Lux et umbra vicissum…

I finally got Alexis to pedal her tricycle by herself if only for a few pedal strokes. 🙂 Wanna know how I did it? Well, the child has been begging to ride the silly thing in the street because she sees the other kids riding their bikes in the street fairly regularly. I’m not going to let her ride it in the street; it’s too low to the ground and drivers wouldn’t be able to see her very easily. But I told her that if she learned to pedal it by herself I would let her ride it across the street to the other sidewalk (with me by her side, of course). No sooner had I said that than she started trying to use the silly pedals. 🙂 She hasn’t quite figured out how to keep her feet straight so the metal pieces that attach the pedals to the wheel don’t hit her heels and knock her feet off, but she’ll get there. 🙂 I was just happy that she was starting to try.

Another cool toy that Alexis got for her birthday came from my grandmother (her Grandma Dolly). She got her an interactive book called “Exploring Time with Dora” starring, of course, Dora the Explorer. I’m really liking this book. It has a clock on it that allows her to move the hands, then a smaller digital clock beneath that that reports the time digitally that she’s set on the analog clock. A “Time” button reports that time aloud that has been set. The pages of the book go through different activities in Dora’s day and say what time they happen including a small picture of a clock with the appropriate time on each page. The buttons at the bottom correspond to the different pages, and you can set the big clock for the right time for a given activity, then hear if you got it right or not. Also, as with the Dora show from what I’ve been told, she sprinkles in a healthy dose of Spanish including saying each of the times in Spanish. It’s really neat and Alexis loves it. 🙂

Branwen’s waking up, so I’d better go. Time to start the whirlwind evening!

We’ve named Branwen’s teddy bear Geronimo because he jumps out of the crib so often.

Speaking of jumping out of bed, every once in a while Alexis has a terrible middle of the night. A few hours after going to sleep she’ll start fussing and crying, often pretty loudly. When we go in to try to help she doesn’t seem to be awake, but we can’t wake her up either. Generally, we spend a half hour or so trying to either wake her up or get her back into a restful sleep, and she spends that time in an odd sleep state crying and sometimes screaming (especially in response to various attempts at waking her up such as tickling). This happened again Saturday night and Joel brought it up in Sunday School the next morning. Our friend Stacey was there, and she spoke up and said it sounded like a night terror. Stacey is a physician’s assistant, so she generally knows what she’s talking about on medical matters. 🙂 Anyway, the fact that these episodes occur more often when Alexis is sick than at other times would support Stacey’s theory since night terrors (from what I’ve read) tend to happen more often if a person is overtired or stressed, both of which would be true when she’s sick. I’m going to call it a theory until I talk to our pediatrician about it. We’ll see him this Thursday for Alexis’ three year well check.

The girls both have colds again and so do I. The Lord was good and kept them well for a little over a month. That’s the longest Branwen has ever been well at a stretch. 🙂 Now we’re back to giving three to four breathing treatments a day to keep the coughing at bay, then giving various cold-relieving medicines plus setting up the humidifier at night. It’s a pain, but we’ve gotten pretty used to the routine.

We had fun on Saturday when my parents, my sister Bridgette, and her husband Kevin came to help us celebrate Alexis’ birthday. They came a day early since it would be harder to come on Sunday what with church and whatnot. Alexis got her first tricycle and she loves it. 🙂 She won’t use the pedals yet, but I’m trying to give her a little time on it each day so she can learn. It plays music, too (“Care Bears are coming to your town…”). I’m glad it’s an outdoor toy. 😛

Kevin will be off to Germany soon, so I think this was the only time the girls will get to see him before he leaves. Bridgette will be able to join him as soon as housing is worked out. The base info says it will only take zero to four weeks, but the letter they received said eight, so we’ll see, I guess. I hope for their sakes that he’ll get housing quickly. They were apart for a while already while he finished up training.

Time to go upstairs and finish getting the girls in bed. It’s late for them (9:15-ish as I type), but breathing treatments took a long time tonight with two meds instead of the normal one. Well, maybe they’ll sleep in tomorrow morning. Yeah… right. 🙂

Once again, I have other things I should be doing, but I wanted to at least follow up on that roofing story.

