My Family's Adventures

The boys had their doctor's appointments this week. Shirou will tell you a revisionist version of history and say that he did not cry during his flu shot. OK, Shirou.

James had his 18-month appointment and also got his shots. I spoke to the doctor about my concerns regarding James' lack of speech. The doctor said that it would probably not be very accurate to have a hearing test done at this age and that it is OK to wait a few more months to see how he comes along. James DOES point to or look at objects when you tell him to, and he CAN follow simple directions, so I know that he has some hearing and can comprehend.

However, it is not OK that he says NO WORDS. He doesn't even say Mama or Daddy. He will say some sounds if you prompt him, but he doesn't associate them on his own. I am kind of getting tired of people saying that I am overreacting and that I should stop comparing him to Shirou (I am wondering when I did this??) There are benchmarks that are considered "normal," and there is a difference between "not normal" and "below average." If it was a "below average" situation, fine. However, this is a "not normal" situation, which to me is serious. I have a bit of background in child development, and I know that if there is a minor hearing loss (or some other delay) that can be corrected now, it will prevent a PERMANENT loss of some aspect of his language. Some things can only be learned in this stage of life, and I don't want him to miss it because people think I'm overreacting. Something is not right. I'm his mom and that's how I know.

I am willing to wait a little while and try a few things with him to see if that brings about other results. The doctor suggested doing some rhyming games, and I am trying to "test" him when it's quiet in the room to see if he responds. I'm not going to wait very long before we get a formal screening, though.

Shirou is doing great! He has adjusted to his new school. We spent the day today searching for autumn leaves of different colors. He has a show-and-tell about Fall coming up, so we are going to make a book of the leaves he has found around our neighborhood. It was fun to collect the leaves together! James helped!

Current Mood: worried

I am planning to back-date to put in all of the milestones we have had with James and Shirou. Really!!

Highlights:
James can walk.
James does not speak.
Shirou speaks all the time.
Shirou starts pre-K next week.

Current Mood: okay

We have had a busy summer!

Dale has been adjusting to his new job. He is pretty overwhelmed, but I think that will get better with time. I guess the office is a little disorganized and he has a lot of procedures to learn. However, he is getting a lot of good experience and he gets along with the other men in the firm, so I think it will turn out to be very positive. Part of the job is to be a kind of office manager, too, so Dale will really have a lot to take away if he decides to start his own firm. My favorite part is the paycheck :-)

We have had the chance to go to Tammy and Phil's new house a few times! They have a pool, and Shirou loves to play in it because he gets to wear swimmies! He is not so sure about his swimming class and gets very nervous in the pool without the swimmies, but he was still able to move from Level A to Level B!

James also likes to go swimming. He wants to do whatever his brother is doing! He is an excellent copy cat.

I decided to quit Huntington. My motivation to keep working my behind off seriously waned when we got a second paycheck. Also, I wanted to spend some quality time with the boys before the school year and my Master's starts. Plus, I think the business is going down the toilet and I don't want to take hours from the teachers who really need the money. (We could still use the money but are not desperate for it anymore!)

Did I mention THANK YOU GOD for Dale's new job?!!

Current Mood: busy

Shirou has the BEST soccer coaches!.... his mom and dad! Yes, we got guilted into volunteering to be soccer coaches for the 3-4 year old summer league. Actually it will be fun! We have eleven kids on our team. Now that Dale has a new job, he was only able to be at the game today and will be leaving me alone with the kids for the rest of the season! Slacker! haha!

Today the season began with a practice session. We met all the members of our team and went over some of the rules. It wasn't as chaotic as I thought it would be! This is our only practice, though; for the rest of the summer we are playing games against the other teams!

Shirou really picked up on soccer right away. He seems to be having a blast! He was so excited to get his very own shin guards - it makes him feel like an official player!

GO MAROON TEAM!

Current Mood: cheerful

Praise the Lord! Dale got a job! (We won't celebrate too loudly because of the large number of his classmates that are still unemployed...) But we are still celebrating!

Shirou was at his swimming class, and Dale got a phone call from a place where he had had a second interview. It is a small firm downtown (in the Loop), and he was offered the job! Even more good news - the lawyer he will be replacing is not leaving until the end of June, so Dale will be able to shadow him for a while and learn the ropes. He starts on Monday!

