On Saturday afternoon we went back over to the church building for Kolby’s piano recital. There were eight kids who played at the recital, including Kolby and four of the piano teacher’s children. I had to include these two videos from the recital. Kolby’s teacher gave him compliments before and after he played, saying that he was doing very well for his level [he has had 6 piano lessons so far] and that she didn’t know if it was his mom or his dad who was helping him learn so much, but he always did so well and came back for each lesson knowing more each week (we did tell her afterwards that we don’t do much more than try to make sure he practices most every day, and he is learning most everything on his own). She also held up his music book to show all the other kids after Kolby played his last song, and showed them how well Kolby had done to play such a long song. I have to admit, it’s pretty fun to hear a teacher compliment your child, especially when he has done so well with practicing and deserves the praise. So, anyways, Kolby played his songs well. Although he only had two songs listed on the program, he decided to add a couple more and ended up playing four songs. After each student played their songs the teacher handed them a little bag of treats. It was pretty cute when, after Kolby finished playing, Camden hopped up and said he wanted to play too. Kolby’s piano teacher is nice, and let Camden play for a few minutes, and when we told him it was time to be done, he quickly asked for a treat of his own. Pretty smart kid! After the recital was over, Eli also wanted to play for a few minutes. And later on that afternoon Kolby’s teacher had one of her boys bring over an extra treat bag for Camden and Eli to share – so thoughtful. So, it ended up being a very nice first recital, and I was very glad, too, that Michael got home from work early enough that afternoon to be there with us for the entire recital too.
Showing posts with label Piano Lessons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Piano Lessons. Show all posts
15 December 2008
16 November 2008
A Very Long Post
So, this has been an interesting week for us – mostly good, and a little bit not so good. On Monday afternoon Michael took our van in to have the locksmith fix a problem with the automatic locks on the doors that had stopped working and a beeping noise that the car had started to make every time the doors were opened – both of these things started happening since the locksmith replaced the lock on the van last week. So, luckily those things were quick fixes, and after that Michael drove to pick his dad up from a hotel in Salt Lake where he was staying for another work trip, so he came and spent the evening with us. We had dinner, family home evening, and then we played some sports games on the Wii for an activity. (It was fun to sit and watch Dick’s facial expressions as Kolby and then Eli continued to get high scores in bowling and in golf (Kolby beat Dick at bowling, and our boys barely ever play the games on the Wii). After the boys went to bed, we played a while longer before Michael dropped his dad back off at his hotel.
On Tuesday afternoon I had an appointment with the midwife and had that fun glucose test where they make you drink the orange soda, wait an hour, and then draw your blood. Everything looks good with the baby and I’m doing well. And then on Tuesday evening Grandma and I went to Enrichment over at the church. There were a few different classes offered, including a knitting class (which I didn’t sign up for), and a basic computer skills class. I went to the computer class (for lack of another place to go, and because I thought they might want me to answer some questions about the new Relief Society blog). The person who taught the class was knowledgeable, but I was glad that other than a few new shortcuts I knew how to do everything that she taught in the class. After she was done, they turned the time over to me and I showed people how to get to the blog, how to leave a comment (which some people had had trouble with), and what different things were on the blog. I was glad to hear that several of the sisters had looked at the blog at home already (I wondered, especially with a relatively large population of older sisters in our ward, if we would get much use out of the blog, but I was glad to find that people of all ages had started to take a look at it so far). And, the thing that I was most excited about from that evening was that they are starting a new provident living group and are planning on doing monthly trips to different canneries in the area. I signed up to go this Saturday morning and I’m looking forward to it, since I’ve never been to one before. And I’m trying to decide what foods to get this time – I think that a case of six of those big #10 cans of oats for about $13 sounds like a great deal (especially since my kids like oatmeal, so that is something I know we could actually use, plus they have a shelf life of 30 years and you can’t beat that).
On Wednesday afternoon Kolby had his piano lessons. He has his lesson at 3:30 and he still takes a nap after lunch every day, so the last two weeks I’ve had to wake him up from naps for piano lessons and he’s been pretty grumpy while I’ve tried to get him ready to go. I guess I’ll just have to wake him up at like 3:00 and give him a long time to get going before we have to leave. His lesson went well. He got a new song to play and he got to the part in the book where he is learning the different letters of the notes. So, for his practice this week he has been doing his song, and then going through and playing all the ‘A’s on the keyboard, then all the ‘B’s, etc. It’s pretty cool to see that he can find all of the correct keys without messing up most of the time, and when he accidentally hits the wrong key, he realizes that he did the wrong one, and he will say, “No, that’s a ‘G,’ not an ‘F.’” So, he is catching on to that pretty quickly.
Thursday was a pretty rough day for me. The boys did a lot of crying, fighting, and whining, and I did a lot of yelling, time-outs, and some spankings. Besides dealing with all their whining and not listening to me (which seemed like a lot more than normal), I was also struggling because for about the last week or so I had been having an especially hard time with Isaac. I think he has been teething, and he has been extremely fussy some nights (but fine on other nights, so I’m not sure – but it looks like one of his top teeth might finally be coming in). Anyways, Isaac has always had this strong bond with Michael. None of our other boys seemed to have any preference for one parent over the other (although I know that lots of other peoples’ kids do seem to prefer Mommy or Daddy at different times), but all of our other boys were just as happy with one parent or the other. Isaac has always especially liked being held by Michael, and especially cried a lot when Michael left the room. I actually liked this most of the time, with him being the fourth child, because if he was having a really hard time I could hand him off to Michael and he could often calm him down. But lately, especially with Isaac having these fussy times with the teething, he seemed to be crying a lot, and me holding him wasn’t doing any good. He clearly wanted to be held, but then when I picked him up he wouldn’t calm down and would cry just as much. At church last Sunday (Michael had to be at the hospital that morning) Isaac had an especially hard time and I held him in the hallway for over an hour before he finally calmed down and went to sleep, just to wake up about 10 minutes later and cry for a good part of the last meeting. The thing was, he seemed to want my Grandma to hold him more than me, and he even calmed down a little when this cute teenage girl in our ward came over and started to play with him. (He could probably just sense that I was getting stressed and needed a change of people to hold him, but it really felt like he liked everyone else better than me). And with him being especially fussy off and on this week, I felt myself getting annoyed with all his crying for no apparent reason. So, by the time Michael got home from work after a long call day at the hospital on Thursday, very tired and ready to go to bed right away, I kept him up for a while trying to figure out what to do about Isaac and how I didn’t feel like he and I had bonded like we were supposed to. I confessed that I wondered if the fact that Isaac never let me nurse him (I pumped milk and he was bottle fed breast milk for 6 weeks before I switched over to formula) was part of the problem. And Camden did nurse longer than Isaac, but it wasn’t for a really long time, but with Camden I remembered that I would keep him up when I put the other two boys down for naps and I would force myself not to do anything else for a while and lay down and hold him while he was taking his bottle and he would often fall asleep while I was holding him. But with Isaac I didn’t do that – I don’t know why. I guess I didn’t really think of doing it with him, and the idea of getting all 4 boys down for a nap at the same time so that I could have a couple hours a day of no demands and just time to myself was very appealing. And now that he just turned a year old, he takes less than 5 minutes to empty his sippy cup and he is constantly on the move, so I don’t think that I could get him to lay down with me at this point, even if I tried. So I wondered if I had messed something up with him and that I had missed my chance and I could never make it better. It felt good to say all this stuff out loud to Michael, even though it feels really guilty to admit that you don’t feel bonded with your baby. But we talked about it, and just decided that I’d have to try to do other things with Isaac and see how it would go in the future. I think I needed to get all that out, because since then it has been so much better.