For a bit of background, I should mention that we’ve had a leak in our roof for about a year now. I started trying to get someone out to fix it the day after I noticed it, but due to several irritating factors (companies that said they’d come and didn’t show up, for instance), we weren’t able to get someone out to look at it for a couple of months after I noticed it. We finally got someone out to look at it and they told us that it looked like it was a ridge vent problem. They went up to fix it but told us that it would really be best if we could get a wider ridge vent. They tried to sell us on a new vent system, but between the cost of the system and the fact that we’d have to ok it with the HOA, we said we’d rather not do that if they could just fix the existing system. The subject was dropped and they nailed, caulked, and generally sealed our roof.

Only it didn’t work. The drip onto our master bathroom ceiling became a hole in the ceiling which dripped onto the floor. I lost track of how many times they came back to try again. They finally replaced the existing vent with the same type in case there was a small bend in it they weren’t seeing or something. It still leaked. By now they were working free of charge because it had been so long since the problem had started and they hadn’t been able to repair it.

We put in another call to them not long ago when one of the latest heavy rainstorms caused quite a flood in our bathroom. This time, Joel went up in the attic when it was leaking and borrowed my parents digital camera to take pictures of the leak… leaks, really. He found another one while he was up there. Anyway, we were able to show them the pictures of the vent and a nearby nailhead that seemed to be the leak point.

One of the guys came to check it out, and he told Joel that he was going to try to get us a deal on that new ridge vent system since he was pretty sure that would take care of the problem. He said he’d have some guys come out and get up on the roof soon to fix it up for us. Then we awaited a phone call.

I got a call yesterday morning from one of their front desk ladies who said that the roofers would be there in a couple of hours if that was ok. I had a chiropractic appointment, but since they wouldn’t need to get inside the house at all, I said that was fine. Of course, I was thinking they were taking care of that nailhead Joel had pointed out. The matter quickly left my mind in the hustle and bustle of trying to get an almost three year old and a one year old out the door and to the chiropractor’s office.

Joel goes to the chiropractor’s office with us, partly for an adjustment and partly to help me with crowd control. 🙂 Anyway, on our way back to his work to drop him off, he got a call on his cell phone. We’re out of minutes now (our plan rolls over in a couple of days) and the number was unfamiliar, so he didn’t answer it. When he checked his voicemail, it was a guy saying, “Hi. We just wanted to let you know we’re on our way to the house to install your new vent.” AAAAA!!! What? Install? Ack!

Then commenced a crazy hour or so. Joel ran in to work to call the company back, but the front desk lady didn’t know much about it. She tried to contact the guy who had put the order in, but couldn’t reach him. She said she’d keep trying, and Joel mentioned that it would also be good to try to catch the roofers before they started the job. Then he sat and waited for a call back.

I got home about a half hour later and saw a ladder being taken around to the back of our house by two guys I thought I recognized from our other roofing adventures over the past year. I opened the van door so the girls would be ok air-wise, and ran down the sidewalk to catch them. The discussion we had was very confusing since they hadn’t heard anything about a nailhead or about stopping what they were doing. All they knew was to install a new vent system. 😛 So much for communication!

From that point on, I was on the cell with Joel and talking to the roofer simultaneously. After much discussion between us (and including, at one point, another guy on the roofer’s cell phone), we finally decided that the roofers would just try to find the problem nail and would give us a chance to get the new system approved by the HOA. We thought about just having them put the new system up there and then having it approved after the fact; Joel tried to describe it to our HOA president over the phone and he said he thought it would be fine, but that was before we had a really good description of what it would look like ourselves. The HOA tends to be pretty picky, so we decided against doing that. It was nice to find out that cost wouldn’t be a factor since the roofing company is going to do it for free. 🙂

Anyway, now we have our paperwork together to send to the HOA and it should go in the mail tomorrow. I put a note on it explaining the situation, and hopefully they’ll give us a quick response since delaying could cause further damage to our house. 😛 We’ll see how fast they move, I guess, and whether they’re willing to approve a different type of ridge vent than any of the other houses has. I’m not getting my hopes up too far. 😛

I want to get to bed early, so I won’t go into my day (which included a charming interlude where roofers were going to perform a desirable yet unauthorized action upon my roof… more on that tomorrow, hopefully). I did want to post something brief, though, because Joel had a really good post earlier today that I wanted to link to. There was a guy who wrote an article – writes regular articles, actually – on MSNBC yesterday about Stem-Cell Research. The article really upset Joel, so he put together a well thought out response. You can find it here.