Dale has already quit at Huntington, and I am planning to stay through the summer. My online class at DePaul has started (I got it free for having a student teacher), and my Master's cohort has been postponed until September due to numbers. So, end of summer will be a good time to leave Huntington. I am thankful that we will be able to quit that job! (I can't remember if I posted that I had been given the role of Lead Teacher there...)

Unfortunately, this means Dale will also have to quit at the Veterans' Rights Project. He is still working on getting a journal article published, and I think he will still try to do some work with them when he can, but it definitely needs to get put on the back burner for now.

Current Mood: ecstatic

James is starting Musikgarten! Shirou has been in the classes since he was 6 months old, and James has been tagging along for a while. Now he is in his own class!

James really loves bouncing and listening to music. He is so interested in the other little kids, sometimes getting right up in their faces to see what they are all about!

Shirou is now officially DONE at LaPetite. We will NOT be returning there. The straw that broke the camel's back was that he got his fingers slammed in a door last week (the nails are about to come off on 2 fingers) and no one called me. It happened about 30 minutes after he got there, so the poor kid went the rest of the morning with his fingers like that! I had been frustrated for other reasons, too - lack of communication (partly my fault because I never pick up/drop off due to having too many jobs), the communication I was receiving just stopped (newsletters, car notes, etc), I wasn't informed that Shirou was supposed to be the farmer in a recital (no, he did not tell me himself because he's FOUR), I didn't find out about the recital at all until just before it happened, my mom told me that when she goes to get him, frequently the "little" kids are mixed in his class and the teachers are just standing around... Anyway, my mom is a great babysitter and I was just tired of paying LaPetite to be a very expensive supplemental babysitter. He is going to Providence next year!

Current Mood: excited

We spent Mother's Day in the house this year. Well, I did anyway. I did NOT want to do any traveling, especially while remembering the terrible day we had last year in the Emergency Room. (Remember, we got hit by that big semi and our car got totaled?! It is also important to remember that it was NOT my fault in any way!)

One year later, we are just about to settle with the insurance company for the truck that hit us, so this will all be in the past soon. Thank goodness!

Current Mood: calm

James took his first steps today! We were all at Gaga and Papa Ruhl's house, and James decided he wanted to come over by his mom. He took several steps across the room to get to me! It was so great! He was very excited because we were all so excited to see him take those steps :-) A perfect Mother's Day gift.

Current Mood: bouncy

Shirou had his chest X-ray and obviously it was clear. He was very good for his X-ray and is now old enough to get it without being restrained. He was able to go to school on Thursday as usual. The bump on his arm has not yet gone away.

In other news, Baby James got a black eye, so both kids look pretty beat up!

Current Mood: relieved

This week was my Spring Break, so I tried to get a bunch of doctor's appointments in. The kids had their physicals on Friday, but Dale got a job interview at the last minute and was unable to take them. So, my mom took them, which was nice.

Unfortunately, she (and the doctor) forgot that he had had the BCG vaccine while we were in Japan. This is the vaccine against tuberculosis. Because it's a live vaccine, I was told that a TB skin test would likely come out positive for several years. WELL... they did a skin test because they had forgotten, so now I know what a positive skin test looks like!

Another unfortunately... this probably means he will not be allowed to go to school tomorrow until we get him in for a chest X-ray to confirm that he does not have TB.

Grumble grumble...

Current Mood: irritated

James is now ONE YEAR OLD!

Today we had a birthday party at Grandma and Grandpa Ruhl's house. Unfortunately, because Easter is tomorrow, a few people weren't able to come. We still had a great time, though!

The theme was PIRATES! I decorated a pirate ship-shaped cake, and James' smash cake was a treasure chest with M&Ms pouring out of it. James was uber-confused about why we were putting a cake with a flaming candle on it in front of him, but seemed to like it when we all started singing! He was sort of picking at the cake, and then Uncle Chris showed him how to really smash it. It was hilarious!

He also got several really cute presents. Then, we all taught Shirou how to play Parcheesi. He won!

Overall a very nice day!

James' milestones at age one year:
Crawls very well/fast!
Can go up AND down the stairs on his own
Can put objects in a cup
Manipulates shapes to fit in certain spaces
Pulls himself up to standing, and walks along if he can hold on to a surface (will be walking/standing independently any day now!)

