "where did you learn that" to which she responds, "at school of course, we learn all kinds of things." She's a little sponge. Oh, and Anna was insistent on being at the table with us, she never wants to miss a thing!

Peas and Carrots

Blake and Anna are like peas and carrots, they just go together. They love to be around each other and often just follow one another around. Anna is very upset if Aunt Kim comes over without Blake, he's her special little buddy! I'm so glad they are close in age and can grow up together, although they often find trouble together - guess it goes with the territory!

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Paintball MadMen

Here they are ladies, our oldest children all decked out for paintball before the Super Bowl!

Snow Day!

After years of waiting for the BIG ONE...we finally got it. Erin and Anna were the perfect ages to enjoy this huge snowfall (huge for Virginia Beach that is!) We were so excited to see Anna's reaction to the white stuff because she's never really encountered it. Erin just wanted to have a snowball fight like Buddy in Elf! Daddy was pretty excited to get to use the sled he bought 4 years ago at Sam's club for $4 that mommy had wanted to sell in a yard sale! I was just happy to have everyone home so I could have a few breaks from the mundane! So it worked for all of us and now that it's finally melting away, I don't think any of us wish it back. It can wait again until next year when the newness of it will once again excite everyone, even Megan!

NO APRAXIA HERE!

I have wonderful news and a huge praise - Anna does not have Speech Apraxia!!!!! If you recall in former posts I mentioned that this was one of the main concerns with her new diagnosis of VCFS. The therapist at CHKD, who met her once, thought Anna had Speech Apraxia which is a very severe language disorder and would require years of tough speech therapy. Our therapist from Early Intervention is an expert in Apraxia and always gave me hope that Anna may not have it.

Two weeks ago Anna met her 5th goal in Speech Therapy that had been set back in October. Because she came so far so fast, her therapist feels comfortable saying that she does not have Apraxia! She feels Anna's speech issues stem from some deficits in phonological processing, setbacks from the palate issues, and low muscle tone around the mouth. We will still need to continue therapy for awhile, but we are so pleased that the road doesn't seem to be quite as long. Praise the Lord!

Life with Megan

Hey there little buddy!

What a good little mommy Anna is!

We are slowly transitioning to life with another child. Anna is definitely more interested in Megan than Erin is. She is constantly bringing me her passy when she cries and often tries to stick it in Megan's mouth by herself. She loves to be in the center of the baby action. Anna also enjoys treating her bunny like a baby and offering it a passy and buckling it into the carseat.

These first 5 weeks have been challenging. We are working through some reflux issues with Megan and trying our best to remind ourselves that this time will pass and we will fall into a rhythm one day soon. Please pray for little Megan, her reflux is making her very uncomfortable and irritable. We are in contact with her doctor though and hope to have the issues resolved very soon! She is still has cute as a button just like 2 other little girls I know!

A published Artist

A few weeks ago Erin sent in a drawing to the Virginian-Pilot for their holiday gallery to be displayed on Christmas Day. That morning we hurriedly flipped through the insert with all of the children's art only to be disappointed that Erin's hadn't made the cut. She was sad that they didn't like her art. We took the opportunity to use it as a teaching experience that there will be disappointments in life as we were disappointed too. It wasn't until the next morning when Joe received an email from his boss congratulating Erin on her drawing in the paper that we realized we had completely missed it. It wasn't in the insert with all the other art - IT WAS ON THE FRONT PAGE of the paper. We all got super excited and started calling friends to save yesterday's paper! Erin was elated and was even more excited that her picture was above Barack Obama's in the paper - don't know where she comes up with stuff like that! We are so proud of our little artist and know this is the first of many illustrations to be printed by Erin!