Blast from the past

Spending Thanksgiving with old friends was wonderful. Isn't it great how you can immediately pick up where you left off 5 years ago?

Yep, asking for a raise after this one...

It took me about 2 hours to notice, and only then it was because I couldn't figure out why there was hair all over the upstairs.
Sorry for the poor picture--but all of a sudden she looks like me!

Ellie didn't want to be left out of the hair chopping action, so we took a few inches off hers, too.


I figured as long as I had the scissors out and there was hair all over the bathroom, I might as well trim the little girls up as well.

Hope pics

I'm cleaning off my camera's flash card before Thanksgiving, and I found some good ones to show you! They're all out of order, but I'm sure you guys can figure that out :)
This is Miss Nancy working with Hope this week. Can you believe she's on her hands and knees? She did not like it. Otherwise, she's doing so well. Every week she makes noticeable progress, and her sitting up is getting so much better.







Isn't this a nice picture? If only I'd given her a haircut first...

When you're the fifth child, you have to put up with a lot of shenanigans.

Look who's sitting up! (kind of)

We have been doing PT with Hope for about a month now. I have to admit, I was not convinced that they knew anything I didn't, but it has been such a huge help! Two different women come, once a week each. Miss Kim works with Hope on fine motor skills, and Miss Nancy works more on gross motor stuff. Hope will now reach for a toy and grab it, with either hand. She's not putting them in her mouth yet, but that's what we're working on next.
And as for gross motor, look at this!
This was about 2 weeks ago--her first few days in the Bumbo. She gets tired quickly, and her body position isn't quite how Miss Nancy would like it (she's curled over a little too much in the bumbo, not have to use her back muscles), so we don't use it too much anymore.


This was last week, transitioning to the high chair. It turns out our high chair is ideally suited to her--it curves around her sides, giving her floppy arms the support they need. In the high chair, she can play with toys while having her arms supported by the tray. This gives her longer eye- and hand- interaction with the toys. If she drops one, she can still see it to pick it up. Getting her eyes involved is key--we want her to learn the connection between hands and eyes. In the high chair, she doesn't have to work so hard and sitting up, and can concentrate on hand movements with toys.


And here's sitting in a tripod position this weekend! This is so huge!! When we're working on posture, we give her toys that aren't quite to interactive so that she can concentrate on holding her back straight and head up.


Isn't she cute? I like these pictures because her eyes are straight. She really doesn't cross all that often--mostly when she's tired, and it seems, for the camera. But here you can see her looking at you!

Her weakest muscles are across her upper back and shoulders. She tires quickly lying on her back and holding toys in the air. Her neck is also very weak, and she hates tummy time. She will tolerate it for about a minute. My mission this week is to get her doing more tummy time, even if it's only for a moment at a time to try to build up some more of those muscles. The therapist and I also worked on carrying her facing out in the Moby wrap. While facing out is not ideal for most babies (it encourages a reverse curve in the back), Hope needs to strengthen those muscles. So we will be doing it for short spurts to encourage her to get her head up and off her chest, and to be looking around and compensating for my movements.

Her progress in the past months with the PT has been huge. It is a very good indicator for her future development. When we started PT, she was so wobbly that she couldn't grab a toy, and she couldn't really hold her head up without wobbling. Now she can do both those toys without wobbling. Just imagine what the next month will bring? Maybe rolling over, maybe sitting up all by herself!

Happy Halloween!

We got about 6 inches of snow. Our power was out for about 12 hours, which is much better than a lot of the people around us, some of whom still don't have power, including the hospital where Hope was supposed to have a head ultrasound today. We have a dead tree in our front yard, which survived earthquake and hurricane, to finally succumb to heavy snow. About 1/3 of the tree came down--one of the main branches. It feel into the yard and street, though, not getting close to our house. How God has sheltered us through natural disasters this year!

Stop the ride, please, I'd like to get off...

This past month has had a lot of changes for us. I know--it can't possibly be as many as we'd had this summer, but David and I often get to the end of a day asking each other, "How come this state makes me so tired?"

Carver is now in school full swing, after a week's delay due to flooding from Hurricane Irene. It has been a little bit of a rocky transition for him and for us. While the past two weeks have been a little better, we have spent a lot of time doing homework, working on things like formatting your paper to take the spelling test correctly, and learning how to follow basic directions on the vocab test. He does not have good handwriting, and that is meaning that he has to redo a lot of stuff and make corrections. He has been up till 10 many nights finishing up homework, which is making him pretty exhausted by the end of the week. I saw some victory today, though, when he wrote a postcard to a friend, and the finished product (without my help) was neat and mostly in complete sentences. Success! And, lucky for us, he LOVES school, and doesn't seem to notice that he's doing an insane amount of work. We're really hoping that as he continues to figure things out, the homework will let up a little bit.

