Axel sews his costume!

We did it! We found old sheets and used a couple of different pillow cases to make the top of Axel's Halloween costume. He plans on wearing his white baseball pants and using ace wraps from his knees to his feet to look like boots. I think it turned out quite well for two people who don't know much about sewing or making clothes. I think next time I will purchase a pattern of some type so that we can do an even better job. 

Our "Good Jedi"!

Our fall has been very mild so far this year. This week we finally have rain, but last week was sunny and beautiful. Last Friday Phoenix chose El Quito Park again. Now that Rubix is mobile I have to keep him involved in the playing. He lasts only 10 minutes or so on the blanket before he wants to wonder off and start consuming or teething on grass or tanbark. He is enjoying the swings and slide more and more. 

Here is Phoenix being silly swinging side ways. 

I have been extremely sleep deprived with trying to sleep train Rubix and spend more time with Keith. It never fails that the night I stay up to watch a movie Rubix has a rough night and I end up with not just broken sleep, but very little total sleep. I say this because I can't remember what day over the past week and a half that I took this picture. I absolutely love the picture, but for the life of me can't remember. 

On Saturday we went to Forest Hill Elementary Country Fair. It is just like the Pumpkin Walk at Marshall Lane that we plan on going to this Saturday. The only picture I managed to take was of Phoenix and her face painting. Axel met a baseball buddy, Cade, there. Cade goes to Forest Hill and thought it would be fun to have a play date with Axel there. As you can imagine I hardly saw him. They were running around to different games, up the big blow up slide and to the book fair. I think the book fair ended up being Axel's favorite part because he came home with Lego comic books and a new Mine Craft Book. Phoenix and I left early to put Rubix down for a nap. 

After nap time we headed over to Tyler and Cynthia's for dinner. The kids had fun playing with Jade and Zoe's toys. I unfortunately did not take anymore photos, but the girls are really cute now that they are almost 2.5 years old. They understand English, but mostly speak Chinese, so I couldn't understand anything they tried to say in English. They are very high energy still as you can see from the small jungle gym and home made slide they have in their living/play room. 

I wanted to show some videos of the 7 month old mobile Rubix. He is getting faster and faster every day. I find it amusing that he is doing the military crawl just like Axel. Phoenix never did the military crawl, but went straight to crawling. I am very curious if Rubix will pick up on regular crawling because he continues to explore rocking on his hands and knees and playing in the kneeling position. 

He loves to jump. Every time I hold him in the standing position he immediately jumps. He even tries to jump while in his exersaucer. Luckily, we have the johnny jumperoo now. He goes back and forth from sucking on his toys to jumping just like this video shows. 

I am having so much fun with these three amazing children. Keith and I feel so blessed to have them in our lives. The entire house is gearing up for our action packed Halloween weekend. We are especially excited that the Jolley's are joining us for the Pumpkin Walk! Can't wait to see all of the little munchkins in their costumes!

Rubix is 7 months old, Louis is 14 years old and Rubix gets hand foot mouth disease

What a week it has been! As I mentioned last week, Phoenix came down with a fever on Saturday. Well, on Monday she woke with a couple of dots on her toes. When we arrived at Day care we were informed that two children came down with hand foot mouth disease and then I realized that was exactly what Phoenix had. I convinced Angela to take the kids and to let me contact the doctor to see if she was still contagious. Unfortunately, the doctor said she was and we had to pull both kids out of daycare for the rest of the week. When I arrived at 11 am poor Phoenix was separated from the other kids. I felt bad for taking so long to get back to them, but it was difficult catching up on my work, seeing my patients who were already there and cancelling the rest of my schedule. 

It was nice that we were home for the week because Phoenix took some monster naps. On Tuesday she took a 4 hour nap and woke at 5pm.  It was just enough time to get Axel and to get to the pharmacy to pick up Axel's new medication for a rash/dermatitis that he has been dealing with for over a month.

Rubix finally came down with a mild fever on Wednesday. His rash appeared slowly over the next couple of days and he appears to be healing more quickly than Phoenix. Luckily, Daddy was able to take Wednesday off so I was able to go to work. Phoenix did not nap the rest of the week, but I was glad that she took long naps on Monday and Tuesday. 

On Friday we had dentist appointments. Phoenix was still a bit nervous. She let the dentist brush and floss her teeth, but I had to put the flouride on.

Axel charmed our dentist like always. His tooth is already coming forward filling the space of the tooth that he lost last week. It amazes me how the body makes accommodations like these!

Friday Axel was home from school because of a teacher development day. It happened to also be the first rain of the season. After playing in doors most of the morning, after our dentist appointment, the kids couldn't wait to get outside and play in the rain.

It wasn't enough rain to make puddles, but it was wet enough to make the surfaces very slippery with the layer of pollen underneath.

I love this picture of Axel and Phoenix. Axel was saying, "first" and Phoenix was saying "rain". I have a cute video but am too lazy to download it.

On Saturday Rubix turned 7 months old. He isn't crawling yet, but he does like to go on his hands and knees and rock back and forth. He is also starting the military crawl on his stomach. He doesn't get very far very quickly because he still reverts back to the super man position with his legs and hands in the air kicking back and forth like he is swimming. It is very cute, but he gets frustrated when he doesn't go anywhere.