The next day I decided to stay off the computer except when all the boys were asleep – it’s easy to get on to check e-mail, then just upload the pictures from the camera real quick while you’re waiting for the internet connection to re-connect to read that last e-mail. Then you need to post something to the Relief Society blog real quick that you received in an e-mail from one of the Relief Society presidency (because you feel bad for already waiting several days before posting some things she sent you last week, and then it turned out the coupons she sent were expired by the time you got around to posting them on the RS blog, so you had committed to being better at just doing it as soon as you got the e-mails). And then when those pictures get uploaded from the camera, you might as well just post them on the family blog while you’re at it – the kids are all happy playing with their toys at the moment anyways – and all of the family members who live far away have expressed such gratitude for you keeping your blog up to date with pictures and videos of the kids so that they can feel like they are there with your family too – plus our blog isn’t just a blog, it’s our family journal and we are printing it into a series of books to save for posterity, so we’d better keep it up to date, since we all know what a good idea it is to keep a regular journal – so anyways, you post those photos that you uploaded from the camera to the blog (but first you have to open the pictures in Photoshop real quick, just to get rid of the red-eye in the pictures that must be genetic, because your husband and all your kids always have red-eye in most of the pictures you take). And hopefully the computer was cooperating all this time, the wireless internet connecting quickly and the computer not freezing up or slowing down because you have a few different programs running at once. Anyways, you can see how hopping on the computer to get something done real quick might end up taking an hour or two, and that’s if I don’t even have anything ‘big’ to work on at the time, like creating a new blog for the Relief Society, making and printing birthday party invitations, updating the books that I keep of each of the boys’ art work, trying to get some genealogy done, etc.
So anyways, I didn’t even turn the computer on until after the boys went down for naps. And while they were playing with their toys, I tried to pick up Isaac and hold him whenever he was in between running after his brothers and crawling after a toy. It would have been kind of a rough morning, because on Friday Eli woke up throwing up (he has always kind of had a week stomach – not that he is sickly or anything, but every few months he will have a day when he just throws up for no apparent reason, no one else in the family gets sick, and he fully recovers before too long). So, Eli was throwing up, and he asked for toast for breakfast, but then he didn’t really want to eat it (which is strange, because even when he is sick I usually have to explain to him why we can’t eat a big meal when we are throwing up while he is pitifully crying for me to get him food). He and I had a holdy on the couch, and then he told me he needed to go potty. He was in the restroom for a while, so I went to check on him to make sure he wasn’t sick again, and he was sleeping on the floor (the only time I have ever appreciated bathrooms with carpeted floors). I covered him with his blanket, set his bowl near him, and shut the door so he could sleep (after taking a picture), and he ended up sleeping in there for at least an hour. After that he ate and told me he felt fine, and he didn’t act sick again, which is always nice when there is a quick and painless recovery like that. So, we spent the day inside, playing together, and things went a lot better with Isaac. And he started doing the best thing ever – I was holding him and he laid his head on my shoulder. When he picked his head up, I said, “Isaac, give Mommy a hug.” And he did it again – since then he has been giving me hugs on demand, every time I’ve asked him to, and I felt almost like that was an answer to my prayers that he does like me (no, I didn’t really think he didn’t like me, but it kind of felt like he liked being held by other people more than by me) and that we did have a special connection. Anyways, that was a very quick change – I went from crying and feeling like I had messed up on raising my baby one night, to feeling normal, happy, and like he liked me the next day. Michael was glad to find out that I was feeling a lot better and Isaac had done well when he got home that afternoon. And things have gone just fine with Isaac since then. So, sorry if I don’t respond to an e-mail or keep up to date on everyone’s’ blogs in the future – but I think that is one little thing that I can do to have a better relationship with my boys, is to spend more time having fun with them than writing about and posting pictures of the fun we’ve had. (But don’t worry too much, Michael and I will still try to keep up our weekly blog posts and I’ll always have nap time to catch up on things).
So, back to our week. Oh, I forgot to mention that I cut Camden’s hair on Thursday morning too. I noticed that it was almost to his shoulders again, after just cutting it while we were in San Diego. So, I decided to just trim it like I did last time, but do it a little shorter this time so it would take a little longer before I had to cut it again. I totally messed it up, though. (Boy, am I glad that I waited until after we had our family photos taken to cut it!) I got it wait, combed it all straight, and cut it all the way around his head in a nice, straight line, but when it dried and curled back up, the back curled up noticeably shorter than on the sides around his ears. So, it ended up looking to me a lot like a really cute short little girl’s haircut (no, I did not think Camden looked like a girl, but I think he looked pretty silly with a girl haircut – which is kind of funny, that I would think a shorter haircut would look girly, even though I know others thought his long curls didn’t look very boy-ish). Anyways, I left it for a few days, thinking of how I would need to fix it, and then last night right before bed I ran him into the bathroom for a quick fix trim, because I couldn’t stand taking him to church with that haircut the next morning. I trimmed it shorter around the ears, and I think that fixed it – although I should have just left it how it was in the first place, this second trim looks a lot better than the first one (and a lot more like a boys’ haircut), and it can grow back out now. I couldn’t help thinking today, as he wore a little sweater to church that Kolby used to wear, and as his hair is now a similar length as Kolby’s used to be when he was that age (although still more curly), that Camden really reminded me of Kolby. I know that everyone thinks I am way off whenever I say I think Camden looks somewhat like Kolby did, but we’ll just have to wait and see – I wouldn’t be too surprised if they looked more and more alike as they get older.