David is loving his job. The students are great, and he's getting some really good chances to interact with them and push them on issues they haven't thought about. I think it's fair to say that he's becoming known as the guy who will talk about Biblical manhood and womanhood without apology. We got the chance to go spend a Saturday out in PA at a retreat center with about half of the student body, and he taught a breakout session titled, "Why We Hate True Community." I spent the day getting to know some of the girls, and getting really excited about spending time with them. I will be going into the city every 2-3 weeks to participate in their Bible studies, and can't wait to get started!

Thanks to dear friends, we were able to get a 'stay-cation' without our kids last weekend. We spent the weekend eating out and exploring the city. It was so, so relaxing, although much too short. From that weekend, I've got a few pictures of Hope, which are the only Hope pics I've got for you today (sorry!):


It really was fun--we basically spent 3 days pretending we were tourists who didn't live in the suburbs with 4 other kids. We got lots of comments about how cute our baby was, and we'd always walk away laughing about how they'd have been so disgusted if we'd been trooping around with all of our kids (which we have done several times, and are getting much better at).

Ellie turned 6, and I don't have a single picture from the entire day. We decided to go meet David in the city and get Chipotle, but due to traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel, the 45-minute trip in turned into a 2 1/2 hour bummer. Fortunately, Hope was asleep most of the time, so it wasn't nearly as stressful as it could've been, but we learned an important lesson about trying to go into the city in the evenings during the week.

I've been learning my way around Morristown Memorial, meeting different specialists. I took Hope to the neurologist last week, and came home with a glowing report. She was so upbeat, she didn't want to see us again for 6 months! How sweet is that? We will be going to have our 6-month checkup with the neurosurgeon this week. But I'll continue my Hope update in a minute. The other specialist we met was a pediatric ophthalmologist, who gave Rosie some glasses ("gasses" she says). Rose has been crossing her eyes for about 6 months now, but she was finally doing it consistently enough to take her in to the doctor. Sure enough, she's extremely far-sighted, and has earned herself a cute little pair of glasses. They're pretty thick, and make her eyes look bigger than they actually are, but other than that, they're really pretty cute. After a few days of easing her into them, she's now wearing them full-time and doing very well with them. She asks for them in the morning when she wakes up, and doesn't give us trouble after that.




And glasses makers are getting smart--we get one completely free replacement, no questions asked!

Hope continues to do very well. She is now lifting up her head when we put her on her tummy, and attempting to support herself with her arms. Through New Jersey's Early Intervention program, we are now seeing a physical therapist once a week and an occupational therapist once a week. I like both of the women very well, and am excited to see what forward progress we can make with her. We have learned, both through them and the neurologist, that a lot of her wobbly movements are due to the damage to her cerebellum. She has a lot of muscle weakness in her neck and upper back, which has contributed to her tendency to prefer turning her head to one side. This in turn has caused her skull to be slightly lopsided. When I go to the neurosurgeon this week, I'll be asking her about this, and a possible treatment is a helmet. Hope's a chunk--she now weight 18 lbs, 10 oz. I still carry her around a lot in the baby carrier, but I'm not sure how much longer my back's going to put up with that.

The biggest thing that continues to make us feel unsettled, though, is the fact that we do not yet have a permanent church home. We have been going to a church for the past two months, but we are viewing that as a trial period right now, and now sure if we'll stay there. Not to be rude, but I'm not asking for recommendations--but I would covet your prayers on this issue. We are really praying that God would show us where He wants us, and where He wants to use us. Funny how you only realize what you had when it's gone, right? If you live within any kind of commuting distance from ClearNote Church (there's one in Indy, too), go! Don't waste another precious moment! We are so very, very excited about going back at Christmastime for a wedding, and we're even looking into the possibility of me and the girls going a week early to the Christmas concert, and then to spend a week being refreshed by dear friends.

Hope Update: 5 months

Hope is 5 months old today! Can you believe it?

She had her first physical therapy evaluation on Monday. It went well, and I liked the women that I was working with. The people who do the evaluation are different from the actual PT who will work with Hope, but even the evaluator gave me a few ideas of things to do differently with her.

