Abbie’s 4 year check up

Abbie had her 4 year check up the same time Ben had his 18 month (at 19 months old).  They checked her out and said she was good to go.  She’s 43” tall (way above the 95%) and 40lbs (between 50-75%) and her vision is 20/40, which they say is normal right now.

We had Abbie take 2 weeks of swimming lessons for the first time in July.  She LOVED them, and I was so surprised at how quickly she picked up the basics.  We could barely get her to jump in to the pool to us prior to the lessons, and by the end of them, she was jumping in the pool by herself and swimming back to the side by herself.  It was impressive.  She can swim the width of our pool by herself now, but that’s mainly because she’s good at holding her breath for that long.  She is good at kicking, but her arms need a LOT of work and she forgets to use them half the time.  She’s learning how to roll over on to her back and float to catch her breath and then continue swimming and she might be able to do that once, unassisted, but then she gets too out of breath and too stiff, so you have to help her stabilize her float the second time.  Now she never wants to use her water wings in the pool and always wants to practice.  I wish our pool was a foot or to more shallow so she could touch in the shallow end.  She loves swimming though, so we’re excited about that.

Abbie is getting better at recognizing her letters and numbers and she’s learning the sounds of her letters.  With as well as she talks, I would have thought that she would be a lot further along with her reading and writing skills by now, but she’s getting there.  I’m hoping once she starts at the Montessori school, she’ll learn at a little quicker pace.  She’s smart enough to learn these things, she just doesn’t have the motivation, which I think is going to be our issue with her.  I think she’s better at wanting to learn when she’s at school, but at home, she usually wants nothing to do with us trying to teach her letters and numbers.  It’s a bit frustrating.

We’re working with Abbie on not being so jealous.  She is EXTREMELY jealous of Ben.  If Ben gets any sort of attention or toy or whatever, and she feels like she’s not getting equal attention or toys or whatever, she does her best to get the attention or toy.  Mark can spend the entire 3 hours Ben naps with Abbie, playing and swimming and doing whatever, and if Mark even looks at Ben when he wakes up, Abbie gets very jealous and tries to crawl all over Mark and divert his attention away from Ben.  It’s frustrating and annoying for us because we don’t exactly know how to remedy it and it’s a constant problem.  We’re hoping it’s just a phase that she’ll grow out of soon.  ??

Abbie overheard Mark talking to one of his friends last night, who is also a pilot.  After we got home, she said, “Daddy, I didn’t know your jet had TWO seats.  I thought it only had one.”  It’s amazing to us that she picks up on this kind of stuff.  She asked him a bunch of questions while he explained to her that it normally does have one seat but when new people learn to fly the jet, some of them have back seats so they don’t have to be in it by themselves, etc.  She understood that after he explained it to her.

This little girl keeps us on our toes, for sure.  She is constantly asking us for a little sister.  Constantly.  I told her she already has a little brother and she said, “Yeah, but I didn’t want a little brother.  I want a little sister.”  I’m not quite sure how to explain to her that you don’t exactly get to pick whether you have a little brother or a little sister…  She is VERY excited about her big sister getting here though and talks about her frequently.  Hopefully Emily will tide her over for a little while and take her mind off of wanting a little sister.

Benj at 19 months

I took both kids for their 18 month and 4 year doctors appointments in July 8th.  So Ben was a month late for his 18 month appointment, but oh well.  I really like his (their) new doctor, so that was reassuring.

Ben is 33” tall (between 50-75%) and he’s 25.5lbs (again between 50-75%).  So he’s pretty darn proportionate.  He STILL has that rash around his mouth that you can see in these pictures.  He’s had it for over a year now and he must just have acidic spit.  I know it’s caused by his paci that he uses when he sleeps (and ONLY when he sleeps) and even though I coat his mouth with Aquafor during naps and bedtime, he still has it.  It comes and goes and doesn’t seem to bother him much, unless he eats something spicy, so I’m fairly certain it’ll go away when he’s done with the paci.

They did the autism screening questionnaire this appointment and he doesn’t have any signs of that, which I wasn’t too worried about in the first place.  He’s a pretty happy and social little guy.  I was a little worried about his vocabulary since Abbie was talking a LOT more at this age, but the dr said that it’s typical for boys to not talk as much or as early as girls, and he is saying about 20 words so that’s good for him.  He’s also starting to try to repeat what we say more often so I’m sure pretty soon he’ll be taking off with his talking.

