After we arrived back home in Texas, we were more than thrilled to have a week of Jonathan still being off from work and school to get settled back in, and adjust back into our daily routine! Sometimes a slow-paced, non-overly-packed and scheduled routine can bring some of the best opportunities for joy, learning and growth together! We were so glad for lots of fun moments and memories together!
Here is little mustached Joshua, (compliments to Mom and Terry hehe...for Christmas) getting ready to help us take on Homeschooling again! We love this little guy, even looking so professor-like and officially spiffy! hehe =D
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Joshua started smiling big wide open grins in response to high pitched "hiii"s and "helloo Joshy baby"s :) He is an adorable baby with such an asy-going, content, peaceful and happy personality! What a perfect and needful addition to our energetic, spirited and incredibly lively bunch! =D
Here is Joshua at 3 months old!
To show you how peaceful and easy a baby he is, this was taken one morning when I was making waffles for breakfast with the older kiddos and before I could even get over there to get little Joshy and put him down for his morning nap, I found he had just eased his own way into his little nap. What a tender little piece of heaven :). We sure love him awake and asleep. :)
Nathan and Gracie love riding their bikes through the neighborhood while Katelyn goes to her music class! Super fun for these middle two little partners in fun! :)
She picked up the trike all on her own and has a ball of a time crusin' around!! Look at that precious smile! Just love her!
We had been talking for a long while on how to improve this one wall in our family room in our home....since it happens to be the largest wall in the entire house, and for so long, only had the tv up against it. So, to give it some more character, depth, meaning and to take all the attention away from the tv, (which we hardly ever watch, except on family movie nights and once or twice a week for learning shows as an incentive for homeschool work---but Jonathan loves having it nice so we can get some nice quality movie nights...hehe), he took on this big project...and whipped out this amazing bookshelf center to fill up our wall and allow us to display meaningful items for our family!! What an intense project, but he decided to make the most of his last week off before school started again...and completed it all start to finish from scratch!! I was so amazed and so proud! It was a nice outlet for him too to go out and work on it during his lunch breaks and to break up his nights of studying! Great work honey!
Katelyn's beautiful patterned block tower creation! Very nice!
Another fun highlight of January was that I received an email from the local aquarium we used to have passes to, and learned that they were having a contest for children ages 6-12 with a question on "how can you help the environment in your neighborhood and at home?" I brought the idea to Katelyn and she wanted to do it. The rewards for being selected as one of the 12 finalists would be a year family membership to the aquarium, behind-the-scenes passes, being able ot participate in local lake cleanup service projects with the aquarium youth group and more! So with a little discussion help, miss Katelyn got right to work! She decided she could help the environment at home by re-using coloring pages to save paper and reduce the number of trees cut down to make it, and in the neighborhood, she said she could remind her mom to use fabric grocery bags when we go shopping! Awesome ideas huh! This is the drawing she came up with, to go with a cute little video about it.... and much to our excited and joyful surprise, she was a finalist! woo hoo! Yay Katelyn!!
We went to the doctor to see an x-ray of miss Katelyn's arm while still in her cast, and thankfully all the healing seemed to have been going nicely! What a blessing it wasn't refractured with all of the rough wrestling and running into the couches, etc. with Nathan!
We went shopping for some organizing storage baskets and Katelyn loved this turquoise dress on the rack, so we had to take a picture to see just how beautiful it was on her! :)
A sweet young woman in our ward wanted to do some service for one of her Young Woman value projects, and offered to come spend time at our house organizing our kitchen cupboards and toys! The kids had a blast with her coming over and working on organizing projects with her! So fun- builder girl Katelyn, Ninjago boy Nathan and polka-dot dress Gracie! :)
That week we had well check visits with our doctor, but it turns out our kiddos were actually more sick than well. Nathan ended up having anal strep, and Gracie was positive for strep in her mouth. :( When I thought things wouldn't get much worse, they did. :( That night, poor little Joshua came down with a pretty deep cough....by the end of the week after trying all sorts of natural remedies, diffusing essential oils, trying a garlic paste rub, and foot zoning him, we still couldn't get him over his insistent deep cough, and so we ended up taking him to an InstaCare to have him tested and x-rayed to find that he was positive for RSV. Ahhh our poor sweet little baby. We spent lots of sleepless nights, or nights when he would only sleep in my arms, barely eating a few small little bursts of meals throughout the day....He was so lethargic, miserable and helpless. We were praying so hard and hoping that he could recover soon. We had Jonathan and uncle Austin give him a Priesthood blessing, wherein we learned that the doctors would be able to tell us and find if anything was wrong, and so that's when it was confirmed to me that we probably needed to take him in just to have him checked. Thankfully, we did andjust so happened to catch him in one of his coughing spells and so they gave him an x-ray, breathing steroids, and breathing treatments to help him calm down and breathe again. It was so heart-wrenching to see him in such a helpless and miserable state...the only thing that would help would be for him to nurse with me, or if that didn't work I would just hold him and walk around with him, sometimes late in the middle of the night outside in the cool air, to help soothe his throat and calm down again. It was a blessing we foundout what he had, and were able to geta breathing treatment for him so it could help open up his airways and allow for much improved breathing.