Hope is a couple months behind, which is about what we were expecting. She came in at the physical and cognitive level of a 2-3 month old. However, the therapist made a point of telling me that she thinks Hope's cognitive delays are due to her physical limitations, and will go away as soon as Hope gains better muscle strength and control. In the picture above, she is reaching for a toy, which she has just started doing in the past few days. Her movements are very jerky, which the therapist said is to be expected with damage to the cerebellum.
Hope loves people and faces. She is very expressive when you sit and talk to her. She's vocalizing, and will make noises with you. She loves Ellie, although she responds differently to Ellie than she does to me. I think she somehow knows that Ellie's a firecracker who might explode at any moment :)

While her neck control is getting better, it was by far her lowest scoring area on the evaluation. She's just starting to hold her head up when you hold her to your shoulder, and even then she's pretty wobbly.

While it is clear that she's seeing us and able to track, her eyes cross a fair amount. The therapist thought that this might just be due to muscle fatigue. She looks at something for a little while, and then after a bit, her head goes down and her eyes cross. Poor kid--she's tired!



One area where she's clearly excelling is eating and growing. She's a chunk, weighing in at 17 1/2 lbs. I love carrying my babies around, but she's so heavy and so floppy that we're starting to think about stroller options that will work for her. If you have a stroller that you love that would work for an infant (since she is still so floppy), but doesn't involve a snap-in car seat, let me know!

Hope is a super sweet baby. She is by far our easiest baby, which is the Lord's mercy to me! She is happy in her car seat, she loves a bouncer that I've been borrowing from Delene, and she's happy to sit in her baby seat and listen as I do school with the big girls. While we still don't know what the days ahead look like, we're so grateful to God for giving her to us!

Home Tour: The Dining Room

The dining room is still one of my works-in-progress. Things I love? The table. The rug. The huge windows. The chandelier. The picture rail.

Things that need some work? The pictures in the frames on the picture rail. Storage. And something to absorb sound.



You can see the trunk at one end of the dining room. It's housing pantry items that I can't fit into the pantry--mostly baking goods: sugar, flour, etc. I think I'll probably center it along that wall, in between the windows. Along the wall with the big window in the middle, I would like to put two of these on either side of the window. I think they would break up the wall, add a splash of color to a room that's very blue-and-gold, and provide some much-needed storage space for china, canned goods, and other misc. items. They would also give me a horizontal surface to put some decorative accents on. But, I've got to convince my husband first :) He's not sold on the red yet. And for sound-absorbtion, I'm going to add curtains at some point. I'm not sure when that'll happen: it's not really high on the priority list, both for decorating funds and my time. But I did find some fabric that I would love to use for curtains, if I get to them any time soon. This would make wonderfully graphic curtains and be a strong counterpart to the yellow walls.

Home Tour: The Kitchen

Here's the room I should've started with: the kitchen.

As you can see, the kitchen is beautiful. It has great brown tile which hides an abundance of dirt and kitchen debris, lovely stainless steel appliances, and beautiful cabinets. As far as functionality goes, it's great there too--it has a gas oven and range, which I LOVE, and big fridge, and even a teeny-tiny bathroom tucked in one corner (it's on the right-hand side of the last picture, next to the door out to the backyard). It was a little lacking in space, though, so we had to get creative to figure that out. As you can see, one of the cabinets is missing a door. It was one of those in-cabinet trash cans, which I abhor. They are disgusting. The grime on that thing was super thick, so thick that the drawer wouldn't open smoothly at all. So we pulled it out, cleaned up the cabinet door, and are still working on installing the hardware to put it back on. Doing that gained me an extra bottom cabinet, which helped, but we still needed more.

We decided to use on of my antique dresses as a DIY island in the middle of the kitchen. We bought $10 Ikea butcher-block cutting boards and put them up-side-down on the top of the dresser (with a layer of carpet non-skid stuff underneath) to add more counter space. I use the drawers for storage of spices and kitchen linens. But the back is the best part:

A couple of evenings with some chalkboard paint, and I've got a kitchen kid-distraction that they all love! The back of the dresser was painted a hideous pink, so it was not hard at all to start swiping away with primer and paint. And the kids LOVE it. And I'm super excited that I had the gray matter to come up with the idea :)

Here's the view looking down from the pass-through that leads to the living room. The step-stool is the same one that's up in the blue room (I have two), and it's the perfect size for kids to pull over and help with dinner prep.

The door in the back leads out to the backyard, and the pass-through to the dining room has been wonderful. I'm still working out the bugs of learning new appliances, but we're getting there. Today I was cooking grape jelly (from real grapes!) on the stove and home-made refried beans in the crockpot--both ideas from Delene :) I'm looking forward to making applesauce here in a month, hopefully finding some peaches for peach butter, and super-excited about Thanksgiving! We're hoping to rustle up some stray college students to fill our table up, and I'm guessing we won't have any trouble!