Happy Birthday, James!

Current Mood: cheerful

Yeah... things have been busy!

Shirou is doing well. He likes to go around proclaiming that he is "almost 5." Haha! We went to Providence on Friday to see whether the pre-kindergarten program was something to continue exploring. I felt much better about that program than the one at his current location. So far, the final decision is that he will be leaving his current pre-school, but it is also very likely that he will go to Providence in the Fall. Today, Dale and I decided to pull him out of pre-school for the summer and instead enroll him in a wider variety of park district programs (art, music, T-ball, soccer, swimming, lunch bunch, etc.) This would also be a good transition to his new school.

James is getting so big! He's walking all along furniture, climbing stairs, etc. In the past 2 days, he has even stood on his own! If he's balanced and you let go of his hands, he can stand for several seconds. He'll be walking very soon, which is very sad for me to think about. My baby!!

James is also our little musician. He is so hilarious when he bops to the music. He also nods his head from side to side - too funny! He constantly has a drumstick in his hand so that he can clang on something. We will definitely be enrolling him in Musikgarten this summer!

What else.... my Master's program has been postponed until September rather than May. This means I will not get my raise (lane change) until like 3 months later. No worries, it's not like the extra money would be USEFUL around here or anything. Grumble. My student teacher started and she is turning out to be very good (yay!) and I get to take a free class at DePaul for hosting her, so I will do that and the APT test over the summer.

At work... praise Jesus that I did not get laid off! Unfortunately our district had to do some RIF-ing, but my job was saved. Competence is not always punished after all. At Huntington I was promoted to Lead Teacher. These are all good things.

Dale is still volunteering and looking for jobs. He has had interviews trickle in, so although things are moving at a slow pace for him, at least they are moving. He picks up a few hours at Huntington which helps tremendously. And, through his volunteer position, he is getting some good people their money, so he has some good karma on his side.

Current Mood: busy

Shirou is FOUR! It's pretty unbelievable. We had a party at our house yesterday. It was just a few people, and Shirou had several playmates for his remote-controlled cars. He was happy!

The party theme this year was "Cars." I decorated a regular sheet cake to look like a race track, and Shirou put some (new, clean) racecars on top. Plus, candles. Shirou really likes to be the helper with anything to do in the kitchen these days! He's learning how to do a lot of things!

James had no idea what was going on, but was wide-eyed the whole time. He had his check-up earlier this week. He is very small for his age (10th percentile) but is proportional, so it's not like he's malnourished or anything. He's just a lil guy. He also has 4 teeth now, and crawls up to me and bites me on the leg or arm when he wants to nurse.

Current Mood: grateful

Mmmm Hmmm another brag post.

James can get up several steps, but has not figured out that he can't back up so easily, so this is still a dangerous activity!

The very interesting thing about James is how well he mimics everything. Shirou got a racetrack for Christmas, and about 3 weeks ago, we noticed that James tries to put the cars in the slot where the race starts. Today he was copying the way Shirou played with his kung-fu dolls. I think we may have another little genius on our hands!

Shirou's sentences are getting better, and his list of words is getting longer. He is learning to spell the names of all the kids in his class. We started this after he wrote a few of them on a paper and then came up to ask me how to spell Maddy. Shirou also successfully spelled the word "variety" for his cousin Seth during our Nielsen Christmas event last weekend, so he can now get a job at Jimmy John's! LOL!

Current Mood: pleased

Today James has been out as long as he was inside cooking! Happy 9 months, James!

James can now pull himself up to standing. He did this for the first time on Wednesday! Since then, he has learned to pull himself up onto the landing of the stairs... better put up a baby gate over there! Luckily, Dale and Shirou lowered the crib mattress last weekend because he has been pulling himself up to standing in there, too!

That's all. We're all sick. Dale started volunteering. I'm procrastinating and so thought I'd come on here to update...

Current Mood: bouncy

James understands that when someone says "hi," he should wave! It's hilarious! He waves his whole arm and gets this huge silly grin on his face. ADORABLE!

Current Mood: giggly

Our latest adventure...

Dale woke up about 2am because the heat kept kicking on, which usually means we've had a wind tunnel in the garage which forces our kitchen door open, thereby letting in all kinds of cold air. So he went to check. Well, eventually he figured out that there was actually a hole in the ceiling of the garage, with TORRENTS of water coming down! There was about an inch of water on the garage floor!

