A few weeks ago Ryan took the boys up to wind cave. They actually made it to the top. I was so proud of all of them!

Hiking

Stop by a wash for a pose

halfway point (where we turned around last time)

Made it!

Enjoying the cave

The view from the cave

And unrelated blackmail photos :-) taken the day after the hike.

Aren't they so cute?

Meet Jayke, the inquisitive little explorer

This man is so curious and helpful. He is wise beyond his years. He learns and remembers everything. His mind amazes me every day. He will do great things during his lifetime, I am sure of it. He is an incredible person. I am humbled to know that I am his mother.

Meet Kate, the little mother

Oh, how I love this sweet little woman! She is so beautiful and so compassionate! She is so perfect in every way! I am blessed to call her daughter!

This week has been absolutely heavenly!

We received a very generous donation over the weekend that allowed us to buy a yearly pass to the maricopa county parks. They offer several classes a week about various desert topics. For those of you who learned about scorpions from Jayke, this is where he learned his information. He just LOVES those classes! All of the park rangers are so impressed that Jayke knows so much about the desert already. (We studied the desert in homeschool last year and he still remembers most of it.) They all joke that Jayke will grow up to be a park ranger someday b/c he can spout off so much info about most desert topics.

So far during the week, we have been to one class about desert trees and how they adapt to the harsh desert environment, one nature walk looking for signs of animals and one toddler cruise where they learned about different desert animals and how to stay safe when you encounter them. They have a few shaded playgrounds throughout the park and the kids love to play in the perfect weather after we finish our daily classes. It has been so relaxing and the kids are so excited about learning information about the desert. I am even justifying all of it by using it as our science curriculum. They are learning information that is very similar to what I learned in elem school.

This morning we woke up and went on a hike on wind cave trail. We got about halfway up and everyone needed to use the bathroom, so we turned around. We still had incredible views at that point. 

(at our turn-around point, halfway up the mountain)

After we finished, Ryan and the older kids went to a model-size jet airshow (which was also in Usery Park). The kids had so much fun. They spent most of the day there.

(at the air show)

After they came home from the airshow, Ryan went to the demolition derby with his brother. Not just to watch, might I add, his brother is in it and Ryan was part of the crew. So while Ryan did that, I got the kids all ready for bed and we had a pajama party. They watched a movie and had root beer floats. They were in heaven!

After such a long and busy day, not a single one of the kids had a hard time falling asleep tonight!

Earlier this week, I have found the kids sneaking oreos out of the pantry. Kate only eats the filling and leaves the cookie part alone. She was trying to hide the fact that she had been sneaking them, so she left the cookie portion on the floor in the family room. Aimee found them and gobbled them up. When I found her, she looked up at me with a huge grin. I think she likes oreos. At least they could have waited until we introduced solids to her and ruled out any allergies!

(no one can eat an oreo and stay clean!)

Update for Oct until now

It has been a very busy month! I’ll try to keep it simple and just give a picture summary of our month.

The kids doing school in the reading corner while Aimee plays on the floor.

Boys making masks out of tortillas.

Jayke had a b-day party. He is now our big 7 year old!

Ethan and Kate playing in our front yard. We definitely need to mow soon!

The kids learning about the properties of matter with oobleck!

Getting ready for Halloween.

Sweet baby

Love the face (mess)

My little vampires

Trying to crawl

Her tongue is always out of her mouth.

Does he look like Ian?

Kate had a birthday. Happy 3 years!

The Hottest man alive!

Aimee crawled backwards under the couch.

She crawls backward a lot…

All her best traits. Her hair sticking up in the back (it never lays flat), the drool, and a silly face.

Jayke is such a good babysitter. He walked her through the bike trail until she fell asleep.

Aimee is crawling now and she had both of her bottom teeth pop through on her six month birthday. She is 20 pounds and still right about 26” long.

I can’t believe Kate is 3 years old now. She is almost the same size as Ethan. They weigh the same, but Kate is just a little bit shorter than him.

Ethan and Jayke both have a part in the primary program coming up on Sunday. They are excited.

