Half Day

Today the girls had a half day of school. Avery was done at 9:45 am and Allie was done at 11:45 am. Once Allie got home we got our things together and headed over to Lackland.......

it was sunny out so we had to grab sunglasses before we left

Once we got there both girls new we were where Daddy worked. Allie thought I must be surprising them and that Daddy was going to be there. That would have been a good surprise. I let them down easily and said we'll have to have lunch with him the next time we were there (we were stopping at the BX food court for lunch). After lunch we headed over to the Bob Hope Performing Arts Center to see a Sesame Street performance. We saw a similar performance four years ago (when Allie was 2) at Scott AFB. It's put on by the USO. Allie thought she was too old for the show yet she wanted to get up there to shake their hands. The other two sat and watched and played with their new Elmo toys (the same ones we got four years ago).

3rd row seats!

After the show was over we went to the park on base. It's a huge park with lots of shade. The girls had a blast and Blake took about a 20 minute nap. When he woke up he was excited and ready to play too!

even though it was pretty shaded the smaller area for Blake's age wasn't as shaded as the rest at this time of day. And it was still really hot.

He wasn't quite as happy because he had shoes on. He's not use to them yet.

It was a fun, busy day. Hopefully they are exhausted enough that they will sleep in a little in the morning!!!!

Now this next picture is just from earlier in the week. We went outside to play with chalk. Blake was in heaven. It was pretty much the first time I've ever put him down on the ground outside.....besides the one time in Idaho when we realized the grass was razor blade sharp there. Allie practiced writing her spelling words for the week.

I also should mention the sweet moment between Blake and Avery while we were at the Sesame Street show. Blake was extremely tired. He only had about a 20 minute nap all day prior to the show. He wasn't to the point where he was whiny yet, but he was being very lovey. He and Avery have been getting to be good friends lately. He reached for her and put his arms around her and gave her a nice big, gentle hug.....and patted her back. Then he would look at her and babble something like he was telling her something really serious and then hug her again, pat her back and lay his head on hers. He did this 3 or 4 times before Avery had had enough. I think these two are going to be a lot alike in their personalities.

Just an Update

Not a lot of exciting stuff going on. The girls are enjoying school. Avery has surprised us and seems to love school and is opening up more and more each day. She's made a little friend, Mia. Mia LOVES Avery and gives her a hug after school every day.....and sometimes even a kiss, lol. Avery is itching for a playdate. She asked me if I knew where Mia lived and I said, "no but  I know that her Grandma & Grandpa live up the road from us somewhere.....I just don't know exactly where." Avery replied, " Just put it in the GPS and it will find it!"

I've been noticing that Allie might be a little dyslexic. I've always kind of wondered but thought it could be just a simple mistake since it was all still new to her. I'm not going to get too worried right now but if it continues I may need to look into what to do about it. She consistently writes her sixes as twos.....and quite often fives as 's'. She will get d's and b's mixed up a lot too. She also will write her 7's backwards. Any thoughts on what I can do to keep her from consistently doing this??

Blake is taking more and more steps. He gets so excited! He's such a cuddly, happy (mostly) little boy.

excited to be walking

found sissy's blankey while she was at school

for the most part she is full of energy from 5:50AM until she's in bed at 7:30PM. She still needs naps, in my opinion, but she just won't fall asleep most days. This particular day she fell asleep while she was playing!

he's not always happy. He loves his naps and does NOT like to be woken up from them. I almost always have to wake him up to go get Allie from the bus stop. He will let me know he's not happy.

Swollen

As I said in my last post, Avery woke up with her eyes extremely swollen on Blake's birthday. At first I wasn't sure if they were just swollen because she was exhausted with the first week of school or what. But the more I looked at how swollen they were I figured it had to be something else but wasn't sure what. I didn't know if I should take her to school or not. She demanded that she wanted to go and after her first day experience I didn't want to keep her away if she really wanted to go.......as long as it wasn't anything serious.