I told the dr about the murmurs they’d heard on the echocardiogram that he had when he was around 2 months old.  They had told us then that he had 2 very small holes, one that should close up by 6 months, and one that 30% of adults have.  So she listened very carefully and after a while she said that she still heard a slight murmur, which is interesting since the dr’s on base in Italy all said that they hadn’t heard one anymore.  She ordered a referral to a cardiologist here to get another echo done on him, just to make sure that it’s not a big deal.  Again, I’m not super worried about this since he’s growing and acting fine.  He doesn’t get winded, that I notice, when he runs around so I think he might just have that one that is common in adults, but it’ll be nice to know for sure what it is, and also to see how the American cardiologists differ from the Italian ones.

Ben is starting to gain more independence.  He’s wanting to try to do things by himself now, whether I want him to or not.  He can walk completely down our flights of stairs by himself now, which scares me, but he doesn’t want help at all.  He’s a bit wobbly, but he can get all the way down them without holding on to anything.  Pretty impressive.  He’s just started pushing the kitchen table chairs all over the place and then climbing on top of them and standing up.  Not my favorite activity of his for sure.  He’s learning more animal noises and likes to practice when we say “what does a ____ say?”.    He LOVES to be outside and to go for walks and bike rides.  He’s a lot of fun because even though he doesn’t say a ton of words, he knows exactly when you’re saying to him.  So if you ask him if he wants to go for a bike ride, he runs and gets his shoes and brings them to you and then runs to the garage door to go get on the bike.

The new discovery this month is that Ben LOVES the pool!  I think it’s warm enough for him now, so he loves to get in and paddle around in his little floaty.  I need to get him some of those UV swim shirts because I would feel better if he was a little more protected from the sun here.  If you click on the picture above where Mark is splashing, you can see that Ben is having a great time.  He’s such a little snuggly guy too!

 

Here’s a picture of Benj at 19 months and Abbie at 19 months.  I remember wondering if I would love Ben as much as I loved Abbie before I had him.  Seems so silly now.  I couldn’t imagine my life without this sweet little boy in it.  He makes me want to have 10 more just like him.

 

Adding to the family

Meet Emily, our soon to be daughter/ exchange student for 10-11 months.  Emily gets here in just over a month and we are SO excited to meet her in person!

I’m not quite sure where I got the idea to look in to hosting a foreign exchange student, but some time earlier this summer, the idea popped in to my head.  It probably has a lot to do with us missing the culture of living in Europe and if we can’t live over there and expose our kids to different cultures that way, the next best way is to bring different cultures to us!  So that’s what we’re doing.

Honestly, the whole time I was going through this process of applying to be a host family I was still on the fence about it.  My family hosted LOTS of people – kids, adults and everything in between – from all over the place (Japan, Russia, Germany, etc) when I was growing up, but they were always for shorter periods of time, usually a few days to maybe a few weeks.  Mark’s family hosted a high school student from Spain when he was 7 years old and we actually went and stayed with Mercedes in Madrid when we visited Spain in 2008.  So neither of us is new to the experience of hosting, but it is different when your parents are hosting versus you being the hosts.  Mark and I talked it over a few times, pretty casually, and we were interested in getting more info on it, but weren’t 100% convinced that we had the time and energy to devote to hosting a student.

I put a message out on FB to see if anyone had any experience with hosting a student and we got some good and positive feedback from that.  Everyone that responded had said that it was a great experience for them.  Mark was actually the one that was convinced first and thought we should do it.  We went through the application process of filing out a bunch of paperwork and giving references and then had to do an in-home interview with an Ayusa (the program we found Emily through) rep.  At this point I still wasn’t 100% convinced so I asked the rep a lot of questions to try to get a better handle on what we would be in for.  After the meeting with the rep we were approved and could start looking at student profiles and I think it was at that time that I really got excited about hosting. 

We looked through TONS of profiles for the students.  We knew we wanted a girl with similar interests to ours and originally we were thinking we wanted a girl from Germany since Mark speaks a little German and studied there for a year.  However, I looked at girl’s profiles from all over Western Europe, which is how I came across Emily.  One of my biggest reservations about hosting was having such an age difference between our kids and the student.  I wasn’t sure high schoolers would be okay with having two little ones as siblings, so when I saw in Emily’s profile that she loved kids and wants to teach little ones some day, I knew she would be a good fit.

