New front door

We're starting to slowly get our house ready to be put up for sale next year. Today we had our front door replaced as part of that. Our sidelights are a weird size, smaller than they are made now, so it had to be a special order. The first time it was ordered, it came in backwards (the hinges were on the wrong side), so it had to be re-ordered. Finally it came in and was installed today. I really like it. It'll take a bit of getting used to, because there is no more screen door, and the doorknob is down lower than it used to be. I have to do some finishing work--filling in nail holes and painting--but it will look really nice once all that's done.

The house with a big hole in it after the old door was taken out. Bethany was really upset when she saw this. She thought the men "broke the house." She felt better when the new door was in place.

The new door after the workers were gone.

Yeah for gymnastics

Today Bethany and Meagan started a gymnastics class at a YMCA near us. I'd been looking for some sort of summer program to give the kids something to do, and something that involved some sort of exercise was even better. I thought about soccer--every time we see kids out playing soccer when we go to the park, it's all I can do to keep her off the field--but I don't think she's quite ready for anything that structured yet, especially considering how competitive some people around here get. I also thought about summer preschool, but I did want to get them up and moving, so I finally decided on the gymnastics. Based on what they did today, I think it was a great decision. They both had so much fun! Bethany loves running and jumping and hopping around, and she got to do all of that. They did some warm-ups, then went through an obstacle course where they jumped up on a huge pile of mats, then hopped through some hoops, did somersaults, rolled and crawled through a tunnel. They did that course a couple of times, then moved to a second course where there was a balance beam, bars to go hand-over-hand along, more hoops, and this bar where they hung from their hands while putting their feet on the bar at the same time for at least three seconds. Meagan had a hard time staying in the line and taking her turn--she just kept running from station to station, and not necessarily in the right order. The teachers were really patient with her, though.

The only bad part was at the end. They gave all the kids a stamp on their hands, which Bethany did NOT like at all. She immediately told me she wanted it off, and kept trying to rub it off. I ended up giving her a diaper wipe in the car, which she used to get it off. Also, on our way out, we passed by the swimming pool. It looks just like the pool I tried to have Bethany take swimming lessons in last year (or was it the year before that?) that ended so badly, so I didn't think she'd want to have anything to do with it. Both the kids kept asking to go swimming, though. They stared through the windows for a while before I got them moving again. The YMCA offers a discount on the gymnastics class if you sign your child up for swimming lessons at the same time. If they keep bugging me about going swimming, I might just try it out. I'll probably take Bethany to a real pool first, to see if she's okay with it before I try the lessons, though.

All in all, they had fun, and I think this will be good for them.

Sean's new skill

We must've worn Sean out today with all our going here and there (the AF Museum, several Goodwill stores and a bookstore). When we got home, I put him down on his back on this mat. The next thing I knew, he'd rolled over and gone to sleep. This is the first time he's rolled from his back to his front. It's not perfect, his left shoulder is still in the way, but he's essentially learned to roll over already, and he's only three months old!

Visiting the AF Museum

Nate's brother, Aaron, and his wife Joy came to visit us for the weekend, and we decided to go to the AF Museum. Bethany calls it the "airplane place". Until recently, she has loved visiting the planes outside the museum, but refused to go in. I think it's because the hangars inside are pretty dark, and she got scared. Whatever the reason, I wasn't expecting her to go inside this time either, but she went in with no problem and had a great time. Here were some of their favorites:


Meagan pointed this one out to me. She called it the "baby Dumbo plane."


This is kind of hard to see--it was so huge I had a hard time getting a good picture of it. It's a really long missile. Bethany took a look at it and decided it was a rocket.


Meagan was sure that this was a shark airplane. I told her the real name of the plane, a Tiger something or other (I can't remember anymore), and she said, "It's not a tiger airplane! It's a shark airplane!" Sometimes, there's just no arguing with a three-year-old.

Happy Father's Day

The kids had a lot of fun creating this shirt for Nate for Father's Day. Bethany's are the yellow hands, Meagan's are red, and since it would've been too hard to do Sean's hands, I did his feet in the blue. He had blue paint on his toenails for a couple of days. Since his feet were already painted up, I stamped them in his journal while I was at it.

Best doctor's appointment ever

I had the best doctor's appointment ever with Bethany today.