Well, yesterday was long, but I got a lot done. I decided that I needed to get all the Christmas gifts and wrap them all before Thanksgiving, because both my family and Michael’s family will be here, so we can give everyone their gifts and avoid paying to ship them in December. So, I made a list and discussed it with Michael, and then went out and got it all done yesterday. (Oh, I guess I had already made the gifts for each of our parents a couple months ago, and I went and picked up something for my brothers on Friday evening, but I got everything else done on Saturday). I got everything done for the parents, brothers and sisters, and cousins (so I do still need to do it for Michael and the boys, but I don’t have to worry about shipping their gifts). Now there is one gift left that I need to make, and I’ll print some family photos for the parents and grandparents like we do every year, and then all we’ll have left to do is the wrapping. I’m pretty proud of myself that I could get it mostly all done in one Saturday – it only took trips to 4 different stores and about 5 hours (with three of the boys with me the whole time). While we were out, we also got some new jeans for Kolby and Camden (each of them had a pair that wore out in the knees in the last week or so), a new pair of pajama pants for Michael since his old ones got a hole in the knee this week too, and stuff for dinner last night. Oh, and Michael hit a milestone – I bought his pajama pants in a size large because the other sizes didn’t look like they’d be big enough for him, and when I brought them home and he saw that the tag said “size Large, 36/38,” he said there was no way they’d fit him. He had always gotten 34/36 in the past. But I said he should just try them, especially since they had a draw string. Amazingly, they fit, and he didn’t even have to use the draw string to synch them up around the waist or anything. So, Michael has officially gotten fat (no – I would never say that, he was the one making this claim). But really, it is nice that he’s gained a little weight because it’s kind of difficult to find a size 34/36 in some stores sometimes, and I think he looks very nice now that he’s “filled in” just a little bit. I guess eating free hospital cafeteria food has paid off. :) Anyways, after a good dinner of spaghetti squash and garlic bread – spaghetti squash is one of our new favorite meals, since it is relatively quick and easy to make, everyone in our family likes how it tastes, and it is healthy for you – we got the boys down for bed and Grandma stayed with them while we went on a date. First we went to a store that I had seen advertisements for called Tai Pan Trading (kind of a weird name, but it was a really cool store). It was a giant store filled with all sorts of Christmas items, home decorations and art, and things that you could use to make your own Christmas decorations. We only had half an hour there before the store closed (and Michael was disappointed to see a sign advertising free fudge samples, only to find out that that part of the store had closed earlier in the evening) so we probably didn’t even see everything in the store, but it was fun to just walk through and see all the fun Christmas stuff. After that we stopped at Target and picked up a snow brush for Michael’s car (since the one he had before had broken last winter). And after sharing a banana milkshake, we saw a late showing of the new James Bond movie. Although we were both tired, it was still nice to get out and just be together.
Today things went pretty well at church. Michael had the day off today. We got ready this morning and the boys had enough time to watch a quick church movie while Michael and I were getting ready and then Michael played a couple songs on the piano before we walked to church (it’s so much easier getting them all ready for church when I’m not the only one doing it). Although Michael had a headache at church, and Isaac was being extremely wiggly in Sacrament meeting (by wiggly, I mean throwing his entire body back and forth as to make it difficult for any adult to keep him from falling off their lap) so Camden, Isaac, and I spent most of the last meeting in the hallway, but Isaac and Camden played together on the floor happily while I listened to a good talk on tithing, so that was a lot better than last week’s church meeting went for us. After walking home and having quesadillas (or “didas,” as Camden would call them) for lunch, we have gotten the boys down for naps and I think they are all finally asleep – after two additional potty trips for Eli (yes, we do always make both Kolby and Eli use the bathroom before going to sleep), 3 or 4 trips into Camden’s room to tell him not to get out of his bed/not to get into Isaac’s bed/and not to get things out of the closet, changing 1 poopy diaper on Camden, moving Camden’s crib to a different side of his room so he couldn’t get into the closet as easily, and going in to find Eli repeatedly doing some kind of hand stands and then flipping over in the corner of his room – now there is silence and I think they are all finally asleep.
So, sorry for the long post, but at least this kind of rough week ended up being a good week for us. Hope it was good for all of you too.
On Tuesday afternoon I had an appointment with the midwife and had that fun glucose test where they make you drink the orange soda, wait an hour, and then draw your blood. Everything looks good with the baby and I’m doing well. And then on Tuesday evening Grandma and I went to Enrichment over at the church. There were a few different classes offered, including a knitting class (which I didn’t sign up for), and a basic computer skills class. I went to the computer class (for lack of another place to go, and because I thought they might want me to answer some questions about the new Relief Society blog). The person who taught the class was knowledgeable, but I was glad that other than a few new shortcuts I knew how to do everything that she taught in the class. After she was done, they turned the time over to me and I showed people how to get to the blog, how to leave a comment (which some people had had trouble with), and what different things were on the blog. I was glad to hear that several of the sisters had looked at the blog at home already (I wondered, especially with a relatively large population of older sisters in our ward, if we would get much use out of the blog, but I was glad to find that people of all ages had started to take a look at it so far). And, the thing that I was most excited about from that evening was that they are starting a new provident living group and are planning on doing monthly trips to different canneries in the area. I signed up to go this Saturday morning and I’m looking forward to it, since I’ve never been to one before. And I’m trying to decide what foods to get this time – I think that a case of six of those big #10 cans of oats for about $13 sounds like a great deal (especially since my kids like oatmeal, so that is something I know we could actually use, plus they have a shelf life of 30 years and you can’t beat that).