So Emily is 16 years old and she’s from The Netherlands.  She loves to dance and ride horses, along with riding bikes and cooking.  She has a twin sister and Emily seems very social and energetic.  The people that interviewed her for the program said she is very friendly and happy.  She said she likes to talk, which is great, because so do I.  We have been emailing her for a few weeks now and every email we get just makes us more and more excited to meet her in person.

I’ve also been in contact with her mom, Ilse, a bit.  I am sad for her family, her mom especially, since I know exactly how I’d feel if I was saying goodbye to my own daughter for 11 months.  And it’s got to be extra scary for them since they really don’t know us at all and they’ve never been to AZ.  They have seen my blog and our FB pages, and I think those are a pretty good representation of who we are, but I still couldn’t imagine shipping my daughter to a foreign country for almost a year at 16 years old by herself.  So I am sad and nervous for Emily’s family but I’m so happy for them too, because I know we’ll take good care of her and do everything we can to make sure her time in the USA is as enjoyable as possible.  I’ve been busy getting our guest room turned in to Emily’s room by repainting it and refinishing furniture.  We bought a desk off of Craigslist that we are going to fix up and refinish for her and I think it’ll look great when it’s all said and done and I hope she’ll like it.

So in a month, we will be a family of five and we couldn’t be more excited about it!  Abbie keeps asking when her big sister is going to get here.  =)

Grant’s Farm with Grammy and Grampy

As usual, I am way behind in my blogging, so I am going to backdate this a little.

On our drive from my parents house in MO to the Chicago area, we decided to spend the night near St. Louis so we could take the kids to Grant’s Farm for a few hours before we drove the rest of the way.  I knew we didn’t have much time, only about 3 hours, but I figured it would be good to let them burn some energy before we stuck them in the car for another 4.5ish hours.

Grant’s Farm is owned by the Anheuser-Busch family, so it is home to quite a few of the Budweiser Clydesdales.  I love seeing those horses.  They are just so huge and majestic and I still remember my first encounter with Scotty, one of the Clydesdales at Grant’s Farm.  Abbie wanted to pet them, until one of them in the pasture showed a huge interest in her, and then she wasn’t too sure.  I think that picture of my dad holding Abbie up to the horse is my favorite one of the trip!

And for all of my “horsey friends”, you should have SEEN the mound of shavings in these stalls.  This picture doesn’t do it justice – that large pile in the middle was probably 3 feet higher than the rest of the sawdust in the stall!  Crazy!

Ben was completely fascinated with the school bus and had to go over and check it out and say “WOW!!!” a few times.  He’s such a boy.

After checking out the horses, we took a tram ride through the farm.  This is where president, Ulysses S Grant lived for a while and the cabin pictured below is the only remaining structure in the US that was built by a president prior to assuming office.  The whole farm is 281 acres and there are over 900 animals on it.  It was originally owned by Grant’s wife’s father, who gifted them a portion of the farm upon their marriage.

After the tram ride, we went to the “zoo” type area of the farm.  There is LOTS to do at Grant’s Farm, especially for the little ones.  Abbie and Ben both LOVED it and I wish we could have stayed longer, but I also wish Mark had been there to enjoy it with us.  We’ll have to go back with him some day.

My favorite part of the farm, and Abbie’s too, as the goats.  You could buy little bottles and feed all the goats in this little yard they had them in.  I thought Abbie might be afraid of them, but she wasn’t at all, and neither was Ben.  He just wandered around in there looking at all of them while Abbie had to go hug and kiss every single one of them.  I think she would have spent about 4 hours in there if we’d had the time.

In the black and white picture below, the goat was chewing on Abbie’s shorts, which she thought was pretty funny.

After seeing the horses, the tram ride, and spending a good 30 mins in with the goats, we didn’t have much time left so we quickly toured the old stables while my dad tried the free beer samples they give you in the courtyard.

Grant’s Farm was a lot of fun.  If you’re ever in the St. Louis area, I highly recommend checking it out, especially if you have little ones!  And the best part, it’s free!  There’s a $12 parking charge, but other than that, it’s free!