I decided to take her but stop by the nurses office first to see what she thought. As soon as I took her in everyone was just staring at her and gasping, "what's wrong!?!?!" The nurse said she didn't know what it was but that she couldn't stay at school and that she needed to see a doctor because it could be something contagious. I'm assuming she thought it could be pink eye but her eyes weren't red. Although I was noticing a small section of red bumps around the swollen area.

Since Blake had his one year check up and immunizations scheduled for 8:30 that morning I just brought Avery along and they had no problem squeezing her in after looking at her. I was really starting to think it was something really serious with everyone's reactions. Turns out no one is really sure what caused it but, more than likely, it was an allergic reaction to something. Just don't know what that something is. We tried to get her to take some steriod medicine while we were there but she would not open her mouth to take it. It was a huge pain. She was not cooperating at all. They were going to give her a shot of the steriods but in the end decided that she was probably acting the way she was b/c she had just gotten her booster shots a week prior and may have feared she was getting more, especially since she just saw Blake get his. They gave me some chewable tablets to have her take. And she wanted to take them as soon as we got out the door. I'm guessing the fear of shots was a big part of the problem too because she usually takes medicine really easily.

Later that day, once the swelling went down, I found two spots on her eyelid. It looked like little stingers or splinters that I was able to pull out so I'm wondering if it was a bite or sting of some kind????

She also had to pee in a cup. I forget why exactly but we just found out Tuesday that the results came back that she has a UTI so she is also taking antibiotics for that now.

These pictures were taken around lunch time.....a few hours after she took the steriod tablets. So, the swelling had already gone down quite a bit. I don't even know if you can really tell that they are very swollen in this picture but it was way worse than this.

Blake ~ One Year Milestones

Blake had his one year well baby visit last Thursday. I was a little distracted with everything because I took Avery to be seen as well because her eyes were extremely swollen that morning. I think he weighed in at 21 lbs, his height was around 29 inches, making his percentages come in at 50% & 25%, I think.

Milestones

• he will stand up in the middle of the room without holding on to anything. And will even take 2-3 steps on his own. He just gets really excited and starts laughing and then falls!
• his first real word (other than mama and dada) is CAR. It's sooooo cute when he says it. And he definitely knows what a car is.
• he loves for me to read him books and he will point at the pictures
• he has two favorite things to play with; cars.....any car will do, and balls.
• he has been shaking his head no for quite a while now but now he will also shake his head yes, really its more like a nod and it sounds like he's saying yes.
• he's pretty good with following directions. If I ask him to get his car, he'll get his car, etc.
• just recently started drinking whole milk. I was worried he wouldn't like it because he's been so used to drinking his formula warm, but he seems to love it! He drinks it from a straw cup.
• he's been eating pretty much everything we eat since about 8 months. When we have things that are harder to chew I still warm up a jar of baby food for him. For the most part he just wants to feed himself. We've tried giving him a spoon but he just throws it down and uses his hands so for now we're sticking with things that we can cut up and not stuff to eat with a spoon.....way too messy! So far there hasn't been anything that he really won't eat. He is still shoveling food into his mouth!
• he gets really shy around strangers, but at the same time, loves the attention
• he loves me! and I love him! sometimes he just wants to sit and cuddle with me and I love it. Our one on one times in the morning have been so much fun. He is always making me laugh. He really is such a goofball! He'll do something funny and then come and cuddle with me. It's funny how excited I get when he says a new word or does something new. It's been 3 years since I had a little one this age and it all feels so new and exciting again. The 2 year difference was exciting too but the extra year difference just makes it that much more exciting........hard to explain.
• recently found out he does NOT like shoes. I don't know if it's just shoes in general or that specific pair. Now that he's so close to walking we really need to find a pair that he will wear.
• really looks up to his sisters. He's always seemed pretty attached to Allie and now that he's getting some time alone with Avery he's starting to get attached to her too.
• he is an awesome sleeper. He goes to bed when the girls go to bed and wakes up when they wake up. His naps, although not as consistent now due to the back to school schedule, are still happening twice a day. He only gets 45 min to an hour in the morning before we have to go get Avery. And then he gets about 2 hours in the early afternoon before we get Allie from the bus stop.
• he's just an extremely happy, giggly, fun little boy!

he puts everything in his mouth. Drives me crazy! I'm pretty sure he has eaten a dead fly among other things before.