On Wednesday afternoon Kolby had his piano lessons. He has his lesson at 3:30 and he still takes a nap after lunch every day, so the last two weeks I’ve had to wake him up from naps for piano lessons and he’s been pretty grumpy while I’ve tried to get him ready to go. I guess I’ll just have to wake him up at like 3:00 and give him a long time to get going before we have to leave. His lesson went well. He got a new song to play and he got to the part in the book where he is learning the different letters of the notes. So, for his practice this week he has been doing his song, and then going through and playing all the ‘A’s on the keyboard, then all the ‘B’s, etc. It’s pretty cool to see that he can find all of the correct keys without messing up most of the time, and when he accidentally hits the wrong key, he realizes that he did the wrong one, and he will say, “No, that’s a ‘G,’ not an ‘F.’” So, he is catching on to that pretty quickly.
Thursday was a pretty rough day for me. The boys did a lot of crying, fighting, and whining, and I did a lot of yelling, time-outs, and some spankings. Besides dealing with all their whining and not listening to me (which seemed like a lot more than normal), I was also struggling because for about the last week or so I had been having an especially hard time with Isaac. I think he has been teething, and he has been extremely fussy some nights (but fine on other nights, so I’m not sure – but it looks like one of his top teeth might finally be coming in). Anyways, Isaac has always had this strong bond with Michael. None of our other boys seemed to have any preference for one parent over the other (although I know that lots of other peoples’ kids do seem to prefer Mommy or Daddy at different times), but all of our other boys were just as happy with one parent or the other. Isaac has always especially liked being held by Michael, and especially cried a lot when Michael left the room. I actually liked this most of the time, with him being the fourth child, because if he was having a really hard time I could hand him off to Michael and he could often calm him down. But lately, especially with Isaac having these fussy times with the teething, he seemed to be crying a lot, and me holding him wasn’t doing any good. He clearly wanted to be held, but then when I picked him up he wouldn’t calm down and would cry just as much. At church last Sunday (Michael had to be at the hospital that morning) Isaac had an especially hard time and I held him in the hallway for over an hour before he finally calmed down and went to sleep, just to wake up about 10 minutes later and cry for a good part of the last meeting. The thing was, he seemed to want my Grandma to hold him more than me, and he even calmed down a little when this cute teenage girl in our ward came over and started to play with him. (He could probably just sense that I was getting stressed and needed a change of people to hold him, but it really felt like he liked everyone else better than me). And with him being especially fussy off and on this week, I felt myself getting annoyed with all his crying for no apparent reason. So, by the time Michael got home from work after a long call day at the hospital on Thursday, very tired and ready to go to bed right away, I kept him up for a while trying to figure out what to do about Isaac and how I didn’t feel like he and I had bonded like we were supposed to. I confessed that I wondered if the fact that Isaac never let me nurse him (I pumped milk and he was bottle fed breast milk for 6 weeks before I switched over to formula) was part of the problem. And Camden did nurse longer than Isaac, but it wasn’t for a really long time, but with Camden I remembered that I would keep him up when I put the other two boys down for naps and I would force myself not to do anything else for a while and lay down and hold him while he was taking his bottle and he would often fall asleep while I was holding him. But with Isaac I didn’t do that – I don’t know why. I guess I didn’t really think of doing it with him, and the idea of getting all 4 boys down for a nap at the same time so that I could have a couple hours a day of no demands and just time to myself was very appealing. And now that he just turned a year old, he takes less than 5 minutes to empty his sippy cup and he is constantly on the move, so I don’t think that I could get him to lay down with me at this point, even if I tried. So I wondered if I had messed something up with him and that I had missed my chance and I could never make it better. It felt good to say all this stuff out loud to Michael, even though it feels really guilty to admit that you don’t feel bonded with your baby. But we talked about it, and just decided that I’d have to try to do other things with Isaac and see how it would go in the future. I think I needed to get all that out, because since then it has been so much better.
The next day I decided to stay off the computer except when all the boys were asleep – it’s easy to get on to check e-mail, then just upload the pictures from the camera real quick while you’re waiting for the internet connection to re-connect to read that last e-mail. Then you need to post something to the Relief Society blog real quick that you received in an e-mail from one of the Relief Society presidency (because you feel bad for already waiting several days before posting some things she sent you last week, and then it turned out the coupons she sent were expired by the time you got around to posting them on the RS blog, so you had committed to being better at just doing it as soon as you got the e-mails). And then when those pictures get uploaded from the camera, you might as well just post them on the family blog while you’re at it – the kids are all happy playing with their toys at the moment anyways – and all of the family members who live far away have expressed such gratitude for you keeping your blog up to date with pictures and videos of the kids so that they can feel like they are there with your family too – plus our blog isn’t just a blog, it’s our family journal and we are printing it into a series of books to save for posterity, so we’d better keep it up to date, since we all know what a good idea it is to keep a regular journal – so anyways, you post those photos that you uploaded from the camera to the blog (but first you have to open the pictures in Photoshop real quick, just to get rid of the red-eye in the pictures that must be genetic, because your husband and all your kids always have red-eye in most of the pictures you take). And hopefully the computer was cooperating all this time, the wireless internet connecting quickly and the computer not freezing up or slowing down because you have a few different programs running at once. Anyways, you can see how hopping on the computer to get something done real quick might end up taking an hour or two, and that’s if I don’t even have anything ‘big’ to work on at the time, like creating a new blog for the Relief Society, making and printing birthday party invitations, updating the books that I keep of each of the boys’ art work, trying to get some genealogy done, etc.
