ENT update

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

This is the day Cooper is going in to get his tonsils and adnoids (however you spell that) taken out.

We went today to the new ENT. He said, without hesitation and with great certainty that this is exactly what needs to be done. I'm so glad that he is willing to do it. He said that they don't do this surgery on children under the age of 2, but since Cooper is over that and seems to be big enough and healthy enough that he thought it would go fine.

I'm so back and forth on the emotion of it all. I'm SOOOOOOO glad that it will be done and over with now and that he won't have to deal with those horrible things anymore. I can only imagine how uncomfortable he miust be, especially each time he gets sick. On the other hand I'm scared half to death. I'm so scared of him going under anesthesia, of his horrible, hard recovery period and something going wrong. I'm trying to remember that it's all planned out already and it's totally in God's hands, but it's so hard to trust.

So, if you remember us on the 23rd, please send up a prayer for my baby. Thanks.

Happy Birthday Kaelyn!

Today is Kaelyn's 7th birthday. Wow. When did I become the mother of a 7 year old (yeah, yeah, today - I know)! Crazy. Here is my birthday girl today with her parrot, Annie (who coincidentally has a birthday today LOL).

Kaelyn has become quite the young lady. She is usually so polite to people we meet and is still as boisturous and talkative as she always has been. She loves all things Star Wars, High School Musical, and movie oriented. I'm constantly amazed at how much she knows and how quickly she learns. She LOVES math. So much, in fact, that we have to save it for the end of the "school day" as a reward for doing all of her other school work. She is slowly but surely starting to read. I KNOW she can read more than she gives herself credit for. Mostly she lacks the confidence and motivation to just do it. So, we're trying to set aside some time that she has to sit and read books. She'll find the motivation somewhere. And once she's ready I'm sure she'll be reading up a storm. She is SO tall. People constantly think she is older than she is - Jeff and I do too sometimes. She still wants "long hair" but we are convinced that her hair will NOT grow past her shoulders. Considering we haven't significantly cut it since she was three I think we have a good argument that it will never be long. She is definately bordering between being a little girl and becoming a "tween". Sometimes she really wants to get down on the floor and play with some of Cooper's baby toys, but sometimes she wants nothing to do with them and thinks they are all boring. She still loves dressing up, building forts, and doing puzzles. She has also recently discovered board games and all things "crafty" which has led to some fun times while Cooper naps. It seems like just yesterday that she was Cooper's age and toddling around. Where does the time go?

One of the things we did for Kaelyn's birthday was to give her a "big girl room". Truthfully, it was time for Cooper to move into a bigger bed and we wanted to give him Kaelyn's old twin bed and move her into a double bed so when she has friends spend the night they have room to both sleep in her bed. So, after only 4 1/2 years in this house we painted over the plaid wall in her room.

Jeff did NOT like that we painted over this wall as it took us so long to paint it in the first place. But, in Kaelyn's words, "I'm not four years old anymore". She wanted a beach themed room. So we decided to paint two walls blue (water) and two walls tan (sand). Thankfully, we found a great comforter with both of those colors in it. We still have a few pictures to put up and a small shelf that will go over her closet to hold all her shells and beach whatnots. But I think you'll all agree that it looks a lot more grown up.


We moved Cooper into his twin bed too and suprisingly he has been doing pretty well going to sleep by himself at naptimes and bedtime. We'll see how it continues! Here's a picture of Coop in his new bed. :)

Do I have the cutest little boy on the planet or what? Ok, so he needs a haircut, but gosh he's awfully cute.

This week we cleaned out Kaelyn's room so that we can paint it - more details on that will be in another post. :-) While going through her room she found this Etch A Sketch and decided that maybe Cooper would like to play with it. Sure enough. He LOVES the thing. He must have played with it for an hour when we first gave it to him. I was lucky enough to get some very cute shots of him. I'm just loving this age. I love to see him learning new things every single day. What a joy. :-)

Inauguration Day

Ok - before I get to the subject of Inauguration Day I have to write this... this is a pictures of Cooper eating a corn dog.

What is so exciting about a 2 year old eating a corn dog? Well, nothing really. Except that he ate this entire corn dog AFTER eating a whole bowl of peaches, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a whole handful of goldfish. I'm SOOOO in for it when he is a teenager.

Anyway, Inauguration Day.... so I have to first of all admit that I didn't vote for Obama. There are a few moral issues that I have with him and his beliefs. But I'm not going to go into that right now. I've made the decision that since he IS our new president (well, he will be in about 4 days) that I'm accepting that and I'm going to be supportive of him. I'm going to be praying for him as he takes over this VERY hard role at a VERY scary time in our country's history. I've also recognized the significance of this particular president. I want my kids (well at least Kaelyn) remember this day. I want them to realize how important it is that we have crossed over into a new world because of Obama's election. We are going to celebrate this day simply because of it's significance. We may not support his stance on certain issues, but we DEFINATELY support our countries choice to elect an African American president. So, we will be watching the Inauguration. I've been talking to Kaelyn a lot in the past day or two about what this all means. I've given her just a very, very small glance into our country's history with racial issues and I've made sure that she knows how very important this inauguration is. Today after we talked more about it she announced that we needed to make hats to wear while we watch this event. So, we picked out our supplies and went to work. Here is the end result....

I hope that you are able to watch this with your children and talk with them about it. Talk about what you believe, talk about what your hopes and fears are for our country. I believe now is the time for my children to start to realize what a great country we live in and how their future is affected by what happens now.

Money Makeover

Today we had a meeting with a friend of ours (well, of mine) who is a mortgage broker. We've been wanting to refinance our adjustable rate mortgage to get into a fixed one and since the rates are pretty low we wanted to see if we might be able to swing it right now. The overall answer is that we really can't afford the monthly payments with the fixed right now.

Which led me to think about Dave Ramsey and his Money makeover strategies. I wondered if I could get the book from the library and read it to see if it is something that we could swing. As I was on the computer upstairs I thought to myself... "I seem to remember purchasing some book several years ago about money management. I wonder if I still have it?" So, I looked on the bookshelf and sure enough we had Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover book sitting right there! I picked up and thought I would glance at it tonight and knowing myself it would be put back on the shelf and nothing would be done. Well, I was totally wrong. I sat down at 4pm and started looking at it, got up around 5:30 to get dinner in the oven, sat down again after dinner and finished reading the ENTIRE book at 9 this evening. Needless to say I was completely engrossed in his strategies.

I'm sold. So.................................. I think over this next week I'm going to start working on our budget so we can get going on this thing!

So for those who know me in real life - start thinking I'm crazy (not that you don't already) because the next couple years are HOPEFULLY going to be insane, but in a good way!