After he came to get me, I went downstairs and grabbed a few things I wanted to salvage (a Christmas present being hidden for Shirou and a set of pictures I got when Grandpa Stawarz died - both in the line of water!)

Well, then we tried to wake up some neighbors. The people who live above the garage weren't answering their door or phone, and we also wanted to make sure our other neighbors weren't getting flooded. Since we couldn't get a hold of anyone to shut off the water, I called the police, who sent the fire department! (Yes, Shirou missed it that the biiiig red fire truck was parked out in front!)

Just before the fire department arrived, we got in touch with the people who live above us and they were able to shut off the water. The water stopped coming down a couple of minutes later. There is quite a lot of damage - a hole in the ceiling, boxes and rugs and other things that had to be thrown out, bubbles in the plaster/dry wall on one side of the garage, cracks in other parts of the ceiling where the water kind of ran along the pipe... THANKFULLY nothing in the main part of the house (that we can see anyway).

Anyway, the fireman said that a lot of people were calling with frozen pipes that had burst, which is what he guessed had happened. The plumber who came later in the day thought the same thing. We are now figuring out how we are going to fix it. It is becoming a rather frustrating process. My goals are these:

1) That it gets fixed properly and we can move our things back into the garage.
2) That I don't have to talk to any insurance companies. I am getting really tired of insurance companies!

Current Mood: annoyed

Today Shirou participated in his very first Sunday School Christmas program at church! He was a shepherd, and he did a great job! He stood in his spot just like he was supposed to, he sang the song and did all the motions just right, and wore a really cute costume. It was hilarious and precious to watch!

Afterwards we went to Nana's to exchange gifts with Tim and Amanda. They are going to be with her family in Wisconsin on Christmas Day, so we spent today together instead. James got to open his first Christmas gifts :-) He was somewhat interested in the wrapping paper, but of course he doesn't really understand what was going on.

Overall a good day, though very very very cold! I had to hack through a snow drift in our driveway to even get out this morning, and the wind was sooooo bitterly cold! We had to stop for gas, and we decided it was worth paying a few cents extra to go to a station on the side of the street so that the building would block the wind!

Current Mood: chipper

James has come a long way on the purposeful forward movement! It's still a very erratic crawl, but he definitely gets where he wants to be! He is also repeating more sounds, although he still hasn't associated them with anyone/thing in particular. It's pretty hilarious to listen to him repeat some babble and then start whispering it to himself. Plus, he's always smiling about something! He's a funny little kid!

James is also growing quite fast, and I can't keep up with the nursing, but he refuses to take formula. I'm going to have to get some soy formula (that's what Shirou drank) and see if that works. Kind of an expensive experiment, though...

Shirou will perform in his first Christmas program tomorrow. He just got back from dress rehearsal. It should be adorable! He is a shepherd, and they are singing "Away in a Manger." I have to remember to double check the video camera tape and batteries!

Preschool also had a Santa visit, so Shirou sat on his lap. James also got a turn, but didn't seem to care for it. Apparently he wailed! Shirou suddenly started asking for a trumpet because Bob the Builder got on in one of the movies Shirou has. I wrote some suggestions for Santa on Shirou's letter...

Shirou and I had our dental check-ups! Twenty-nine years with NO cavities for me! Shirou also had no cavities, AND he let the hygienist take Xrays and do the fluoride treatment! What a big boy!

Dale had some work this week. He is doing some consulting work on a federal bill related to veterans' health benefits. So far it's volunteer, but we have hopes it will lead to future opportunities. He also is starting at Huntington to help keep busy in the meantime. Dale really needs to get out of the house and use his brain... the kids are starting to make him crazy!

Current Mood: energetic

So... I have been thinking about my Master's degree for quite some time. A couple of weeks ago, I saw an ad that a nearby university was starting up a cohort in New Lenox. It is for Reading Specialist Type 10 certification, which is what I'd decided to pursue. It seemed like the fates aligned, so I signed up! I start in May!

(I have also calculated that this is a pay raise in addition to my regular yearly raise every year for the next 3 years as I move along the steps on the salary schedule!)

Current Mood: productive