So anyways, I didn’t even turn the computer on until after the boys went down for naps. And while they were playing with their toys, I tried to pick up Isaac and hold him whenever he was in between running after his brothers and crawling after a toy. It would have been kind of a rough morning, because on Friday Eli woke up throwing up (he has always kind of had a week stomach – not that he is sickly or anything, but every few months he will have a day when he just throws up for no apparent reason, no one else in the family gets sick, and he fully recovers before too long). So, Eli was throwing up, and he asked for toast for breakfast, but then he didn’t really want to eat it (which is strange, because even when he is sick I usually have to explain to him why we can’t eat a big meal when we are throwing up while he is pitifully crying for me to get him food). He and I had a holdy on the couch, and then he told me he needed to go potty. He was in the restroom for a while, so I went to check on him to make sure he wasn’t sick again, and he was sleeping on the floor (the only time I have ever appreciated bathrooms with carpeted floors). I covered him with his blanket, set his bowl near him, and shut the door so he could sleep (after taking a picture), and he ended up sleeping in there for at least an hour. After that he ate and told me he felt fine, and he didn’t act sick again, which is always nice when there is a quick and painless recovery like that. So, we spent the day inside, playing together, and things went a lot better with Isaac. And he started doing the best thing ever – I was holding him and he laid his head on my shoulder. When he picked his head up, I said, “Isaac, give Mommy a hug.” And he did it again – since then he has been giving me hugs on demand, every time I’ve asked him to, and I felt almost like that was an answer to my prayers that he does like me (no, I didn’t really think he didn’t like me, but it kind of felt like he liked being held by other people more than by me) and that we did have a special connection. Anyways, that was a very quick change – I went from crying and feeling like I had messed up on raising my baby one night, to feeling normal, happy, and like he liked me the next day. Michael was glad to find out that I was feeling a lot better and Isaac had done well when he got home that afternoon. And things have gone just fine with Isaac since then. So, sorry if I don’t respond to an e-mail or keep up to date on everyone’s’ blogs in the future – but I think that is one little thing that I can do to have a better relationship with my boys, is to spend more time having fun with them than writing about and posting pictures of the fun we’ve had. (But don’t worry too much, Michael and I will still try to keep up our weekly blog posts and I’ll always have nap time to catch up on things).
So, back to our week. Oh, I forgot to mention that I cut Camden’s hair on Thursday morning too. I noticed that it was almost to his shoulders again, after just cutting it while we were in San Diego. So, I decided to just trim it like I did last time, but do it a little shorter this time so it would take a little longer before I had to cut it again. I totally messed it up, though. (Boy, am I glad that I waited until after we had our family photos taken to cut it!) I got it wait, combed it all straight, and cut it all the way around his head in a nice, straight line, but when it dried and curled back up, the back curled up noticeably shorter than on the sides around his ears. So, it ended up looking to me a lot like a really cute short little girl’s haircut (no, I did not think Camden looked like a girl, but I think he looked pretty silly with a girl haircut – which is kind of funny, that I would think a shorter haircut would look girly, even though I know others thought his long curls didn’t look very boy-ish). Anyways, I left it for a few days, thinking of how I would need to fix it, and then last night right before bed I ran him into the bathroom for a quick fix trim, because I couldn’t stand taking him to church with that haircut the next morning. I trimmed it shorter around the ears, and I think that fixed it – although I should have just left it how it was in the first place, this second trim looks a lot better than the first one (and a lot more like a boys’ haircut), and it can grow back out now. I couldn’t help thinking today, as he wore a little sweater to church that Kolby used to wear, and as his hair is now a similar length as Kolby’s used to be when he was that age (although still more curly), that Camden really reminded me of Kolby. I know that everyone thinks I am way off whenever I say I think Camden looks somewhat like Kolby did, but we’ll just have to wait and see – I wouldn’t be too surprised if they looked more and more alike as they get older.
Well, yesterday was long, but I got a lot done. I decided that I needed to get all the Christmas gifts and wrap them all before Thanksgiving, because both my family and Michael’s family will be here, so we can give everyone their gifts and avoid paying to ship them in December. So, I made a list and discussed it with Michael, and then went out and got it all done yesterday. (Oh, I guess I had already made the gifts for each of our parents a couple months ago, and I went and picked up something for my brothers on Friday evening, but I got everything else done on Saturday). I got everything done for the parents, brothers and sisters, and cousins (so I do still need to do it for Michael and the boys, but I don’t have to worry about shipping their gifts). Now there is one gift left that I need to make, and I’ll print some family photos for the parents and grandparents like we do every year, and then all we’ll have left to do is the wrapping. I’m pretty proud of myself that I could get it mostly all done in one Saturday – it only took trips to 4 different stores and about 5 hours (with three of the boys with me the whole time). While we were out, we also got some new jeans for Kolby and Camden (each of them had a pair that wore out in the knees in the last week or so), a new pair of pajama pants for Michael since his old ones got a hole in the knee this week too, and stuff for dinner last night. Oh, and Michael hit a milestone – I bought his pajama pants in a size large because the other sizes didn’t look like they’d be big enough for him, and when I brought them home and he saw that the tag said “size Large, 36/38,” he said there was no way they’d fit him. He had always gotten 34/36 in the past. But I said he should just try them, especially since they had a draw string. Amazingly, they fit, and he didn’t even have to use the draw string to synch them up around the waist or anything. So, Michael has officially gotten fat (no – I would never say that, he was the one making this claim). But really, it is nice that he’s gained a little weight because it’s kind of difficult to find a size 34/36 in some stores sometimes, and I think he looks very nice now that he’s “filled in” just a little bit. I guess eating free hospital cafeteria food has paid off. :) Anyways, after a good dinner of spaghetti squash and garlic bread – spaghetti squash is one of our new favorite meals, since it is relatively quick and easy to make, everyone in our family likes how it tastes, and it is healthy for you – we got the boys down for bed and Grandma stayed with them while we went on a date. First we went to a store that I had seen advertisements for called Tai Pan Trading (kind of a weird name, but it was a really cool store). It was a giant store filled with all sorts of Christmas items, home decorations and art, and things that you could use to make your own Christmas decorations. We only had half an hour there before the store closed (and Michael was disappointed to see a sign advertising free fudge samples, only to find out that that part of the store had closed earlier in the evening) so we probably didn’t even see everything in the store, but it was fun to just walk through and see all the fun Christmas stuff. After that we stopped at Target and picked up a snow brush for Michael’s car (since the one he had before had broken last winter). And after sharing a banana milkshake, we saw a late showing of the new James Bond movie. Although we were both tired, it was still nice to get out and just be together.