Whatever you do, don't try this at home, or What was I thinking?

I decided that we are going to have more picnics around here, so I went out to buy lunchboxes. I thought they were too expensive, and didn't look that complicated, so I thought, 'Oh, I can just make some.' Ha. That was really funny. They are really worth every penny they charge for those stupid things! Maybe I should have been smart and actually got a pattern for them instead of just trying to eyeball everything. I have 2 almost done (meaning done enough- I don't know if I'll ever finish them) and I have 2-3 more to go. Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if my sewing machine actually worked. The tension is all messed up, and the feed dogs don't work anymore. They definitely move, but no matter what I sew, I always have to pull it through. And the little turny wheel on the right gets stuck all the time, so I have to give it a spin each time I start sewing. So you can imagine what I look like when I sew. I'm pushing the pedal, getting only the groaning sound, trying to spin the wheel and pull my fabric through at the same time. Not funny. I'm ready to buy an industrial sewing machine. I think I just sew too much for the machine that I have.

But, the kids really loved their picnic today in the green grass out back all by themselves. Food just tastes better when it comes in disposable packages (even if mom did just divide it into serving size containers). And I loved the quiet moments while they were away. Until...I heard rocks hitting the glass back door. I ran over to see what it was and the kids come to me saying it is raining rocks. I can hear someone weed-eating and see huge clouds of dust over the back fence. I quickly set Aimee down and ran with a chair to the fence and start acting like those stupid crazy ladies that yell at everyone for no reason at all, except there WAS a good reason and I felt good yelling at him. I was protecting my babies while they were playing in the safety (or what should be) of our own back yard. The guy looked at me kinda funny and said 'I can't control it, you see, we are working here' So I yelled back, 'then turn the other direction, you are hitting my kids with rocks!' He turned off his weed-eater and left. Poor guy, he was just doing his job and was attacked by a psychotic woman over the fence. Boy, did it feel GOOD!

I guess I can consider myself a REAL mom now that I yell at people that I don't even know just to protect my kids. :-)

Wow! What a crazy month it has been. My sister was diagnosed with malignant melanoma. She is only 23. She is expecting her first baby. I have spent countless hours researching cancer and the signs and risks. I have come across blog of people who have lost loved ones or are fighting for their life right now. I cried with them. I cried for my sister. I cried for me. I cried for my children. I cried for our parents. I cried for those dying. I cried for those having to live as widows. Needless to say, I cried a lot b/c my sister had cancer.

Then, last night we got an email from her saying that she did not have cancer. The lab had mixed up the samples. Someone else had cancer, not my sister. I had a flood of emotions at that point. I wrote this email to her this morning that describes it pretty well:

when I read this last night, I was livid. I was angry for all that you had to go through needlessly. Not knowing if you were going to be able to see your child grow to adulthood or possibly having to have some severe cancer treatment. Mad at the dr's office for screwing it up. Mad that you probably would have had another surgery and pretty heafty scarring needlessly, possibly a lymph node removed. I was mad that our whole family was worried so much about you and also about our sudden increase in cancer risk. I was mad that I had spent countless hours researching cancer and how to know when you should see a dr. Then I went to bed. Angry and a little relieved. Then I actually slept last night (which is rare with a baby). I dreamed. I was peaceful. I dreamed of being friends with people that I had previously disliked. I dreamed that I could see a different perspective. I dreamed that life was happy. That there is hope in life. I was happy. I woke up feeling peace. That suddenly turned to sorrow when I realized that b/c of your mole not being cancerous, that someone else's was. I was sorry for them. I cried for them. I hoped for them. I was saddened for their family and loved ones. I could do this b/c I have felt what it is like having a loved one with cancer. Not just any cancer, mind you, but the most deadly type of skin cancer. This experience has made me a better person. A little more aware of how fragile life can be. A little more aware that we are not invincible. A little more patient and loving. More open about my true feelings, not just the raging feelings of each moment. I'm sorry that you had a roller coaster of a month, but at least it is over and not just starting. Thank you for the lessons you have taught me.