Thanks to lots of treatments, he was able to improve steadily over the course of the next two weeks. We were so overjoyed and it felt like the sunlight had broken through and dispersed some clouds in our lives when our sweet little Joshy started smiling again! What a tender mercy and relief that he was showing so many signs of improvement, as his desire to eat and bility to keep food down improved and so did his sleeping abilities too. Slowly, but surely, we were able to get him to be able to sleep in his bassinet again after a week and a half...Oh, how grateful we were when he started to get better again. :)
This is what our daytime activities would consist of, when we couldn't really go anywhere in the daytimes as we were trying to bring Joshua back to health. So, the kiddos ad lots of indoor play-dough, imaginex builder time and making valentines for the family!
Here's iss Katelyn, showing the restaurant menu she came up with, right from her very own play-dough kitchen! hehe....She is so creative and has so many great ideas to keep us all going! My favorite was her "five strawberries complete with the leaves hehe...with vanila cake delight"!
The surprise left on my pillow after our fun play-dough creation time :)
We all wanted little Joshua to get better so quickly...If only all the hugs and hand-holds in the world would snap someone back into healthfulness. We sure wanted our happy baby back again.
We got together with cousins to study the Boston Tea Party, George Washington and some of the early origins of the founding of our country! We love Homeschool cousin Fridays!
I found some great library books, and I found a great lap-book resource with lots of different historical figures of that day including George Washington, Thomas Paine, Patrick henry, Paul Revere, King George, Nathan Hale, Abigail and John Adams, Benedict Arnold, and more! We had the kids each choose a character to learn about with a mommy, then present their person in fron of the group!
After that, we played an American Revolution game outside, where the Patriots had to defend their Concord armory, while the Loyalists and British would come sneaking in to get their "cannons" and attack! The kids and moms sure had so much fun with this game! Oh one of the fun joys of homeschooling, when we can all play and learn together the great depths of what history and science have to offer in such hands on and fun memorable ways!
Finally, after a week and a half of healing, we were able to catch of glimpse of this charming smile again! Love that boy!
Overall, it was a great Friday...so much fun with our Homeschool American Revolutionary Unit experiences and playing with the kids! Then, to top it off, Daddy and Mommy had a fun date night in watching movies, and Downton Abbey together with yummy key lime pie (one of my healthy faves!) What a wonderful ray of sunshine this day was after the cloudy sad times with a poor little sick baby. Thanks to a wonderful visiting teacher too, who noticed when I wasn't at church with Joshua one Sunday, we also had wonderful meals brought in to our home for several days while the two middle ones were sick along with baby Joshua too. They surely were angels to us as we were all trying to function on low levels of sleep and trying to get everyone feeling better again.
Just when we thought we were catching a break from hardship, the next day....Katelyn accidentally pushed Nathan out of her way as she was running through the family room, and he fell smack into the beaded metal bumps on our couch in such a way that the impact completely knocked one of his front teeth out!! AGHHH!!!! I could not even believe this had happened! I watched the whole thing take place.... and I was SOOOO worried that the tooth had been slammed up back into his gumline...ohhhh heavens...and was so sad, this was the 2nd time he had had a major whack to his face altering his front tooth positioning. Thankfully, our dentist is in our ward, and so he agreed to meet us at his office to take a look at it for us. He showed me the x-ray depicting how his tooth would be coming in soon and reassured me that it should just be a gap in his teeth for awhile! poor Nathan though....I felt so sad for him. But, thankfully, he was all okay, just one less tooth to loose when he gets older.
We were lucky that he was feeling okay because our cousins invited us to go to a Lake Beach nearby to spend the Saturday together. The kids had such a wonderful time building a huge sand-hill/castle and dipping their feet in the water! We enjoyed the warmer 70 degree weather and fun times together.
One highlight was riding the zipline on the playground, so fun!
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