Today things went pretty well at church. Michael had the day off today. We got ready this morning and the boys had enough time to watch a quick church movie while Michael and I were getting ready and then Michael played a couple songs on the piano before we walked to church (it’s so much easier getting them all ready for church when I’m not the only one doing it). Although Michael had a headache at church, and Isaac was being extremely wiggly in Sacrament meeting (by wiggly, I mean throwing his entire body back and forth as to make it difficult for any adult to keep him from falling off their lap) so Camden, Isaac, and I spent most of the last meeting in the hallway, but Isaac and Camden played together on the floor happily while I listened to a good talk on tithing, so that was a lot better than last week’s church meeting went for us. After walking home and having quesadillas (or “didas,” as Camden would call them) for lunch, we have gotten the boys down for naps and I think they are all finally asleep – after two additional potty trips for Eli (yes, we do always make both Kolby and Eli use the bathroom before going to sleep), 3 or 4 trips into Camden’s room to tell him not to get out of his bed/not to get into Isaac’s bed/and not to get things out of the closet, changing 1 poopy diaper on Camden, moving Camden’s crib to a different side of his room so he couldn’t get into the closet as easily, and going in to find Eli repeatedly doing some kind of hand stands and then flipping over in the corner of his room – now there is silence and I think they are all finally asleep.
So, sorry for the long post, but at least this kind of rough week ended up being a good week for us. Hope it was good for all of you too.
10 November 2008
ER is over
Today was the last day of my ER rotation. That’s 5 of the 13 rotations for this year done. Yeah!! The ER was nice – I worked 21 eight hour shifts and had 7 days off. The shifts ranged from 7am-3pm, 9am-5pm, 2pm-10pm, 5pm-1am, and 11pm-7am. I saw quite an array of people with lots of differing personalities and problems, ranging from no reason for being in the ER to every reason for being there and very sick. Here are examples of some of the more interesting things I saw:
An older man who had a tumor growing on his head for a year before seeing a doctor finally because it was giving him headaches and leaking lots of junk on his shirts. It was about 5 inches wide and 1-2 inches deep and was eating into his bone. We took a biopsy and he ended up having a really bad squamous cell skin cancer. He will need a lot of work with plastic surgery to try and fix it.
A teenage girl who came in 1 week after being diagnosed with strep throat with no other medical problems. She was put on an antibiotic and had a rash appear on her stomach and the front of her legs, and we thought it was just a reaction to the antibiotic. We got some basic labs that came back showing signs of cancer. Further testing showed she had a new leukemia (blood cancer).
A lady had back surgery about 10 days before and had gone to a rehab center. She was not having very many bowel movements and started having a lot of pain and bloating in her abdomen. She ended up having a hole in her large intestine from all the pressure that had built up and was quite sick from it. The CT scan of her belly showed lots of air in her abdomen (a really bad sign) and she was rushed to the OR, where a large part of her bowel was taken out and she was in the ICU on a ventilator for almost a week afterwards recovering.
A man who was wheeled in by EMS with really bad chest pain. We were sitting in the other room and heard, “I need a doctor and nurse in the room now!!” so I rushed in after the attending doctor to watch. The patient had stopped breathing and had an abnormal heart rhythm. The doc ran in and gave a large thump with his fist to the man’s chest while the machine was getting ready to shock him. I think he ended up being shocked 3-4 times before he came around and said “Ouch!” with the last one. He was rushed up to cardiology to get a rapid procedure to look at the blood vessels to his heart, and they found a giant clot blocking the main vessel in his heart. He is so lucky because if he had been at home when he lost consciousness, he wouldn’t have had the machine there to shock him, and so he probably would be dead.
A lady who got something in her eye from raking leaves. We placed a fluorescent dye on her eye and then used a machine called a slit lamp to look at her cornea to see if there were any abrasions (cuts), which would fluoresce a light green color, and I got to see it.
I got to suture (sew) up a few people’s lacerations – one on an eyebrow and one on a head – all by myself, which was so much fun.
I would go see the patient, then talk with the doctor over me, and we would talk about the possible things going on and decide what labs or other tests to order. It was a nice month because the ER is run by the attending doctors, and we are there more to learn than to run it. So we could go a little slower and take time to learn about our patients. I also enjoyed the people I worked with.
There were some frustrating things that would keep me from choosing ER as a career: 1) I saw firsthand the problems that our current healthcare system has with respect to the ER – so many people who use it as their primary care office because they don’t have insurance so they don’t go to a regular doctor, which drives the premiums and taxes up for everyone else; 2) I got annoyed by people who use the ER like McDonalds: they think they can come in, pick and choose (sometimes demand) what tests they want ordered or what pain medicines they want, and then get mad when things are not done as fast as they like because they need to be somewhere else; 3) I don’t like the lack of continuity of care while working in the ER – you see patients, figure out what is going on with them, and then send them out, and it is hard to know what happens to them. I guess if anything this year continues to make me more and more excited for the upcoming training when I will get to learn dermatology, which I am liking more and more the more I see of it.
In other news, Kolby has now done 2 weeks of piano and loves it. He can already play a song that is recognizable (“Merrily we roll along”). The boys had doctor’s appointments this week for well-child checks and they all seem to be doing well. We went on Thursday to JC Penney to get a family picture that we will send out for Christmas. The lady who did our session was the same one who had taken the pictures of the boys in their Halloween costumes a few weeks ago, which turned out so cute, and she was so good again this time – we want her to do it for us every time we go. I can’t wait to get the pictures back – they turned out so nice. Thursday night was Daddy-Eli night and we went to see Wall-E together. Eli was so excited to get a little bag of popcorn and watch the movie on the big screen. We took the van in for a $20 oil change on Friday that ended up costing about $400 – the area where you put the key in locked up and so we had to have a locksmith go to the car place and replace that; the battery was dying and needed to be replaced; and we got the oil change. At lease that van works so well for us most of the time. Yesterday Kolby had a practice for his primary program that he participated in at church today. We had dinner tonight at the Eccles, a family in our ward. The kids had so much fun playing together and we had fun just talking. It has been a pleasant evening and a nice week.
05 November 2008
Odds and Ends
So, here are some random photos and video clips. The pictures are of Camden reading his new “family book” that I had updated the photos in, Isaac walking with the help of Grandma Faun, Eli being silly at dinnertime, and Kolby showing us his piano books on the day he started piano lessons. The videos are just some fun ones: Camden and Eli having fun running circles around the dining room table, Eli with his contagious laugh (he thought it was hilarious to look away from the video camera every time I tried to record him laughing), and one that shows how fast Isaac can crawl and how Kolby has recently decided that it is really cute to play with Isaac. They’re all pretty fun!