I managed to get us there early, so I wasn't stressed and running to get in the building which was a nice start. Then, before we went in, I told Bethany that we were there for her, and if she would let the doctor look and her and be good, then I would get her a treat afterward. A little bribery never hurt. I really didn't think it would help, though. She's had a phobia of doctors since she was nine months old and had pneumonia. She had x-rays and IVs and an oxygen mask and even got an ambulance ride. You'd think that she would be young enough that she wouldn't remember, but at her next check-up, she cried as soon as they tried to measure her head circumferance. But for whatever reason, when we got in, she was a perfect angel. She hopped up on the scale, stood over by the wall to have her height measured, and happily stuck out her arm for the blood pressure cuff. She started fussing once it tightened, but still, I was beyond shocked at how good she was. She was even really good for the doctor, and cooperated with her, too. The doctor (a resident) had a student with her. The student played with Bethany and Meagan, and colored with them on the paper that goes over the exam table, and basically kept them occupied while I talked to the doctor. It was really, really nice. Very low-stress for me, which is not normal when I take all the kids with me. After talking to the doctor for a while, she left with the student to go talk to the attending physician. While they were gone, Bethany looked at me and said, "How many doctors we need?"

The reason we were there was to screen her for Asperger's and/or ADHD. The doctor pretty much ruled out Asperger's (she's hitting all the milestones she should be hitting for her age) and gave a couple of questionaires to go home and fill out for the ADHD. One of them is for her old preschool teacher, so it'll take a few days to actually finish. Then I have to mail it back to a nurse who will look at it and call us back to set up a return appointment. Kinda complicated, but oh well.

Bethany asked me for a sucker for her treat for being good. I was so over-the-top happy with her, that she could've asked for something much bigger and I would've happily given it to her. We made a detour on the way home to get her treat, and she was perfectly content. I just hope this becomes a habit with her.

Return trip

We drove home today. It was a pretty good drive, in spite of the thirteen hours it took us to get home. The kids were quiet (thanks heavens for portable DVD players!), Sean only fussed twice, and not for very long.

We were out of pretty much everything, so I went grocery shopping after kids were in bed. It was 9:30 by the time I left, so I went to Walmart since I knew it was still open. It was very quiet—some of the aisles were dead quiet. It was great. The only bad thing was I got home at 11:00, and still had to get ready for bed and clean the cats’ litter box, so it’ll be quite late before I get in bed.

Staying in a farmhouse in New York

We've been in upstate New York for the past couple of days. We drove up to help Nate's mom get her house ready for sale. All of his siblings are here, too. Nate's been basically painting from breakfast to dinner for the past couple of days, while I've just been watching kids. The house is basically empty, so we (the entire extended family) rented a farmhouse to stay in. Before I got here, I thought that was just a term, not that they rented an honest-to-goodness farmhouse, but that's really what it is, complete with a huge barn and several other outbuildings. There's a huge hill in the back, which has been great for entertaining the kids. Keeping the kids occupied has been a chore, to say the least. There's Bethany (4 years), Meagan (3), and their cousins Simon (5), Jonah (3), Evelyn (5) and Brielle (4), plus the two babies Sean (2 months) and Clark (10 months). That's a lot of little kids with too much energy and lots of desire to be entertained. Of course they've watched a ton of TV, but even that will only get you so far. So we've come up with things for them to do outside, like playing with a soccer ball and sidewalk chalk. Someone gave them cups the other day to go catch butterflies. I kind of scoffed when I first saw it, but to my surprise, they actually caught some little moths with the cups. It's quickly become an obsession for the kids, but they never knew what to do with them after they'd caught them. Yesterday Bethany caught a pretty white one, and was just walking around with it stuck in two cups shoved together end-to-end. I needed to get out of the house anyway, so I took my kids to Toys-R-Us and we got a butterfly habitat to keep it in. The horrible thing was that Bethany opened her cups with the butterfly just as she got buckled in the car, and just before I got the habitat out of the package, and it flew away. She cried and cried for her white butterfly. I tried to tell her that we could catch another one, but that didn't really help. Oh well. I'm sure she'll get over it. In the meantime, we did get more butterflies, and she's been carrying the habitat around the house looking at the butterflies, and even asked to use my camera to take pictures of them. She actually got a couple of decent shots, too.


The farmhouse we stayed in. It was orginally built by the owner's great or great-great grandparents, or something like that. It's really old. Fun to stay in, but not to live in permanently. It's settled enough over time that most of the doors didn't really close anymore, and the floors creaked, etc. I'd love to build a new house with and old house's architecture, but I'll leave the originals to someone else.

One of the barns with the house. It was off limits, so I don't know what it was like inside, but we peeked through some of the windows and saw some really old cars stored there. On a side note, why are barns always painted red?


Bethany and her butterflies. Unfortunately, she squished them all trying to get them to go to the top of the habitat.


Bethany coloring with sidewalk chalk. You can see the blue "H" she drew over the top of the house. I think "H" is her favorite letter.

Meagan drew a spider with her sidewalk chalk.

Bethany and Simon trying to catch butterflies with their cups.

Bethany's first real drawing

Up until now, the only drawings I've seen Bethany do are just scribbles, with a few letters drawn in here and there (she likes to draw "H" and "X"). Then today she shows me this, a picture of an airplane she's drawn. I think she's been holding out on me!