First Meal!

As mentioned multiple times in this blog, Addison's weight gain is "turtle-like slow!" - and we have kept increasing the amount of breastmilk that she's drinking up to 29'ish ounces per day (even though Amy is not making that much per day....so this is not sustainable obviously - as soon as the freezer extra milk is gone, then we're in deep trouble!).  Even with increasing the milk, she wasn't gaining very much weight, so we have decided that while we preferred to wait until she was 7 1/2 months to start feeding her food, that we better start now so that we could get her accustomed to eating before the extra milk ran out.  So, Addison has had her first food - sweet potatoes!

It is obvious that the Z parents are rusty at this, and that our other kids didn't eat this early, because we blithely just fork mashed the sweet potatoes and put some breastmilk in there, and lo and behold, she wanted nothing to do with it!  After a day or two of trying, we had the bright obvious idea to puree the sweet potatoes and make them quite runny.  Now we're in business!  She has stopped rejecting the food and while she's still not gung-ho (although this is not entirely surprising as we used to have to coax her just to drink her bottle for the first few months, so eating just does not seem to be a big priority for little girly), she at least is eating about 1 cube of sweet potatoes twice per day.  We're going to keep her on just sweet potatoes for about 2 weeks before we try introducing mashed/pureed bananas.  We aren't rushing to introduce a lot of foods as we normally wouldn't have even started foods for another month or so.  Thankfully, she did have her 6 month doctor appt this week and the doctor said that her weight was fine even though she hasn't doubled her birth weight (typically what they look for by 6 months).  He said she looked healthy and that her thighs were chubby, so all was fine.  She was 15 lbs 0 ounces at her doctor's appt (25th percentile) and about 27 inches tall (75th percentile).

We had her 6 month professional pictures taken last week - it was a frigid 55 degrees, and the pictures were outside!!!  Thankfully it was at a friend's house, so we were able to take her inside to warm up and take a few of the less-dressed pictures indoors.  We'll post a few of the favorite shots next week!

The informal 6 month picture!

Zachary has been enjoying intramurals over at FLEEC, and just finished up a round of basketball before he moves on to t-ball.  Basketball and soccer are two of his favorite past-times, so it was great fun. 

Zachary is standing in front of the man with the white shirt, and has his arms up in the air (red shirt, white sleeves, grey shorts)

Kaleb has started to give us a bit of trouble with taking naps - not totally unexpected as he's almost 5, but we've been spoiled with how easily he's been going down for naps up until now.  He has started to play in his room instead of napping - such as sneaking in the Leapfrog to play with it, or getting out of bed and playing with his crayons and markers.  One such day this week, Kaleb emerged from his room with obvious signs that he had not taken a nap.....see the evidence in the picture below for yourself! :)

 Phrase of the week:  Kaleb was over at Jennifer's and they were cleaning up.  Blake got out the broom to sweep, and Miss Jennifer said "just don't sweep up the dirt outside" when Kaleb got down on the floor and curling into a ball said to Blake "Blake, I'm dirt, sweep me up!"  She took a picture of it and texted it to Amy at work.

Sir Lurch-A-Lot

Karis continues to improve, but doesn't have very much dorsi flexion in his ankle so when he walks around, he definitely has a bit of a lurchy gait.  Amy finds it amusing to dub him as Sir Lurch-A-Lot, so here's hoping that he doesn't feel bad about that!  The pain is like a medium headache as defined by Karis - kind of deep achy. 

We had had a run of some GOOD NEWS!  Yippee - we'll take it!  The first set of good news was that we took Kaleb to the eye doctor, and he has improved dramatically.  He went from 20/160 at the first visit (with no correction) and 20/125 (with correction) to.....drumroll please.....20/20 (with correction)!!!  The doctor indicated that his brain has turned back on his right eye, which is wonderful.  The 'bad side' of his brain turning his eye back on is the fact that he now has double vision at distance.  This is to be expected apparently - when his brain turned off the eye, there was no double vision, and now that it is turned back on, he has to learn how to get his eyes to line up properly again (kind of like a baby does).  She said that this is to be expected on the journey.  The other part of this journey that takes a while is the fact that his depth perception has improved (good) but not as dramatically as we would have hoped.  He had 1% depth perception and now has 15% - she said that this too is slower to improve and thus is expected.  Whatever the case, we definitely put this into a "good news" category!

