Thursday, February 25, 2010

Just some pictures

The few pictures I have from the weekend trip to CoCo Key.
Waiting for the Uncles and Aunt to arrive.

Posing with her new My Little Ponies and Onkteb. Note that she's wearing her skull pants for Uncle Jeremy.

Ben wanted to photograph the new ponies too.

Over a week's worth of updates

Wow, how have my loyal blog readers survived without any updates for one week?
The reason there were no updates from Friday through Sunday was because Brian and I packed Addie and Benjamin up and drove to a water park in Massachusetts. Onkteb, Uncle Jeremy and Aunt Amanda met us there and played all day on Saturday. It was a really nice time. I don't have any pictures from inside the water park. I do have a few which I'll post later from pre-water park festivities. Two funny stories from there. Jeremy bought underwater cameras for our use at the park. Each kid got to use one and they were stoked to capture everything. Addie took her first picture and then stood staring at the camera. She waited and waited. Then she exclaimed that the camera must be broken, because she can't see the picture. Apparently her non-LCD screen wasn't working. It was just a sign of the times for us, because it's probably the first time she dealt with a non-digital camera. She would be even more shocked to learn that Uncle Jeremy had to drop those cameras off for the film to be developed. Imagine that?! When Addie was arguing that her camera was broken, Ben knew exactly why... "It only works underwater, Addie." So cute.
This week has been spent like so many other weeks nowadays. Puzzles are very popular, as is coloring. The Ah-lympics (as Ben pronounces it) are on every night. Ben enjoys the risky sports and frequently tells me "I want me and Addie to do that." Whenever he sees a crash or a spill, he tells me, "that's dangerous. I wouldn't do that."
Tuesday began this session of swim lessons, which were fantastic. I really am impressed by how much they have learned in that last six week session. Now both are completely content, if not ecstatic, to have their heads under water. This week they both successfully floated on their backs unassisted. After lessons is family swim, which we participated in. Ben spent the whole time jumping off the side of the pool into the water and then swimming with his head under water for long periods of time. Very exciting. By the end of it, he was looking a little like a drowned rat, with glazed eyes and the look of not feeling too well. I think he gulped a lot of pool water, which is never a pretty thing. Now I am wondering if he's not actually holding his breath underwater, but perhaps is just gulping away under there.
Addie is really into spelling words right now. She gets it, in a major way. She'll even be like, "Ask me how to spell cat. C-A-T. There. Cat" and then she starts with the next three or four letter word. It's funny because as much as she understands the phonics of the letters and in her head can sound them out, when she's actually reading words she's at about a 50% success rate right now. Just interesting how two different parts of a child's brain have to be able to click at the same time to have it all work.
We got notice that she was accepted at a bilingual charter school for kindergarten!! She'll be in a dual-language immersion program, where 1/2 of her classes are in Spanish and the other 1/2 are in English. The student body is made up of 50% native English speakers and 50% native Spanish speakers. This is a really cool experience and program. Research has shown when children start in kindergarten, within six years they are completely bilingual, biliterate and bicultural. Pretty awesome, right? The second best part of it, she has a uniform to wear!! And it gets Addie out of having to attend her feeder pattern school, which I said there was no way I was sending her there. So all around, hooray!
We're having yet another major snow storm starting today through tomorrow. Prediction 8-12 inches of snow. Really. Um, don't we live in Delaware? Not cool. Not cool at all.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

No therapy necessary

So apparently the 'r' sound doesn't become a consistently pronounced sound by the majority of kids until the age of 6. Not to say that there aren't a bunch of 3 year olds who say it clearly, because there are, but it's not an issue for a soft 'r' in articulation until a child is 6 years old and even then it's not really worrisome.
As the therapist told me, "language is not an issue for her." Really?!? I'm shocked.
I felt like a stage mom, b/c I said "my only concern is the r sound and she loves to perform and if she is singing something with the soft r..."
I feel good to know that it's not something to worry about yet. Hopefully she'll outgrow it. The only recommendation was to try to stretch out the r sounds in words, so "rrrrrrrrred" and "rrrrrrainbow" and "drrrrrrrraw."
We'll see how it goes. Just good to know no therapy is needed!