02 November 2008
Our Week
Ok, so I’ve not kept up as well as I should have with our “weekly family journal” [blog updates] since we got back from San Diego, and Michael’s work schedule has prevented him from writing lately too. I have been rather busy with making that blog for our Relief Society, trying to get in a little genealogy work on the new.familysearch.org site, and with family birthdays and Halloween celebrations lately, (let alone all the busy-ness of daily life with four little boys). I have prepared several slideshows of photos from our trip, and have several more sets of photos since we got back to Utah that I need to post. But I decided that I would tell what’s been going on with us lately and share some thoughts before I get to that.
So, this last week we had something planned every day. On Monday I spent a good portion of the day mixing up a big batch of my favorite soup – a chicken and vegetable recipe that my mom used to make. Then that evening Michael’s Dad and Grandma Bradshaw came for dinner and family home evening because Michael’s dad was in town for work this week. After dinner and desert, Michael did a family home evening lesson with the boys about prayer, and then we carved pumpkins for our activity. The boys had fun pulling the gunk out of the pumpkins, and I think they turned out pretty cute (pictures to come).
On Tuesday evening, after Michael went to work – Michael has been on one of the less-desirable ER shifts this week from 5pm to 2am. We really liked the 2pm to 11pm shift of last week, because he got to be home to enjoy some time with the kids during the day when they were awake, and he only missed out on dinner and bedtime with the family, but then he got off early enough that he wasn’t exhausted the next day. This shift until 2am made him tired during the days, so there was less fun time with the kids. But I think the next 4 days will be his worst ER shift as he starts tonight going in at 11pm and working until 7am, which just means that he gets to be home all day, but that he will have to sleep for most of that time. Too bad that his next two rotations for the months of November and December aren’t going to be a nice elective to get a little break. One month of internal medicine in September got long, and I can only imagine how long two months in a row will seem. Oh well. I was thinking about it, and we have been here for 5 months now – that’s going by pretty quick. Only about 8 more months to go. We’ve been told that the intern year is the worst of a doctor’s career, and then it should gradually start getting better from there on out (and once he gets into dermatology next year I am hoping that that will be an even better schedule than some other residents have). But we’ll just have to wait and see how that goes.
Anyways, on Tuesday night Brother Adamson from the ward came over and had me show him some of the features on Photoshop. I was excited to do that, because I love to use that program. It was a little frustrating that my computer was having such problems that it ran extremely slow while he was here, but I think that he hopefully still got something out of it.
On Wednesday Kolby had his first piano lesson with Emily Harker, a girl in our ward. I was very impressed with how well she explained the ideas of piano playing to a new learner and how she listened to him. I think that he did pretty well – he learned how to hold his hand, and which fingers go where, and they went over two different short songs that we have been practicing since then. He was excited to go to the lesson, and he likes to practice too, so that’s good. On Wednesday night I took Kolby, Eli, and Camden to a Halloween party at our church, where the kids got to trick-or-treat through the church hallways and get their faces painted. And Wednesday was also Grandpa Dick’s birthday – Happy Birthday!
On Thursday morning Dorene Lynch came over and we set up the Relief Society blog, and then I spent quite a bit of time getting that all put together the last few days. Today I need to add some more announcements to it, but mostly I think that the set-up is done and I will just need to keep up with new announcements and anything that people send me to post to that blog. The other fun thing we did on Thursday was that I took Kolby out for his night out, and we went to see the Disney movie about the robot, Wall-E, at the dollar theater. He enjoyed it, and I enjoyed going with him. He likes to sit on my lap when we go to a movie together, and he is such a sweetheart – it’s nice to see how each of our kids are on a one on one basis (as my mom said – she liked us kids a lot more individually than when we were together).
Friday was Kolby’s 5th birthday and Halloween. That morning he and I went to the grocery store together to get him a special birthday breakfast (since we are having his party next week so we didn’t have a cake that day). He picked out chocolate milk, donut holes, and cinnamon rolls, and we came home and enjoyed them together. And we gave Kolby his present – 7 new Book of Mormon character figurines. They are little plastic figurines of characters, such as Nephi and Moroni, from the Deseret Book store that the boys like to take in their “Sunday bag” to play with at church. We didn’t really want to get the “bad guys,” so we picked out almost all of the “good ones” (there were two others that we didn’t get, because they didn’t have them in the store when we went). Thank you, Grandma Debbie and Grandpa Dick – we used the birthday money that you sent for Kolby to pay for part of this gift. In the afternoon Michael had to go to work, and he helped me get the boys into their costumes before he left. We met at the Bentley’s house, along with at least 6 or 7 other families from the ward, to go trick-or-treating around the neighborhood together. It was fun to go as a group. I think that maybe going with just 2 or 3 families would probably be ideal, though, just because Kolby wanted to run ahead with the older kids and Camden was a lot more slow, so Kolby got 3 or 4 houses ahead of me at some times (there were plenty of adults in the group to supervise the kids in the front of the group and those in the back, but I would have rather had all my kids stick together with me – but I couldn’t really tell Kolby he had to stay with me instead of running with his friends). But either way, it was fun. I got some cute pictures of the boys, and Isaac ended up sleeping in his stroller most of the way. I was surprised when we had only gone a little over an hour and Kolby and Eli both decided they were done with the trick-or-treating. The rest of the group continued on, but we decided to stop when we passed our house. Then we got in the car and drove over to the hospital because Michael wanted to show off the kids in their cute costumes to the people at work. The boys each got a cup of water and ice from a water machine there, they said hello to lots of the doctors and nurses, Daddy took them into an empty patient room and showed them how he looks in patients’ mouths and ears and listens to their hearts, and a doctor gave them each a piece of candy. So that was fun for them. And then when we got home Kolby returned several birthday calls that we had missed while we were out trick-or-treating before going to bed.
And yesterday Michael had a day off. We decided to go on a date, and we ended up going downtown to the Joseph Smith Building to see the movie in the legacy theater about the life of Joseph Smith. We had seen it once before at the Mormon Battalion visitor center in San Diego, but at that time Eli was a baby and was being very noisy, so we kept taking turns with him outside the theater and missed most of the movie. We really enjoyed it this time. That will definitely be one worth getting when it becomes available. After that Michael surprised me and stopped at Leatherby’s for an ice cream. It was nice to go out without the kids.
