Halloween

We had a blast trick-or-treating. We went with our friends so all the kids ran from house to house. Poor little Ian who is two could hardly keep up with them. After our neighborhood the kids were still not done so we rounded up the Dad's to go with us and we hit the next neighborhood over. They came home with a really nice stash. Since I want my kids to have the experience of Halloween without all the sugar we picked a few pieces of candy out and then placed the rest out for the book witch (aka Mom and Dad). Perfect solution, my kids get to trick-or-treat, they give up most of the sugar for a book and I get to satisfy my sweet tooth!

Jetted Tub

The sad truth about jetted tubs are that many of us want them and then rarely use them. We get a lot of use out of our tub. At least I should say that my children get a lot of use out of our tub. I have to say it really does make great bubbles.

What were they thinking?

Have you ever stumbled upon a disaster and wondered "What were you thinking?!" Well I have definitely had a few of those moments. One in particular happened to take place in our kitchen. As I was heading towards the kitchen I heard an unidentified sound and I happened to notice a few ice cubes on the tile. As I stopped to take in the moment I saw the culprits dashing to the fridge, filling a cup with ice cubes and tossing them all over the kitchen. There were ice cubes everywhere!! I guess I will have to chalk it up to a science experiment.

Off to School

August brought a whole new ball game. Kindergarten! Instead of seeing the beginning of Kaitlyn's school career, I am terrified because I know that within moments she will be graduating high school. Even though Kaitlyn was definitely ready for school, both academically and socially, I am far from being ready to let my baby go. I vowed not to be one of those parents who cried, but as she boarded the bus (another step I was not ready for) I had to bite my lip. Madison on the other hand cried and cried and cried. She REALLY wanted to get on that bus and go to school too! Her partner in crime was being ripped away from her and for days she wandered around lost without her companion. And of course we had to follow the bus to school on the first day to make sure that Kaitlyn could find her way to her new class.

Yuba Lake

One day I was listening to yet another friend talk about how they were going to go to the beach for a wonderful vacation. I started thinking why in the world does my family have such a boring life and I decided that I wanted to go to the beach too. The one catch was I didn’t have the time or the money to travel to the coast so we had to improvise a little bit. Growing up my family camped at Yuba Lake which is close to were my parents live and only a couple hours from where we lived. So I made my husband take a few days off from work and we packed every inch of our car and headed off to the glorious beach at Yuba Lake. We ended up camping close to the beach but we also had flushing toilets and yes we splurged and camped by showers. We mostly just played in the sand and the water for those few days and my parents even came out for a glorified weenie roast (using brats instead of hot dogs). I was also thrilled that we could get a little more use out of the fishing license that my husband had to have. The bad thing was there were a TON of huge fish that were jumping within feet of where we were standing and fishing but none of them ever gave us the satisfaction of nibbling on our line.

Fishing

Many years during my married life my husband has begged to get a fishing license and then proceeds to go only once the whole year. And . . . with the exception of one year (which happens to be six years ago) has never caught a fish. So with great hesitation, and with many threats, I let him buy another fishing license. Well I have to say he has definitely done better this year and we have gone fishing several times, and yes, we have even caught fish.

Slip N' Slide

Our neighborhood had some really great parties during the summer. There were blow up bounce houses, plenty of food, HUGE blow up screens that they played a movie on and my favorite part was the gigantic slip n’ slides. Our park has really big hills that are ideal for the slip n’ slides. They used plastic that they rolled down the hill and they secured swim noodles to the sides of the plastic. They went clear down the hill! The houses that were next to the hill were generous enough to let us use their hoses and water. My girls loved it! They had a hard time making it all the way to the bottom sometimes so it got to the point that Curtis would take them by the arm and the leg and give them the momentum they needed to ‘fly’ down the hill. The girls were not happy campers when it was time to go home. And once again, after the fun and games Madison realized she was wet and tried stripping all her clothes off in public.

Madison's Surgeries

Most people know about Madison’s surgeries in May of 2009 but for the benefit of those who I haven’t kept in close contact with during the last year, I thought I should write about it. It all started in November of 08 (The year from you know where, that we hope to never re-live) I started noticing that Madison was getting extremely close to books to look at them and she was bumping into things a lot. She hadn’t had her eyes checked since she was a baby so I took her in for a long overdo eye appointment. Sure enough my suspicions were validated that Madison had cataracts in both eyes. The Dr. even let me look through his instrument at both Madison’s eyes and Kaitlyn’s eyes to see the difference.

The reason we hadn’t caught it before was because the cataract did not cover the whole eye. It looked like the cataract was swirled with some places being affected and other parts were clear. Madison was doing a good job at compensating the parts she couldn’t see with the few holes that she could see through. The next step was off to Primary Childrens. Usually they like to wait three weeks to a month in between eyes so that there is less of a chance of passing on an infection but after the whole insurance fiasco and having to reschedule the surgeries, my job that I had to fight so hard to keep (another long, not so humorous at the time story) was quickly coming to an end. We had the surgeries one week apart!

The day of the first surgery we were able to meet with a life specialist who let Madison color on a doll and smell the different scents that the medicine came in. I thought it was nice that the Curious George (G-George) was able to get a wrist band as well and go with Madison. When it was time to go Madison was wheeled off in a wagon. Everything went as good as it possibly could. When we got to see her she of course had her G-George and she was quite attached to a sippie cup of juice. They have these awful sleeves they can put on the children so they can not bend their elbows, but the nurse was able to figure out as long as Madison was occupied drinking that she would leave her eye alone. Then the drama began of having to do the awful eye drops every few hours. Talk about child abuse. We would have to sit on Madison, pry her eyes open and put the drops in. Instead of having to wear the patch all the time the Dr. gave us permission to let Madison wear sun glasses. We got a few interesting looks as we walk into church and our child is wearing sun glasses in the building.

The second surgery also went really well. I was shocked that Madison was willing to separate from us even after having the last surgery being so recent. While Madison was in the recovery room they had a music therapist go around to the different children and play her guitar and sing to them. It was very soothing and it helped Madison from being so agitated and trying to pull her IV out. A few months ago we had a guy come into Early Head Start to have a look around because it is such a new program. I overheard him talking about how his wife was part of the music therapy program that they were implementing at Primary Childrens. I was able to talk with the guy and tell him what an impact that had on our experience there. Although the circumstances were definitely not pleasant, I was very impressed with our experience with the Doctors and with the hospital!