I think he is the cutest thing. I love his innocent facial expressions. He is full of so much joy. It is such a blessing to have him in our lives. We have really been struggling with sleep for the past few weeks. His naps have been great since he has been home for a week, but his night wakings are still way to frequent for a 7 month old. After talking with the GI specialist we have taken him off of solids for a month. I will restart solids in 3 weeks and stick only with sweet potatoes for a minimum of  a week. If that goes well then I can consult the GI specialist to see if I can reintroduce squash and continue to follow the allergy diet. The Neocate cereal has rice starch in it. It seems very likely that Rubix is allergic to rice like Axel was. Besides Rubix becoming very constipated and not sleeping well at night he also broke out in a rash from Axel kissing him on the cheek after eating rice. Now that Rubix has been on only Neocate for almost a week his bowel movements are becoming more regular again and he seems to be less irritable. This has all been very difficult to assess because Rubix continues to work on cutting the two upper front teeth. The left upper appears to be ready to break through any moment. You can practically see the entire tooth just under the gums. From my experience he could still be weeks out! Patience is a virtue. The other complicating factor with sleep has been Rubix dealing with hand foot mouth disease. I go back and forth wirh letting him cry in the night to comforting him. I feel once I can rule out illness, teeth and tummy discomfort, I can then comfortably sleep train Rubix again. Or should I say, let him figure out how to sleep again, since he was the one that sleep trained himself.

On Thursday after school, Phoenix was ready to get out of the house and play. I decided to let her play on the play structure at Marshall Lane because most of the students were gone for the long weekend and any germs that Pheeny left should die by the time another child used the play structure. 

Both kids had a lot of fun getting their energy out before heading home at 5pm for dinner.

On Saturday we headed to the our local pumpkin patch that we tend to go to every year. You can see the nice rain clouds in the back round. It was actually kind of warm out with the sun beaming down on us during a break in the rain system. 

Axel friend, Alex met us at Queens Pumpkin Patch. The three kids went on a tractor ride together.

Parents got to go on for free so I joined the kiddos. My sweet Pheonix!

Daddy and Rubix watched from the picnic bench. My handsome husband and cute baby!

Because Rubix slept so much from being sick, my only chance to capture 7 month photos were at the pumpkin patch. He had a fun time exploring and playing with the hay.

He is just the cutest thing I have seen since my other two were babies! I love how he looks like an old man at the same time having the cutest baby cheeks.

We ended the pumpkin patch visit with our annual painting of pumpkins. After two hours of fun Rubix was ready for another nap and the kids were tired and hungry. They went for a bike ride while I put Rubix down for a nap and made dinner. Today has been busy with playing in the rain, sewing Axel's Halloween costume and Axel and Daddy hitting at the batting cages since the baseball game was rained out. We have 4 birthday party invites for next weekend. I am not sure if we are going to any. We will likely try to keep the weekend low key with Halloween, parent teacher conferences and a bunch of fun activities just around the corner!

Oh, I forgot to mention that Louis is 14 years old today! We took him out in the rain and Keith gave him a bath. I wanted to get a picture of the old man,but it was difficult with the rain coming down hard and me trying to make sure Rubix didn't get soaked. Daddy wants to make sure he gets some nice photos with Louis as we don't know how much longer he is going to be with us. It could be a couple more years, but you never know. Louis has out lived almost all of his off spring, so we will see! Hopefully I can get some pictures of them today or next weekend!

Axel Looses His First Tooth, Phoenix has Hand foot Mouth Disease

I thought it was really funny that the exact day that I wrote the last blog and said that I don't see Axel's bottom two teeth becoming loose anytime soon, his bottom right hand tooth becomes loose!

Here is a cute picture of the three kiddos Thursday after school. I thought it was funny that all three kids dressed in red without knowing the other was in red. We had a fun time playing at Marshall Lane before heading home. 

 When we got home I gave Axel a piece of pumpkin granola chocolate covered bark for eating all of his food for the entire day at school. This is something that we have been working on for some time now. We changed his food intake so that he had three equal sized portions for morning snack, lunch and afternoon snack in order to help Axel consume more calories throughout the day. We have also been sending him to school with a glass of Lactaid and a 5 oz serving of Neocate Jr.. Last Thursday was the first day that everything was consumed at school! So I thought it was funny when Axel came to me with a funny look on his face as he was chewing the delicious pumpkin, chocolate granola. I finally understood him once he had swallowed the very large amount of food in his mouth. He was so cute because he didn't like the funny feeling that had happened. I on the other hand was jumping up and down with excitement.

 As he understood exactly what was happening he became more and more excited himself.