I have always been the one to say that everything happens for a reason. There is a lesson to be learned in everything. Please, let us all live each day as if we will not see tomorrow. Let us love a little more. Let us show our love to others a little more often. Make someone happy today. Greet a stranger with a smile. Do a kind deed each day. Make this world a little happier. You never know if the person you meet at the grocery store is grieving the loss of a loved one or if the person who just rear-ended you on the street is on the way to the hospital to say good-bye for the last time to her husband (this really happened to someone I found on blogger).

Please also remember to do your cancer checks once a month. Get to know your body. Look for anything that is different. A sudden itchiness that won't go away. A new pain. A change in size or shape. An unexplained burning redness. Dimpling in the skin that is not the normal chunky dimples :-)  And for your moles: remember the ABCDE. Assymetry, borders, color, diameter, evolving. Basically if you know your body and suddenly it is different and there is no way to explain it (i.e. you were not injured running or bitten by an insect) then please go see your doctor. Cancer does not have to be a nasty word. Usually if you catch it early enough, your chances of survival are greatly increased or at least greatly prolonged. Don't ignore things just b/c you are afraid of hearing the word cancer. It is much easier to hear the words 'stage 1 cancer' than it is to hear the words 'stage 4 cancer'.

I am so thankful for all of you. I love all of you so much. Have a great day.

What a week!

We had a rough week. Everyone was (and is) sick. The house hasn't been cleaned in days. I barely had enough energy to cook dinner (and never early enough in the day to do my usual crock-pot dinners).

Thursday? had the promise of being a horrible day. Half of the kids were up before Ryan left for work (translated: they were up WAY too early). I was going on about 4-5 hours of sleep (remember I am sick, so I need MORE sleep, not less). I decided pretty early in the day that we needed play around and not do anything important or else I would go absolutely crazy.  So, I asked the kids to clean the family room while I packed a sack lunch for all of us. When we were all finished, I grabbed the stroller, a blanket, and a book and we headed off to the park. We set up 'camp' under the shade of a large tree, ate lunch, read some Magic Treehouse, and played with the toys. Aimee enjoyed laying out on the blanket! It was a nice cool day in the shade and had a very nice refreshing breeze. I think that was the day that was actually below 100 degrees. Ah, it must be getting closer to the beautiful Autumn weather! That was a good day.

Jayke had his first experience with a homework excuse. Yep, the neighbor's pool swallowed his homework. It really was funny. He was so proud of his work that he went to the back fence to tell his friend about it. She couldn't read it when he held it up, so he tried reading it to her. She couldn't hear him very well, so he decided to make a paper airplane out of it and fly it over to her. Needless to say, the airplane did not make it the 10-15 feet it needed to in order to make it over their pool fence. At least it did not land IN the pool. I checked over the fence and saw it, so I called the parents and asked if they could kindly send it back.

Ethan has been VERY sick. He always gets more sick than everyone else. He woke up Saturday early morning with a pretty good fever. He had already been sick for a week with no fever, so this was a warning sign for us. His cough was extra bad and his breathing was shallow and rapid. I called the nurseline with our insurance and she sent us to the ER. We waited there for 2 1/2 hours and still had not been triaged yet. The crazy thing is that there were 5 other people that came in after Ethan with the same symptoms and they had all been triaged, treated and released in that 2 1/2 hours. When I had finally had it waiting for them to triage him, I went to the front desk and told them we were leaving to go to urgent care. She started looking for his name on the list. She looked through two different pages several times to find his name and couldn't so she started to look higher up on the list (meaning he has been waiting for a LONG time) and finally found him. Arg! That made me even more mad. When Ryan took him to Good Night Pediatrics, they were in and out in just a few minutes. (He left the house at 9pm and he said he was home at 10:30.) Anyway, they did a chest x-ray and saw smears in his lungs and could hear the fluid in his lungs. So, he probably has the startings of pneumonia. Hopefully he will start getting better now that he has some steroids and antibiotics. Ethan is also learning how to read. He can sound out most 3 letter words. He is starting to notice print in the environment and tries to read things. He even asked me for his reading lesson earlier in the week. He loves learning!