The second part of the good news is that we took Zachary to the new allergy and asthma doctor.  We were very pleased with our experience with him - he was willing to sit and discuss the symptoms and options with Karis, and was supportive of trying more natural methods of controlling the allergies.   After reviewing all of the spirometer tests, he indicated that he did not believe that Zachary had asthma based on the fact that some of his pre-tests were so good.  Yeah!  On the note of allergies, they have concluded that he's allergic to grasses, dust mites, and some molds.  That is pretty expected as Karis and I both have those allergies.  We have had some really good allergy control actually by taking a daily dose of High Potency Vitamin C liquid.  Our friend Vasti shared that she gives her son this, along with liquefied Parsley.  We decided to try the Vitamin C first, alone, to see if that would work as we weren't sure that Zachary would take the liquid parsley.  Thus far, Zachary hasn't had much of a stuffy nose and hasn't been struggling with the dry cough that is so typical of this time of year.

Addison is starting to sit up by herself - not super stable right now, but she's getting better every day.  She has gotten pretty proficient at rolling over both ways as well.

What an overachiever - holding her bottle all by herself already!  You go girl!



Trying out the highchair for the first time - complete with entertainment!



In other exciting news, it appears that Addison is about to get a new best friend to play with - a little Johnson girl!  Uncle Kent and Aunt Kelli were excited to report that the ultrasound this week reviewed a little Miss in there!  We're very excited!   Between Devin and Little Miss Johnson, Addison won't lack for friends to play with during these early years! 

Snuggling in with Auntie Kelli

Phrase of the week:  Kaleb was sitting at the dinner table this week, intently looking at his water glass. While staring at the water, he says "Pee is yellow.  Water is not yellow.  How does water that is not yellow become yellow pee?"  Excellent question my son - one best answered when you're in front of a biology teacher in highschool!  But Grandma and Mommy attempted as best we could in four-year-old verbiage to describe how the water transforms from clear to yellow as it grabs all the garbage in your body on its way out....you just never know what they'll ask next! :)

A bit blurry, but couldn't resist including a picture of Blake, Evan, Zachary and Kaleb playing "Twister!"  They were loving it!

Wag, Wag, Wag!

Kaleb has always been super creative and imaginative, and this week was no different.  We had balloons from Chick-Fil-A, and the next day Kaleb decided that he wanted to be a fox with an orange tail, so took the balloon string and made a loop out of it to hook around himself.  He would then run around the house saying "wag, wag, wag" as he would wag his little behind to make his "tail" wag!  It was hilarious, and so precious!

Karis had good news this week when he went to the doctor and Dr. Cole said "Get up and walk" (while irreverent, it reminds me of the story in the Bible where the man is told "You are healed, get up and walk!").  If only it was so!  So with the doctor's firm permission, Karis immediately ditched the black boot and the crutches and has been "walking" (or should we say 'lurching', as it is still painful and doesn't have the range of motion back, so he looks quite interesting as he walks!) ever since.  It definitely makes life a lot easier.  His pain is still requiring him to take his meds on a frequent basis but he's hoping in another week that much of the deep bone aching will start to subside.
As is a tradition, we headed off to the park after naps last Sabbath (what a great way to run off some of your kids' endless energy!).  Amy was aghast after reaching the park when Heather H called to ask where we were - why weren't we at Adventurers!?  Whoops - totally flaked out on that!  Bergherms and Cochrans joined us, and Zachary was delighted to have Uncle William pull out orange cones to make soccer goals.  The boys played with those for a long time!  We also took the opportunity to have picture time with Addison and Devin!

Zachary adores being the goalie - and has his stance all ready for when the ball comes!

Speaking of soccer, last Sunday was Kaleb's first soccer game.  Man those 4 year olds are cute out there!  They are playing inside, rather than outside like it was when Zachary was at the JCC playing with Coach Eli, so that the ball is more contained and the kids don't get distracted picking the wildflowers!  Ha ha!  It actually is much nicer for those reasons, and the fact that it is so much more climate controlled!  Kaleb, Evan and Kieran had a great time.