The next day at school Axel did not eat ANY food the entire day. He didn't want to move his tooth or loose it at school. He slowly worked on his food for the day when we got home from school. He slowly ate dinner on the side of his mouth. I offered him another piece of pumpkin chocolate bark to help get the tooth looser. I tried everything in the book to convince him to make the tooth looser. Luckily, when daddy got home he convinced him to use a piece of floss. It took until 8:30 pm to get the tooth out, but with persistence the tooth came out. I was trying to figure out why the tooth had to come out so quickly and once Axel was in bed daddy told me that Axel hardly slept the night before because he was afraid the tooth was going to fall out in his sleep. Apparently he set up pillows to catch his tooth and made himself sleep face down propped up on pillows to make sure he didn't swallow it. 

 Good thing his first tooth came out on Friday October 7th at 8:30pm. The tooth fairy was very generous for his first tooth. He gave him a whopping $10 bill. You would think that Axel would be excited, but he wanted the money taken away and his tooth back! He said that he rather just get a dollar and his tooth and for the tooth fairy to come back and take the $10 bill. So the following night the tooth fairy brought back his tooth and replaced the 10 dollars with two, one dollar bills. I love how Axel decided that his tooth was more important for the sentimental value than the money. I was extremely proud of him for communicating his feelings.

 This past weekend I was at the Annual Physical Therapy conference held at Santa Clara Convention Center. The entire conference was about Movement. It was an exciting conference as Physical Therapy it trying to rename itself as doctoral clinicians that are the experts on diagnosing and treating movement dysfunctions. It is our goal to educate physicians and the public that we are the movements experts that are essential at improving, maintaining and preventing health costs from skyrocketing by helping people move more. Through movement and the correcting of movement dysfunction we can prevent diabetes, strokes, arthritis and basic athletic injuries. California hopes to be the leaders in this movement. I had the privilege of seeing Shirley Sahrmann, the founder of movement impairment syndromes, speak again. I have seen her over a dozen times and her lectures never get old. She is officially retired now that she is in her 80's but she continues to travel the world to educate others as well as continues to help write research articles and books. This is a picture of Cindy and I with Shirley. We took a similar photo 8 years ago in St. Louis at Washington University where she taught and lead the research team. I am amazed that out of the thousands if not millions of people she has met that she continues to remember me over the years. It is such an honor to be taught by the best!

 When I got home on Sunday I went outside with the kids. We were in a pollen storm that doesn't seem to be going away. Almost every day you can see thick green pollen, as pictured below, blowing through our neighborhood. We are hopeful of a rain that is predicted for later this week.

 On Saturday afternoon our neighbor had his 4 year birthday party in the park. Phoenix was whipped out. Here she is passed out on the couch. The only not funny thing about this picture is that she ended up having a 101 degree fever and what we discovered yesterday morning as hand foot mouth disease. I had to leave work to pick up Rubix and Phoenix from day care once our doctor confirmed Phoenix is still contagious. They will be home the entire week like two other kids at day care in order to prevent the other kiddos from catching it. Luckily, Rubix doesn't seem to have come down with it yet!

Rubix turns 7 months this Saturday! I will have a fun post all about him and hopefully cute pictures as we visit a pumpkin patch!

Teething? Family Fun night and more

 Last Friday night the YMCA had a family fun night with bounce houses for the kids, face paintings and fun games. Axel and Phoenix spent most of the time jumping in the bounce houses. I was with Phoenix and Rubix because she was in the 1 to 4 year old bounce house and Daddy was with Axel in the 4 to 10 year old bounce house.

Here is a cute picture of Rubix "holding" Pheeny's crown while she jumped. 

 The kids did stop to wait in line to get their faces painted. Axel is such a fun kid. He still loves to make people laugh. Phoenix was quietly and patiently waiting in line for her turn.

 Phoenix chose a purple flower and Axel chose.....

 a rainbow! He is so handsome!

 I had him take a photo showing off his 4 front bottom teeth. The first row is starting to separate. The second row is over half way in, but the front row is still holding on strong. There is no signs of them becoming loose anytime soon, although it is eminent over the next couple of months!

 Rubix is also teething. You can see the top two front teeth coming in. They have not broke through the gums yet, but I would imagine they will over the next few weeks. He has been very uncomfortable at night and we have had several rough nights over the past 10 days. It is funny how much Axel and Rubix suffer with cutting teeth. Phoenix was a lot tougher in the sense that she would make noise in the night, but she wouldn't scream for hours like her brothers. She was always able to put herself back to sleep. I hope after the first couple of teeth Rubix might get use to the pain and be able to sleep better. The waking 2-3 times per night and crying off and on for 1.5 hours at a time has not been fun to say the least!

The kids love the holidays. This weekend the kids asked when we would be decorating for Halloween. I said, "why not this weekend" to their surprise! They earned it and spent over 2 hours on Sunday making the house festive. 

After quiet time Axel had his friend Alexander over for a play date. The boys had fun building, doing art projects and eating home made granola bars. 

I have noticed how little I have been taking pictures of the kids. I have to get back into the habit. It should be easy with the holidays coming up. This weekend I am at the annual Physical Therapy Conference all weekend so Keith is solo again with the help of Nicole for a couple of hours each day. Luckily, I will be home at 6 pm to help with dinner and bed. Next weekend we plan on going to a pumpkin patch and making Axel's costume! Wish us luck with the sewing machine!!!!