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Speech therapy

Addie has her speech therapy evaluation tomorrow! We all know she's amazingly talented verbally, but her pronunciation of words involving the letter 'r' of which there are many is clearly not correct. She's excited to begin speech therapy and we're really playing it up to be fun and a cool thing to do. In fact, what makes it cooler, is "Mommy used to go to speech therapy when she was a little girl too. She couldn't say 'truck,' see? I can say 'truck'. Truck." I'm sure she'll do well and we'll have a clearly enunciating girl in no time flat.
To demonstrate just how cool it is, Ben has decided to start pronouncing "car" as "carl". He's curling his tongue up on any word that ends with 'r.' When I corrected him last night, he said, "I think I need to go to therapy too!" We'll have to find something special for him to do while Addie's at speech each time.
Her mispronunciation is cute now, but it's not cute as she gets older. Right now no one makes fun of her for it or makes her feel different because she's not saying the 'r' sound, but that will change one day and we'd rather nip it in the bud before that point.
Will keep my loyal blog readers posted on her progress, which should be swift I think.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Major snow again

Why not add insult to injury and have Mother Nature gives us 2 feet more snow on top of the almost 30 inches we got, oh, four days ago?
My little snow bunnies don't mind it though!
Modeling their new hats from Onkteb and Aunt Gail
This snow is thick, wet, packing snow, unlike this weekend's. Addie and Ben each started with a little snowball and kept rolling, rolling, rolling.
They chose to play on the swing set today. Here's Addie swinging on her belly. Notice how her belly is basically touching the snow? Yeah, that's cause we have nearly 3 feet of snow there.



There has been one casualty of this storm...the big tree in our backyard which protects us from the building behind us has had several branches break under the weight of the snow and the blizzard winds. I'm kind of worried about how it'll look once the snow is all gone. Luckily it's far enough from our house that it's not a threat to the house, but our poor shed (aka the holder of Nourie World) may not make it out ok.
I'm sure there'll be more to share later on.
Anytime the snow wants to stop, we're ok with that. Unfortunately, the blizzard warning is through midnight and it's only 4:15pm.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Can you see how Addie's different?

Compare her to her classmates....see what you can figure out.




In case you can't tell, my daughter's mouth is the only one that moves through each song. She's a singer at heart, and as you'll see, not really a dancer, but she has fun, which is the most important.

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Playing in the snow

Ready to go boarding.
The snow was so deep, the kids couldn't get through it easily at all.

Brian made some trails for them to sled down.

And then you can see, it was quite difficult to get back up.
After sledding was over, it was time for the snowman making to begin.

We ended up with a Mommy snowman, a Ben snowman and an Addie snowman.



Whole lotta snow!

Well the first storm of 2010 came with a vengeance. We ended at 28.9 inches officially, but with the drifts we have some areas with 4 feet of snow...as you'll see below. The fence around our backyard really makes for some nice drifts for the snow to settle in.
As the snow was still coming down, the swing set got buried deeper and deeper.
Once the snow stopped at about 3pm, Brian and I headed out to shovel. This is our first use of the incredible Yukon shovel that Jeremy and Amanda gave us for Christmas (and swear by). It's basically the size of 4 shovels and takes about 3/4 of the stress off your body as you push. Pretty amazing. We were the talk of the neighborhood with it.
Here's a good picture for perspective. That's Brian once he shoveled outside of our driveway gate, so we could attack the driveway. That's a 4 foot deep blanket of snow across the entire driveway.
Can you imagine how long that took us to clear? About 3 hours. The biggest problem was figuring out where the heck we were going to put all of the snow!

Looking up our street after we had been out there for 4 hours straight. A nice man on his bobcat came by and did one pass-through for the street.
All overnight the city crews were out plowing and then hauling the snow away. It's too much for them to leave on the street just by plowing, so they have to pick up the plowed snow in dump trucks and then dump it into the river.
The playing in the snow will be intense today!!! And we're slated for 10 more inches of snow from Tuesday to Wednesday!

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Happy birthday to Pam!