And right now Michael and the boys are napping (Michael is trying to prepare for his upcoming night shift). So, we had a good (full) week. And looking at our calendar we have another full one coming up – with doctor’s appointments and flu shots for 3 of the boys, voting on Tuesday, piano lessons, family photos, Kolby and Isaac’s birthday party, and a primary program practice. Well, at least things don’t ever get too boring at our house. :)
So, this last week we had something planned every day. On Monday I spent a good portion of the day mixing up a big batch of my favorite soup – a chicken and vegetable recipe that my mom used to make. Then that evening Michael’s Dad and Grandma Bradshaw came for dinner and family home evening because Michael’s dad was in town for work this week. After dinner and desert, Michael did a family home evening lesson with the boys about prayer, and then we carved pumpkins for our activity. The boys had fun pulling the gunk out of the pumpkins, and I think they turned out pretty cute (pictures to come).
On Tuesday evening, after Michael went to work – Michael has been on one of the less-desirable ER shifts this week from 5pm to 2am. We really liked the 2pm to 11pm shift of last week, because he got to be home to enjoy some time with the kids during the day when they were awake, and he only missed out on dinner and bedtime with the family, but then he got off early enough that he wasn’t exhausted the next day. This shift until 2am made him tired during the days, so there was less fun time with the kids. But I think the next 4 days will be his worst ER shift as he starts tonight going in at 11pm and working until 7am, which just means that he gets to be home all day, but that he will have to sleep for most of that time. Too bad that his next two rotations for the months of November and December aren’t going to be a nice elective to get a little break. One month of internal medicine in September got long, and I can only imagine how long two months in a row will seem. Oh well. I was thinking about it, and we have been here for 5 months now – that’s going by pretty quick. Only about 8 more months to go. We’ve been told that the intern year is the worst of a doctor’s career, and then it should gradually start getting better from there on out (and once he gets into dermatology next year I am hoping that that will be an even better schedule than some other residents have). But we’ll just have to wait and see how that goes.
Anyways, on Tuesday night Brother Adamson from the ward came over and had me show him some of the features on Photoshop. I was excited to do that, because I love to use that program. It was a little frustrating that my computer was having such problems that it ran extremely slow while he was here, but I think that he hopefully still got something out of it.
On Wednesday Kolby had his first piano lesson with Emily Harker, a girl in our ward. I was very impressed with how well she explained the ideas of piano playing to a new learner and how she listened to him. I think that he did pretty well – he learned how to hold his hand, and which fingers go where, and they went over two different short songs that we have been practicing since then. He was excited to go to the lesson, and he likes to practice too, so that’s good. On Wednesday night I took Kolby, Eli, and Camden to a Halloween party at our church, where the kids got to trick-or-treat through the church hallways and get their faces painted. And Wednesday was also Grandpa Dick’s birthday – Happy Birthday!
On Thursday morning Dorene Lynch came over and we set up the Relief Society blog, and then I spent quite a bit of time getting that all put together the last few days. Today I need to add some more announcements to it, but mostly I think that the set-up is done and I will just need to keep up with new announcements and anything that people send me to post to that blog. The other fun thing we did on Thursday was that I took Kolby out for his night out, and we went to see the Disney movie about the robot, Wall-E, at the dollar theater. He enjoyed it, and I enjoyed going with him. He likes to sit on my lap when we go to a movie together, and he is such a sweetheart – it’s nice to see how each of our kids are on a one on one basis (as my mom said – she liked us kids a lot more individually than when we were together).
Friday was Kolby’s 5th birthday and Halloween. That morning he and I went to the grocery store together to get him a special birthday breakfast (since we are having his party next week so we didn’t have a cake that day). He picked out chocolate milk, donut holes, and cinnamon rolls, and we came home and enjoyed them together. And we gave Kolby his present – 7 new Book of Mormon character figurines. They are little plastic figurines of characters, such as Nephi and Moroni, from the Deseret Book store that the boys like to take in their “Sunday bag” to play with at church. We didn’t really want to get the “bad guys,” so we picked out almost all of the “good ones” (there were two others that we didn’t get, because they didn’t have them in the store when we went). Thank you, Grandma Debbie and Grandpa Dick – we used the birthday money that you sent for Kolby to pay for part of this gift. In the afternoon Michael had to go to work, and he helped me get the boys into their costumes before he left. We met at the Bentley’s house, along with at least 6 or 7 other families from the ward, to go trick-or-treating around the neighborhood together. It was fun to go as a group. I think that maybe going with just 2 or 3 families would probably be ideal, though, just because Kolby wanted to run ahead with the older kids and Camden was a lot more slow, so Kolby got 3 or 4 houses ahead of me at some times (there were plenty of adults in the group to supervise the kids in the front of the group and those in the back, but I would have rather had all my kids stick together with me – but I couldn’t really tell Kolby he had to stay with me instead of running with his friends). But either way, it was fun. I got some cute pictures of the boys, and Isaac ended up sleeping in his stroller most of the way. I was surprised when we had only gone a little over an hour and Kolby and Eli both decided they were done with the trick-or-treating. The rest of the group continued on, but we decided to stop when we passed our house. Then we got in the car and drove over to the hospital because Michael wanted to show off the kids in their cute costumes to the people at work. The boys each got a cup of water and ice from a water machine there, they said hello to lots of the doctors and nurses, Daddy took them into an empty patient room and showed them how he looks in patients’ mouths and ears and listens to their hearts, and a doctor gave them each a piece of candy. So that was fun for them. And then when we got home Kolby returned several birthday calls that we had missed while we were out trick-or-treating before going to bed.
And yesterday Michael had a day off. We decided to go on a date, and we ended up going downtown to the Joseph Smith Building to see the movie in the legacy theater about the life of Joseph Smith. We had seen it once before at the Mormon Battalion visitor center in San Diego, but at that time Eli was a baby and was being very noisy, so we kept taking turns with him outside the theater and missed most of the movie. We really enjoyed it this time. That will definitely be one worth getting when it becomes available. After that Michael surprised me and stopped at Leatherby’s for an ice cream. It was nice to go out without the kids.
And right now Michael and the boys are napping (Michael is trying to prepare for his upcoming night shift). So, we had a good (full) week. And looking at our calendar we have another full one coming up – with doctor’s appointments and flu shots for 3 of the boys, voting on Tuesday, piano lessons, family photos, Kolby and Isaac’s birthday party, and a primary program practice. Well, at least things don’t ever get too boring at our house. :)
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