Kate is acting her age and her gender. She is finally starting to potty train, but only b/c I changed the rewards to money. We had tried basically everything to make her go, but she would never do it willingly. She had this pathetic little walk that she would do on the way to the potty. She would shrug her shoulders forward, lean her head down, and take 1 inch steps, literally! When I told her to go she would say "I am going" in this annoying voice like teenagers do when they don't want to do something. It's a mix between a snotty, grumpy, and disgusted tone. You know that voice that is a tone lower than normal that the snotty teenage girls do? Yep that's the one. I wonder where she learned it from! So, I changed her incentive to include money. She now gets a penny for every time she goes on the potty. She is filling up her money container pretty quickly. I can't remember her having an accident in the past few days, although she did have some earlier this week. So, maybe this is finally the trick, (hopefully). BUT despite all the moodiness, she is a really sweet girl. She is always loving on everyone. She is always quick to remember to thank people. And is always trying to be a good mommy to her babies and her baby sister. She always asks me, "This what mommies do?" and tries to mimic what she has seen me do.

Aimee is so cute at this age. She is 4 1/2 mos now. She is a pro at rolling over (she did it the first time when she was 3 mos old, to the day). She is trying to crawl, but gets really frustrated with it. She gets her legs under her and can push, but her arms aren't strong enough to hold her whole body up yet, so she gets carpet burn on her little cheeks. She has successfully grown out of all her infant clothes and is now in the 12 month clothes. We are still squeezing her into a few of them, though. At her appointment a week ago, she weighed 17 1/2 lbs and was 26 inches long. Ryan calls her the michelin man because of all her rolls. Boy, are they cute! They are still small enough to be firm rolls, so there is no dimpling on her, just cuteness! She is smiling all the time now. She does the big, mouth-wide-open-like-I-am-eating smile, but she still has her simple curl-the-edge-of-my-lips courtesy smile for when she really doesn't want to smile.

Ryan is working so hard for us. He works 6 days a week, at least 8 hours each day. He is wore out every day! Poor guy. At least he gets to work along-side his friend for 3 days a week. He is looking for a good-paying full-time job, but has been unable to find one yet.

In my freetime, I am trying to learn how to quilt. I have done a few 'quilts' before, but they aren't really quilts in the sense that they can be family heirlooms. I want to learn how to make quilts like people in the 1600-1800's made them. I am starting with a paper piecing quilt, just to learn the basics of quilting w/o getting too overwhelmed with it. I am just using scraps of material from when I made the cloth diapers for the girls. It is turning out really cute, but it is also turning me into a cloth hoarder. I can't justify throwing any scrap of material bigger than 2"x2" away! I am also trying to re-fashion my wardrobe. So far, I have turned one of my preggo shirts into a skirt and am in the middle of turning one of ryan's old dress shirts into a peasant shirt for me. It's crazy how just one "new" outfit can make you feel so much better about your wardrobe, even if they aren't "new".

As a family, we went to watch the Mexican Brown Bats fly out of their 'cave' at sunset a week or two ago. I had always heard there was a bat colony that lived in Phx, but never knew where it was. I was under the impression that it was somewhere north of the valley in a cave. Nope. It is right across the street from the Biltmore and it is in a man-made tunnel. We got there right before sundown and found a place to sit. Right as the sun went down, the flying insects got really bad. They were all over the place. I think they liked my shampoo, but they were really everywhere. About 10 minutes after sunset, a few bats started flying out of the tunnel. Then, they started coming out in waves. There were tons of them! After a wave of bats came out, you could look at the horizon and see the bats against the sunset. It was really cool. You could see them flying around the neighborhoods, just above the treetops. After several hundred/thousand bats flew out, it started to smell really bad! I don't know if it was the bats that smelled or if it was the air they were pushing out, but it was bad! They kept coming out in waves for a good 1/2 hour before we finally decided to leave (they were still coming out). It was getting too dark to see them unless you were right next to the tunnel and Aimee was getting really fussy. I would guess that we saw several thousand bats come out. There was a lot more than I expected to see! The kids really enjoyed it and couldn't stop talking about how stinky it was!

