Now A Family of *gulp* Six.

I had made a decision to be more cheery in my blog, as I felt I was getting weighed down with all the therapy & speech delay and whatnot. This lasted what, one post? And now here I am, blogging about a downer again. Usually I call my parents, and they rarely call me. This began in college, where I didn't want them calling and interrupting my very independent life, for goodness sakes, and they needed to be available on MY schedule and not the other way around. But I wasn't selfish, or anything. :) Anyway, it just has continued that way. So when my parents call ME, it can't be anything good. Unless we're trying to coordinate a Christmas gift, or something. So my mom calls me Monday night. My grandma (we'll call her Oma) has been admitted to the hospital for a probable perforated intestine (and emergency surgery). A quick glance at WebMD tells me that this is a hole in the intestine which allows the waste to spill out into the abdomen. And commonly caused by cance...

I never think that Christmas is the most wonderful time of year, although I've been known to occasionally break out into song while holiday shopping. No, the most wonderful time to me is FALL. Autumn. Today is a perfect Fall day. Crisp weather but the sun is out; the trees are in their blazing glory; we have pumpkins on our deck, ready to be carved; and we're in the downhill slide toward Halloween. LOVE it. Everyone is healthy in our house for once, and I'm thankful for that. Charlie is saying more & more words each day, although the random outsider wouldn't probably understand him. Roman plays hard during the week and is willing to be lazy on our weekends, which is nice too. We've been diligent in making sure our weekends are relatively travel-free, since both of us are working we need the downtime (and laundry-time!). We had neighbors over yesterday for dinner, and some friends coming next weekend to trick-or-treat with us. And since I have a teeny bit of fre...

Charlie did not show an attachment, like Roman did, to stuffed animals or blankets. In fact even when you give him a stuffed animal, while he knows to hug it and sometimes cuddles it in the crib, when it's out of sight it's out of mind. We figured he wasn't the personality type to get attached. We just weren't giving him the right things, apparently. There is a magic age around 18 months, I think, if you expose a child to something they can get really obsessed. For Roman it was the Thomas train set he got for Christmas at 18 months old. For Charlie, it's going to be Cars. Not just regular cars, although he likes them too. Cars as in Disney Cars, Lightning McQueen, Mater, etc. We have a whole collection of plastic McDonald's Cars given away when the movie came out a few years ago. We also have some metal ones given to Roman, and even some Duplo versions. There are two, especially, that Charlie must have within a few-foot radius of himself. That's metal Lightn...

Wednesday was like a mild episode of ER at our house. Earlier in the day we got a call that Charlie had a low-grade fever but no need to come get him; they'll keep an eye on it. I arrive to pick up Roman to discover he was stung by a bee at recess. Yes, in October. Charlie gets home all grumpy and as I change his diaper, I realize he may have hand-foot-&-mouth disease (that would explain the temp.). Then we unload Roman's backpack to find a sheet warning of a case of head lice in his classroom. Holy grossness, Batman! So at some point Roman was bent over the table with Doug looking for lice, I had Charlie bent backward in my lap trying to see in his mouth, and the whole thing would be comical if it wasn't so icky. But here we are, a couple days later, and Roman is back to normal health and Charlie is... well, getting better. He has taken to not eating much dinner and then waking around 10 or 11pm at night screaming his head off. But he won't eat then, either. So thi...

We made plans to go camping in Frankenmuth this weekend, hoping to hit Indian Summer weather. Either way, we would go out to dinner Friday and host my family at the campground on Saturday. Yeah. Well, I don't think we're going to have warm weather again, although you never know in Michigan. It ended up being rainy and in the 50s all weekend. Needless to say, we spent all of our time at my parents' hotel in the pools & didn't venture outside except to go back to the campground for bedtime! With a pool & arcade, though, even the smallest of children can be amused. Plus my brother & his family joined us for the day, so the cousins ran around and exhausted each other. We weren't sure what we would do back at the campground once we put the kids to bed, but it turns out we had one of the longest nights of sleep we've had in years. We just went to bed when they did! Roman amused us to no end, telling us tall tales about finding his first chest hair (at 6?!...