You've gotta love the ad libbing. Glad my girl has her priorities straight. And love Ben hiding throughout the whole song!
We hope your day was wonderful and we're so glad you're back in our lives!!

Monday, February 1, 2010

Missing in Action (or the Bahamas!)

Because I'm incredibly blessed to have the most wonderful husband in the entire world, this past week we spent on a cruise to the Bahamas! It was my surprise destination 30th birthday trip (remember Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon last year for him). Until we landed in Orlando International airport on Sunday morning, I didn't know where we were headed. Brian had packed one bag of cold weather clothes for me and one bag of warm weather clothes; so I really had no idea where we were headed. Luckily he brought the correct bag on the trip!! Once we landed in Orlando, I wondered if it wasn't an adults only Disney trip. We walked to the Carnival Cruise desk and I found out.
Here we are on the bus ride from the airport to Port Canaveral, where we left from.
Checking out the "serenity" area of the ship, where no children were allowed. See those white poles? They are buzzers to call a bartender over to you. Seriously. How far apart are those two? About five feet. Heaven forbid you have to move off of your lounge chair to order a drink!
Brian surprised me with a suite with full balcony!! The room was ENORMOUS.
This is us right after we were allowed in the room. We boarded the ship at about noon, but had to wait til 1:30pm to get into our rooms. We set sail about 4:30pm.
You'll notice most of the pictures are from this angle. This is dinner the first night.
The first morning on board happened to be Brian's birthday. Here's his breakfast birthday picture.
Us at dinner the 2nd night, which was formal night. I'm wearing my emerald necklace, which Brian surprised me with by getting the chain lengthened so it didn't cut into my collar bone each time I wore it.
The water the first day in Freeport, Bahamas. Freeport ended up being a bust, because the winds were extreme and therefore no one was allowed in the water. Our snorkeling trip got canceled so we tried to go to a resort for water sports, only to find out that it was "red flag" on the water and no one was allowed in. So we headed back to the ship.
Our second port of call was at Nassau. Brian had booked the "beach day at Atlantis." Well, as you can imagine the water was ice cold, so we made this instead. Then we decided to upgrade to the "water park option" at Atlantis, so we could do this...
Yup, that's my husband shooting down a 60 foot vertical drop of a water slide, the "Leap of Faith." It was incredible. We had so much fun at the water park, riding the inner-tubes through rapids and the lazy river, going down many water slides, and enjoying the beautiful surroundings. Atlantis is a gorgeous resort, and after visiting it we've decided to consider it as a future vacation destination for us and the kids. There were so many things to do and around every corner is an aquarium. In fact, as you'll see in the videos below, on the Leap of Faith the slide actually goes through a shark tank! It's just amazing, not to mention fun and exhilarating.
Brian decided to dress up for the occasion.
This is another night before dinner- didn't realize it was out of focus. My bad.
At the farewell finale the night before we arrived back in Port Canaveral.
The sunset from our balcony the last evening.
The last night on the ship.
So we arrive at the airport on Thursday morning and as we're waiting for our flight I tell Brian, "this was all so wonderful and nice, but I think this is the longest I want to be away from Addie and Ben." When we arrived at the Philadelphia airport and back in our car, Brian tells me, "I have some news that might be traumatic to you." Immediately my mind goes through all of the possibilities. He tells me there's good news and bad news and asks which I want first. I choose bad news. "Well we're not going to see Addie and Ben until Saturday afternoon." "The good news is your birthday trip is still going!" And we were headed off to a resort in the Poconos for skiing! We hadn't been skiing since Addie was 6 months old. Really, we still had the lift tickets on our ski coats to prove it!
It was a high of 12 degrees at the resort. Soooo cold.

My only picture of skiing. It was so cold. That's Brian at the top of the mountain. I realize looking at this picture that it could be misconstrued to look like cross country skiing, but let me assure you it was not.
I am so lucky to have such a wonderful husband and best friend. We had a blast together as a couple without any children.
Addie and Ben had their own excitement. They got to split the week between Muddy and Guppy and MomMom and PopPop! Talk about a good deal for them!!

Here's one of the videos from the Atlantis. See, we think of everything! ;)

This is on our ship. It was freezing cold and windy. Brian is such a trooper!