Honestly, the thing that bothered me the most about the guy’s article was that he classified everyone who disagreed with him as a whiner. When people write entire groups of people off that way, I tend to write them off in turn figuring they’re responding emotionally and not rationally to whatever issue they’re writing about. Anyway, if you get a chance, check out Joel’s post. It’s really quite good. 🙂

I don’t know which is sweeter, knowing that Branwen didn’t cry at all in the nursery today or knowing that we managed to accomplish everything with the ten 2 year olds we had in class. We got smart this time and didn’t bring them all to the table at the same time for craft. Instead, I showed it to them while they were eating snack, then while they were playing (after eating) I said, “Ok, who wants to make a trumpet?” (We were making little trumpet-like things out of toilet paper tubes and paper to go along with the story of Joshua and the battle of Jericho.) In typical 2 and 3 year old fashion, most of them didn’t want to just drop the toy they were playing with and run over, so we ended up only having to work with maybe three kids at a time. It worked out very well. Two of them didn’t end up making the trumpets because they didn’t feel like it, so I just made those ones so they’d have something to take home.

I’m glad Branwen seems to be getting over this phase of separation anxiety. I know better than to think it’ll be the last one, but hopefully we’ll have a bit of a break before the next one starts. It’s nice not to be paged for her or see her being walked around the halls. The nursery workers are good with her, so that helps.

Well, I should probably get going. I’m in charge of bringing dessert to our Bible Study tonight and I want to go figure out which ingredients I’ll need Joel to pick up on his way home.

It’s been a gray day.

I had a headache most of the day, and that didn’t help. The rain threatened, but it really only sprinkled ocassionally… just long enough to chase us inside before it stopped again.

The only real rain we had was inside. Twice. Both times from our supposedly potty trained daughter who hasn’t had an accident (except while asleep) in aeons. The first was in the living room right before dinner. We were playing and she got over-excited and didn’t want to stop to use the potty, apparently. It splattered a good bit as it landed, so I ended up cleaning a good-sized spot of carpet before going in to dinner. The second event occurred right before bath time. She said she had to pee and we told her to hurry and go upstairs since it was time for bath anyway. This has happened before and she’s always been fine. I guess she had waited too long for it to be fine this time. When I arrived on the scene, she was standing in the bathroom in a rather large puddle. The bathroom should have been an easier place to clean up, but she managed to get three – count them, THREE – bathmats in the process. It took me several minutes to get the bathmats up, soak up the pee, and lysol the floor (as well as a couple of things that had gotten splashed in the process). Funny, though, Alexis was very good for me while I bathed her tonight. Maybe she realized that it was not a good time to mess with Mommy.

My headache is gone, I’ve just printed out a list of possible Bible Studies for our Sunday School class, and it’s time to fold some laundry so I can get to bed. Sleep, glorious sleep…

*sigh*

Alexis seems to be an introvert. She generally likes to go off in a corner and play with a doll or read a book rather than interacting with any other kids that might be around. Not that she’s always that way… she does play with other kids sometimes and seems to enjoy herself. Actually, in general, she’d rather be around people than not; she just doesn’t always want to interact with them once they’re there. 😛

So, if you have an introverted child, which is more important: letting them be their introverted selves, or getting them plenty of socialization so they learn to play well with others, etc? Both things seem very important, so where’s the balance? So far the way I’ve handled it is by trying to give her plenty of situations where there are other kids, but not pushing her to play group games with them or anything. I get reports from Sunday School teachers and such that she does ocassionally play with one of the other little girls in class, but I rarely see it happen. The times I’ve substituted, she’s mostly been by herself. I don’t care if she doesn’t turn out to be a social butterfly, but I’d like her to be able to play with the other kids well, too. Maybe that’s silly. I don’t know. It just seems to me that now is when she’s starting to learn the basics of interacting with people, and even introverts have to do that from time to time.

Alexis has been on a kick lately where, when Joel or I will ask her to do something, she’ll give a very dramatic sigh and say in almost a drawl, “I don’t want to.” She’s learning that that’s not an appropriate or acceptable response. 😛

I let Branwen wash her hands at the sink for the first time today. I’ve always just washed them with a washcloth before because holding her up to the sink in our kitchen (the only sink on our main floor) is rather difficult, but she got her hands so dirty at the playground today that I thought it was a good time to start teaching her. I figured she’d love it since she likes splashing in the bathtub so much, but instead she looked at me very suspiciously when I held her up and tried to grab her hands to put them under the water. 🙂 Oh well. They got cleaned, anyway.

