What's Up With Us

Hello friends! Here we are, middle of February! February is always a rough month for me. It's about now that I lose my patience with winter and start to feel really stir crazy. All I want is to be able to shove the kids out the door without having to go through the arduous process of snow pants, mittens, boots, hats and coats. God bless all of the teachers in schools and daycare that survive this process daily with armies of children in their care. They are a special kind of person.

Here are the most recent developments in our household.

Joe and I have decided to stay in this house another year. There are some potential plans in the works that have made us not want to buy a house yet or even move. It's small (but still bigger than our last place!), but it's been fine once I got everything cleaned up and had the handyman out here completing my to-do list (he still has some more in the spring!). The landlord is kind and the location can't be beat. Plus it will give Z a little more stability for a bit longer.

I've started babysitting for 18 month old twins one morning a week at their house. It's been fun and is working out really well. My boys love playing with them and everyone seems to be fans of the arrangement. I'm looking into getting back to teaching in the fall, but that's still dependent on a lot of factors, so I'm not sure what's going to happen there.

Z is making a lot of good progress lately, that I really need to spend more time thinking about than I do. As any parent can probably bear witness to, it can be a lot easier to notice all of the things your kid does to make you crazy than to really appreciate their strengths when you're fighting in the daily warfare of parent vs preschooler. I further confess that I'm hyper aware of Z's shortcomings because I'm in a constant state of worrying about his development, though I think I'm getting better about this. We've been having some struggles with his Speech Pathologist, which has added to this and been a pretty consistent source of frustration, but I'm hoping that we'll see some resolution with that soon.

Anyway, back to Z. He's making some really great steps. His Special Ed teacher that comes twice a week was commenting how much has changed since she started seeing him. He no longer needs breaks during their 45 minute session. He's effectively making requests and transitioning between activities with no issues. It's really exciting and he's met just about all of the goals on his IEP now. It's made me feel a lot more confident that he will be successful when he goes to school in the fall (success here being that he will be able to stay at school all day and participate with the class).

Bear is a whirlwind. He's so crazy and destructive while also being lighthearted and hilarious. He climbs everything, has taken to returning Z's attacks and launching some of his own (Lord, have mercy), and is a dancing fool. Right now his top dance tunes are "The Ants Go Marching" (Not DMB, the kid song) and Justin Timberlake's "I've Got This Feeling." He literally can NOT hear those songs without stopping whatever he's doing and starting to dance. It's hysterical. Bear's very verbal and has progressed to using sentences regularly, which is exciting and strange for us. He thinks Z is the coolest and often just follows him around with no other goal.

Bear loves going outside but isn't a huge fan of the snow, unlike Z who would I think would live in a snow fort if he had the option. Bear will tolerate the snow as long as it's not too deep (he gets stuck), isn't getting in his face at all, and he can shovel it around. Bear's favorite things right now are trucks, monster trucks, tractors, and fire trucks, as well as coloring and digging in sand or rice with his trucks. Z's favorite things right now are dinosaurs, Veggie Tales, and Cars cars. He loves watching Dinosaur Train and Veggie Tales for his TV time (Asa prefers Bob the Builder or a YouTube personality called Blippi) and spends a lot of time engaged in imaginary play with his dinosaurs or a smattering of random objects (two kid forks, a silicone trivet, a rubber/foam oval from a puzzle, and a glue stick) that he has designated as Veggie Tales characters.

I think that mostly sums it up for us. We've been really glad to get to visit with some of our Syracuse friends and I'm so thankful for the way modern technology makes communicating with people I love so easy. We love and miss our friends and family in Wisconsin! Until next time...