Nicole was very excited for her first bus ride on Monday. I had heard a rumor that the preschool bus provided door to door service which I was very excited about. It turns out, they pick up and drop off at the same spot as my other kids. She was assigned to Isaac and Charlotte’s morning bus, which meant she got to sit next to her big sister for her first bus ride ever.
Here she is getting on the bus:
I’m on the look-out for new ideas to lighten my load of chores so I was excited to implement some ideas from two of my friends. One friend (who also had her 5 kids 7 and under) told me that she had a laundry basket for each of her kids so that she could fold laundry during the day without her piles getting messed up when she got interrupted (which happens a lot when you have so many little ones).
Name: Thomas Deane Cochran
Age: 9 months
Weight: 17 lbs 13 oz 20th percentile
Length: 27 inches 5th percentile
Head Circumference: 181/4 inches 80th percentile
Last well check (6 month) comparison:
Age = + almost 3 months, weight = +1 lb 13 oz, length = +2 3/4 inches, head = +1/4 inch
Also, check out this kid’s teeth (he has 6 of them already)
At the end of last school year, Nicole’s Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) suggested that we consider having her re-tested to see if she would qualify for the special ed preschool. Nicole’s testing began the second week of October. She was given a “non-verbal†IQ test and she was evaluated for adaptive/social/emotional skills through ratings forms and observations. Although she didn’t understand some of the requirements of the IQ test, she received a score in the normal range. Her scores in the adaptive and social/emotional evaluations were low enough to qualify her for services under the educational classification of developmental delay* and she was recommended for preschool.
We had these fun little frogs on our sliding glass door,but they’re such good jumpers, that when Zach pulled one in for a closer look, it jumped away. 
Our suburban was down for about 3 1/2 weeks, but I’m lucky to have a husband who gave up so many of his evenings working on it and good friends who lent us their suburban so I wasn’t trapped in my house for most of a month!
This is from the day I thought I’d see if the things Zach replaced the night before had worked, it died before I got out of the driveway:
That was a term my dad liked to use. Did he have a song or phrase to go with it? I can’t remember.
Charlotte has been reading stories to Ila at night. Ila really loves it and doesn’t complain about going to bed as long as she can be in Charlotte’s bed (which by the way has a bed tent on it). They have slept together in Charlotte’s bed for the last 4 nights and tonight Charlotte asked us if Ila could just sleep in her bed every night. 
Thomas is crawling now, although it’s not a traditional crawl. He has a little bit of a bear crawl mixed in. It makes for a funny sort of hoppng crawl:
I’ve been making buckeyes and it has inspired me to write about them.
I was born and raised in Ohio (the Buckeye State). Although buckeye trees are found in other states, they are especially prolific in Ohio. We had some in our yard. The nuts are encased in a green pokey hull as they grow:
I usually just buy my kids jeans so they can dress themselves without worry about matching. Clothing that doesn’t just match anything goes in the top drawer and I pull it out occasionally when I help the girls with their clothes.
At some point, Nicole found her top drawer and started composing her outfits completely out of top drawer clothing which resulted in a lot of mis-matched outfits. Soon I discovered that she was not only just wearing top drawer clothes, but that her preference was for skirts. I found that if I offered an outfit with a skirt she got dressed right away without complaint or delay.
Recently, I picked up a few skirts and some leggings for modesty (we call them skirt pants). Now that I’ve indulged her in her skirt obsession, she will no longer wear pants and some of her outfits are not perfectly matched, but I suppose that’s just her style!
Here are some recent pictures of my little fashionista:
I haven’t spent much time the last few months labeling and sorting pictures, so I’m rather far behind. Here are the rest of the pictures that I meant to share from August:
Ila has mastered climbing up on the little neighborhood play thing and she’s proud of herself for doing it:
I wrote this post in my head as I was cleaning my bathroom uninterrupted this morning. Yep, you read that right, I was cleaning my bathroom in the morning and kids were not interrupting me while I did it. And the reason that I could do that is because a teenager who I go to church with was downstairs playing with my kids for 3 hours for free and she’s coming back tomorrow to do the same thing!
Before I go on I want to say that my personal faith is rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ and not in the fringe benefits. If all the wonderful things that I am about to write about didn’t exist, I’d still be a Mormon (You can read about all the amazing things that I believe here).
I hate being hot which makes Seattle a pretty good place for me to live. The only bad part is that when it does get hot (usually about 1 week in the summer), most people around here don’t have AC. So when the weather report was predicting that Thursday and Friday would be the hottest days of the year, I was not looking forward to them.
We planned a beach outing for the Friday (the post that I just wrote), but my only plan for Thursday was to go to the grocery store when it started getting hot. Only you can’t spend all afternoon at the grocery store, especially when you have 5 kids. Luckily I’m blessed with some awesome friends in our ward who called as I was unloading groceries to invite us to the pool.
These pictures are from August 17th when we went to Newcastle Beach Park with my cousin, Lindsay , my friend Mandy , and my friend Megan and all of their kids.
Here’s what the park looks like:
I have avoided signing my kids up for stuff, partly because I didn’t want to have to drive them to activities. I especially didn’t want to have my kids signed up for so many things that I spent most of our after school hours driving around. Only, somehow that has happened to me this year.