Houston, TX

We made the 4 hour trek to the Houston - Bay area over Labor Day weekend. The main purpose behind this was so we could get a weekend with Derek. It was a long drive for him (10ish hours) but saved him 4 hours by us meeting him there. It was also great timing because we were able to celebrate Blake & I's birthdays. We've been wanting to explore Houston and this was the perfect opportunity to do so.

The drive there wasn't much fun. I was tired and it rained.....hard.......for about half of the drive, plus we got stuck in crazy Texas traffic.. We timed it all pretty perfectly though with us getting to the hotel just 20 minutes or so before Derek got there.

We didn't really care what we did for the weekend we just wanted to celebrate birthdays and spend some fun, quality time with the family......and be as cheap as possible. ;) Being cheap made it easy to decide what we would do. 1) the Houston Zoo because military gets in free, 2) the Children's Museum because we get in free with our Witte Museum pass here in SA. Since we don't like crowds we figured the Museum would be less crowded on Sunday and since it's smaller that would probably be the best option for that day.

Of course things didn't work out as we had planned. The day we went to the zoo it started raining on us. Luckily we had been there for about 2 hours and were fine with calling it a day. And then the day we went to the museum ended up being free for EVERYONE. It was a Target sponsored event and so the place was packed and wasn't very enjoyable. It did seem like it was a nice museum though and we'd love to go back. It is ranked the #1 Children's Museum in the country by Parent Magazine. I have to say the zoo was really nice too, one of the cleanest we've been to.

The day we went to the museum we got delayed a bit. When we went to get in our car it had been invaded by ants!!!! I had just cleaned the car out so there wasn't any food or anything in it either. There were literally thousands of these buggers.........everywhere. We went and got ant traps but that wasn't working fast enough so we got some spray and sprayed the car like crazy before we went into the museum. It did kill a lot of them but definitely not all of them. The drive back home was miserable because I was paranoid of them crawling on me the entire time. No exaggerating, I killed about 50 of them on the drive home. Since we've been home I've only found 3 that have been moving and they are crawling around really slow. I did some research on these ants and they are called crazy ants and travel in large groups. They were probably seeking shelter due to the rain we had gotten the day before........and they had just been discovered in the Houston/Katy, TX area in July!

Despite all of our troubles we still had a good time and we're going back in October -- this time we're planning on spending most of our time down by the coast in Galveston though. Can't wait!

HOUSTON ZOO

our very own little monkeys

this little guy was not happy for the first half hour or so. we couldn't figure out why. Turns out he didn't like his shoes! It was the first time we had really put any on him.

CHILDREN'S MUSEUM

they built their own rockets and then got to launch them

OTHER RANDOM PICTURES

this kid LOVES tomatoes!!

 

Blake's First Birthday

We celebrated Blake's birthday over the course of a few days. Since we aren't close to family we didn't throw a big birthday bash.......and Derek was out of town so on his actual birthday we just went to Coldstone for some ice cream. I also took him to the store to spend his birthday money from GG & Great Grandpa. He got so excited when he saw this John Deere Mega Blocks vehicle it was so cute. It was pretty easy to decide what to get.....so much easier than the girls! He loves filling up the back of the truck and pushing it around. He even likes to try and put the blocks together. Of course he got a huge package from Mony & Papa but he opened that early and he loves his little take along cars/garage!

The big celebration happened in Houston, Texas. We decided to go on a little getaway for our birthdays and Derek made the 9-10 hour drive from Alabama to be there for the occasion.

He started out slow and neat........

.........and then he really dug in!

Not happy that we took his cake away.

okay, you can have just a little bit more.

HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY BLAKEY BOY!