Kaleb about to kick the ball in the center of the 'field'

We capped off the weekend by heading over to the Cochrans for the second annual Superbowl party with the usual crowd.  Karis in particular had a great time visiting with everyone as he was just so happy to be out of the house! :)    One particularly cute moment was when we were about to leave, Brady Grodack came over to where Jenn was holding Addison and wanted to give her some 'loving' - so cute!  We highly encourage all possible future marriage connections with folks that we like - who wants to have in-laws that you don't know and don't like!  Ahh, if only arranged marriages were still in vogue! :)

Karis and his black boot - thanks to Allen for taking this picture as Amy didn't actually get a picture before Karis discarded the boot!

Survival of the Fittest

Amy feels like she has entered into a game of the "Survival of the Fittest" and thankfully we are surviving thus far.  Karis' surgery was successful as we reported last week, but recovery is slow and hard.  He has been having a fair amount of pain, so has to take the pain pills regularly.  He has also noticed that now with the hardware in his ankle, that whenever his foot gets cold (so even just touching his toes to the cold plastic floor covering where our office chair is), his entire foot and ankle hurts really bad.  But, he is slowly coming out of the fog of post-surgery and is starting to seem more like his old self - at least mentally.  We are thankful for that, as we've missed both husband and daddy!  We continue to be ever so grateful to Amy's mom, who has been taking care of Karis and Addison each day, and helping Amy with cooking and getting the boys to bed.

Addison has had a good week - some of her accomplishments this week include rolling over multiple times in a row, beginning to try and sit up (front to back stability isn't too bad, but the side to side stability isn't quite there yet!), almost a laugh (Grandma heard a single "ha" that was almost the beginning of a laugh).  Yesterday, when Amy was holding her, she was doing her 'squirming with delight' dance and then started to lean forward repeatedly to "kiss" Amy on the check (mouth wide open with slobber everywhere, but hey, that's okay when kisses are being given out!) Her daytime schedule of naps etc is still pretty unpredictable, but imagine that over the next month it'll start to tighten down a little bit.  She is starting to refuse to take the 5:00PM short nap, which makes for a slightly more crabby baby in the evenings!  She is also is starting to do a 'happy shriek' (Corey, it slightly reminds us of Brady!) - wow, it is long and high-pitched, that's for sure!  She isn't doing it at full volume yet, so we're kind of hoping that this is the limit that she goes because it could probably be ear piercing if she takes it up all of the way.

Amy took the car in this week to get fixed, so we're now proud drivers of a XC60.  It is kind of funny because we considered getting this Volvo cross-over when we weren't sure that the car seats would fit in the back of the S40 (which thankfully they do once we got the Diono car seats).  It is fun to actually have an extended test drive of a vehicle that you'd consider getting in the future!  Some of our observations - shoulder checking in the car is a little bit more "blind" as it seems like the windows get elevated and much smaller as you look towards the back of the car, the speedometer in the car is in an odd location, which isn't intuitive as you look down at the dashboard to see how fast you're going, you have to move your hand a lot of times to see it, and Amy is clear that she wouldn't want a vehicle much longer than this one - she is too used to a short car! :)  But, the car does drive very nice, and we love the Volvo safety feel of it.

With everything that is going on, we haven't taken that many pictures so this post will include some random pictures that we've taken over the last six months that we've been meaning to include on our post, but just never got around to it!

Phrase of the week:  Mommy, why is your hair falling out? Kaleb was curious as to why there is so much hair on the bathroom floor etc, which thankfully usually starts to decrease around the six month post-partum mark for Amy - at least with the boys.  Anyway, Amy's answer was "hormones" to which poor Kaleb having no idea what those were answers with "her moms?"  Ha ha - always good for a chuckle.  Zachary loves to play legos now, and has several of the police lego sets, that come with little policemen complete with handcuffs.  Zachary though likes to refer to them as "handCUPS"  Ha ha - what kind of parents are we that we just let him call it by the wrong name because we think it's cute!?

How blessed are these boys to have Grandma play soccer with them!?

Getting the mid-year patch honors for Adventurers.

Christmas-time - Kaleb was "conducting" the Christmas carols in an adult Sabbath School

Sporting our hockey jersey (thanks Aunt Evelyn!)

Isn't this what these garden tubs really are for!?