The girls got to help Joel open his birthday gifts yesterday, so they enjoyed that. They also enjoyed his ice cream cake. 🙂 Anyway, he got three gifts yesterday. My parents got him a new TV Guardian. We had one before and really liked how it worked. It filters out offensive language in movies (TV, too, though we don’t watch tv) and replaces the words with inoffensive subtitles. Some of the results are rather amusing, but we didn’t have to worry about the girls hearing something they shouldn’t from a video which was very nice. The one complaint I had about it was that it’s made pretty cheaply for being so expensive. Our old one finally had a connector or wire or something break and we couldn’t figure out how to fix it. 😛

Joel’s second gift was a t-shirt from me. His t-shirts are wearing out, so he had mentioned wanting some new ones. He likes the very clearly Christian print shirts, but the ones he has are from high school and, in a few cases, college. Anyway, he liked the one I picked out. 🙂

Joel’s third gift was a sterling silver poesy ring. When Joel was in college, he got into wearing sterling silver rings. He had one on his right ring finger that he got while dating another girl, and he always connected her with the thought of it. In a very romantic gesture, on the day or our wedding, Joel walked down to the side of the river that flowed near the church where we were getting married, and he threw the ring into the river. It was a sweet and meaningful thing to do, but ever since, he’s rather wanted to replace it with a different ring. He’s had trouble finding one he really liked, though. So we figured out his ring size, and I picked one out for him. I got the Latin version because I took 4 years of Latin in highschool and rather like it. 🙂 Besides, though the Hebrew version is cool (the whole original language factor), it looks like a design instead of words at first glance. The Latin version obviously has words on it. Anyway, I knew I had scored when Joel opened it and got tears in his eyes. 🙂

Anyway, I should go get the mail and read my Bible passage for the day. We’re hoping to go shoe shopping for the girls this evening and maybe eat out if I can find any good restaurant coupons. 🙂 Gotta rest up before having to drag two small children through the mall.

You should see my house. The party ended at 11:30 this morning, but I still haven’t gotten up the energy to actually straighten things up. I did manage to clean up food items so we won’t have any more ant trouble, but there are toys coating the living room floor. I can’t tell if there is a floor anymore. I’ll have to do something about that… eventually.

Mess aside, the party was fun. I kept it informal because, quite frankly, a three year old and one year old just don’t need a huge shindig. We invited over three ladies and their children. One was my friend Wendy who has a three year old (Emma) and a 10 week old (Reagan), one was my friend Julie who has a 2 1/2 year old (Abigail), and one was my friend Kelsey who has a 3 year old (Emma) and a 1 1/2 year old (Evan). I figured that gave Alexis three guests and Branwen two. 🙂 Unfortunately, Evan was sick, so I told Kelsey to drop her Emma off and we’d watch her so she could enjoy the party, too.

The kids seemed to have a good time even though I didn’t have moon bounces, planned games, or even party hats and balloons (both of which I would have kind-of liked to do, but I was trying to keep the budget down). I made brownies (actually, Joel made them last night while I took care of some cleaning) instead of a cake because I figured it might be easier for little hands and they’d all enjoy it. We did stick candles in them before they were cut and let everyone sing “Happy Birthday”. I let all of the little girls blow out the candles together. They seemed to like that. 🙂 I did little party favor bags, too, so they had something to take home.

I had told people not to bring gifts, but they brought them anyway. 🙂 Typical. Our friends are just too nice. 🙂 Alexis and Branwen both enjoyed opening their gifts. The biggest hit was an inexpensive toy cell phone that Wendy picked up for Alexis. The tea set she got for both of the girls was a big hit, too. The two Emmas and Alexis sat down and had a tea party at one point, and one of them insisted that they say grace first so they all sang the little song they learned in Sunday School. I wished I had my video camera out for that one!

Branwen had the most fun when I turned some music on and she could dance. 🙂 The excitement of the day seemed to wear her out, though. She ended up in my arms near the end of the party, just resting her head on my shoulder. Sweet girl.