We also had the opportunity to go to Usury Pass and have a class on scorpions. The park ranger did an hour presentation on them and we learned a lot of useful things about them. He had his pet scorpion, Harry, in a little habitat at the front of the room. Afterwards, he let the kids come to the front and look at Harry under a blacklight. After the class, everyone was supposed to go on a hike with blacklights to find scorpions in the desert. We were going to go, but Ryan was getting tired and Ethan was really sick, so we decided to go home instead of taking an hour-long hike after the kids' bedtime. We'll go with them next time Ranger B hosts the hike. Jayke really loved learning about scorpions.

The b-day boy!

Today is Ryan's 30th birthday. So far he has had a day full of no fun (okay, a little fun).

He rode bikes with the kids this morning for a while on our new bike track in the back yard. I 'finished' it just in time for them to ride. Basically, it's just a 10' wide area along our back fence for the designated bike area, so the rest of my yard doesn't get too packed from all the riding.(Yep, the pit is officially filled in. No more yummy thanksgiving turkeys until we can get another one dug.)

He got orange mango juice with his breakfast. (Normally we don't have OJ b/c of E.)

He put up new trim on our front door so we can hang a security screen door and actually enjoy the cool evenings with the front door open.

His dad stopped by for a few minutes while in the neighborhood.

He is at work right now. Yep, he had to work on his important day.

Hopefully they sang happy b-day to him at work (thanks to a phone call from me).

I know his parents are going to stop by tonight after work to give him his b-day present. Hopefully he likes it-I told them what to get for him.

Hopefully he will have a clean house to come home to. (That's his present from us.)

He said he wants caramel popcorn instead of cupcakes. I've never made it before.

Who knows what else might be up my sleeve- I guess it depends on how much energy I have today. I have lots of plans but not enough energy to do it all....

Ethan

This post is completely about Ethan. Wow, that may be a 1st.

We had his follow-up appt today. The results were very encouraging. There were still the obvious no-no's like eggs/peanuts/etc. There were some false positives (he eats them just fine, but tests came back showing positive). But, there were several where his levels had gone down to almost nothing. Of those we decided to try sweet potato, lettuce, and sunflower seeds. After we do those challenges, we will sit down and discuss which ones we will try next.

Some interesting numbers for anyone interested: on the skin prick, egg was the worst by far, but on the blood test, egg showed 4.68 (3 being a pretty severe allergy) and peanut showed over 100! It's amazing that the skin prick didn't show that kind of reaction compared to the egg. Green pea used to be over 4 last year and now it is below 1. Orange showed 1.62 and he just recently had a reaction to it, so we know he is still allergic, and yet soybean was 1.87 (so higher than the orange) and yet he eats it everyday just fine. Soy is an obvious false positive, even though he was allergic to it as a baby. Corn was 3.4 (so almost as high as the egg) and we have corn tortillas at least once a week without any problems-so another false positive. Tomato went down a fraction of a point, so that might explain why he can have very small amounts of it without a reaction. He has been able to eat 1 tsp or less just fine, but any more than that and he has a reaction. Cantaloupe is almost non-existent (0.15), but he reacts to it more b/c of the cross reaction with his ragweed allergy than the actual food itself. Any of the melons will do this-you have an allergic reaction to the food when you eat it b/c the receptor sites think it is ragweed, so all melons are pretty much out for us until he can start allergy shots in a few years.

E has to start using his albuterol more. The Dr. heard way too much wheezing today. (It probably has a lot to do with me digging in the yard yesterday. He wouldn't listen when I told him to stay away from the dust.) We have to do the breathing treatments for the next 2 days and if he still needs it after that, we have to go back to the pulmicort-yuck. He hated that stuff and I don't like giving him steroids all the time. He had total mood swings and anger issues when he was on it last year, so I hope it doesn't get to that point.

Other than that, he's doing great! Hooray for developing immune systems!