Anyway, the party was a hit. When Kelsey came to pick up her daughter, Emma didn’t want to leave. 🙂 As much as I don’t like to see a 3 year old cry, it made me happy to know she’d had a good time. 🙂

Time to go to bed. Tomorrow is Joel’s birthday, so there will be more cake and gift opening then. Alexis is really looking forward to it. 🙂

Branwen’s been climbing up onto the windowseat recently. I found out fairly quickly that there was no real way to stop her from doing it, so I’ve concentrated on teaching her to sit on it instead of standing. That part has gone pretty well, though when she wants to push her boundaries she’ll stand up and smile at me, waiting until I actually get up from what I’m doing to sit down again. She’s a stinker.

Anyway, last night she climbed up there and must have sat right on the edge. I was dealing with post-dinner stuff, so I didn’t see exactly how it happened, but that’s my best guess. Next thing we knew, there was a thud and a baby scream, and there was Branwen on the floor next to her highchair with blood running down her chin. I grabbed her and had Joel get me some clean paint rags that I keep handy for just such incidents along with an ice cube, and it didn’t take too long to get the bleeding stopped. It looked terrible for a little bit because she was drooling as she cried and the drool was mixing with the blood from her split lip. I called my friend Stacey who’s a physician’s assistant and asked if there was anything I should do that I hadn’t done, and she told me the only concern was if it needed stitches. We determined that it didn’t, so we kept her home. Poor kid, her lip is a little swollen and is bruised all the way through.

Not only that, she’s fighting a nasty diaper rash that just won’t go away. I’m really thinking it’s yeast at this point, but we’re trying the method the nurse said to use to see if it goes away on its own. I’m changing her diaper fairly frequently, and every time I change it I use a warm wet washcloth (not wipes since the alcohol isn’t good for the rash) to wipe her off, then I leave her diaperless for 10 minutes (yes, she already pooped on the rug once), then put on Desitin since the zinc oxide is the best thing for it, then rediaper. Oh, and we’re doing a sitz bath a day. It’s a pain in the patookis, but hopefully it’ll help relieve her patookal pain. If it doesn’t show signs of improvement by tomorrow, I’m calling the doctor back and getting in to see him so we can get some yeast medicine if necessary.

I worked at Joy In the Morning this morning. It was a crazy time. We had 13 two year olds with me and one other lady. It wouldn’t have been too bad, but with the remnants of hurricane Jeanne giving us plenty of wet, we couldn’t go outside to play. That meant they were stuck with us inside for a little over 2 hours. Then, to make matters more interesting, the craft that was prepared for us was rather difficult for them to do and there were too many of them for us to easily help them all. They didn’t have much patience with us and some of the crafts ended up looking rather… well, weird. Alexis’ craft was one of them because I didn’t want to favor her by helping her first and ignoring the other kids. Actually hers really looked the worst. 😛 I got to her after her glue had dried so I couldn’t fix it like I did with some of the others. Anyway, besides being cooped up inside and having a difficult craft time, we had two cases of poop in the pants, any number of suddenly necessary potty breaks (some at the same time with one bathroom handy), and lots of cries of, “She’s not sharing!”, “She hit me!”, and, “I want my mommy!” All in all, I’d say I earned my pay today. Hopefully, next week will be sunny.

Time to go rest for a bit. I should be mopping, but I hurt my back picking kids up today and having one of them trying to hang off my neck as I was putting toys away. The mopping will have to wait. Maybe Joel can at least help me move furniture to do it after he gets home from work. That way I can still have it done before Alexis’ and Branwen’s birthday party/play tomorrow morning. If I still have any energy after that gathering is over, I’ll post about it.

What a rush! What a thrill! I bought four very pretty 4T dresses for Alexis today that cost me a total of $17!

Ok, so it’s sad that I’m getting thrills from such things, but when you’re pinching pennies you gotta take the thrills where you can get ’em. 🙂

They are very nice, anyway. One is a denim jumper, one a long-sleeve wool-ish dress with a checkered skirt and black top, one a light weight velvety type dress from Gap, and the last a very pretty blue velvety dress with pink roses and a pink satin tie-back. 🙂 I love consignment sales in nice communities. 🙂 And, thanks to Wendy, I actually got there early enough this morning to have my pick of the nicest clothes. 🙂

Gotta go. Time to give the girls their baths and get them to bed. Tomorrow Alexis will get to wear one of her new dresses. 🙂