It seems like Isaac’s birthday was a long time ago, but by the time I decided to schedule his yearly check-up, I couldn’t get an appointment with the doctor that I wanted until today. So here are his stats:
Name: Isaac Hinckley Cochran
Age: 8 years, 2 months, 2 weeks, and 4 days
Height: 47 1/4 “ 8th percentile
Weight: 58 lbs 50th percentile
I couldn’t find a post with his last stats to compare.
A week ago we spent a Saturday in Portland visiting my sister.
Here we are on the drive down (Charlotte and Ila are sleeping, Nicole is practicing her first primary talk, and Isaac is tracking our progress on Zach’s other GPS, it’s the yellow and black thing in his hand):
You can only see the corner of Thomas’s blanket next to Ila. Here’s a little time-lapse video Zach made of our drive:
We haven’t been camping as a family since we camped at Zion when Nicole was a baby. (This is why). Now that Thomas is sleeping through the night, we thought we could try again.
We bought a tent on Craig’s list a few weeks ago. Here’s Zach assembling it for the first time:
Yesterday was Isaac and Charlotte’s first day of school. Each time I said the words “first day of school,†Charlotte got a little mad and told me that it was not her first day because she had already been to school last year. She would accept the phrase “first day of first grade.†She can be a little stinker about semantics!
This is the only picture I got before school with no coats on. Isaac wanted the shorts and long sleeves together, Charlotte liked the idea of wearing a dress:
I just adore my little Thomas. He is happy and sweet and all of his siblings love to make him smile, except for Nicole. She’s mostly indifferent to him. She has even tattled on him a few times (“Mom, Thomas is looking at me!â€)
He’s not crawling yet, but he’s starting to get more mobile. I put him down facing one way and often come back to find him turned around:
The following pictures were taken between August 4th and August 13th. I did write a few other blog posts about things we did during those days, so this is only some of my pictures.
This is from before I threw away all the chalk in the house:
I didn’t take many pictures from the day we went to the pool with some of our good friends while Zach was gone, but here are some of the few shots I took:
On Thursday (while Zach was gone) I told the kids that we would finger paint if they were good. We got some packing paper and finger paints out, but before we were even set up, Nicole grabbed the red and started squeezing it out and rubbing it all over herself. She cleaned off her hands by rubbing them on her arms and legs:
My last post was about our week without Zach. The next few posts will include some of the pictures I took that week. Starting with our Wednesday outing to my friend Megan’s house for a BBQ and fun outdoors with water to celebrate her baby’s first birthday.
Here’s Charlotte in the sandbox with the birthday boy:
Zach serves as an advisor to the 16-18 year old young men at church and as part of that assignment, he had a chance to go to Canada for a week of sea kayaking at the beginning of August. (insert subtle hint that I think Zach should write a post about his trip on our blog) That meant that I had a week of taking care of the kids by myself.
Here is a little video I took the other day of Thomas sitting. He has gotten really good at sitting and almost never falls over. In this video he kept rocking forward and putting his hands on the ground and it looks like he’s almost ready to take off and crawl:
Nicole has been putting items in her clothing lately. I failed to get pictures of her walking around with toys hanging out of the front of her pants, but here are a few pictures that I did take of her with items in her clothing:
I had to take the water bottle out of the front of her dress to buckle her into her car seat and she cried when she couldn’t fit it back in there:
You can’t actually tell in this picture, but she had a straw in her swimsuit and she got very mad when I tried to remove it.
Here she is asleep with a kitchen timer in her shirt:
We went swimming at a pool with friends and she refused to remove the Nerf Dart from her swimsuit:
This one is only somewhat related. She’s holding a chicken tender between her legs (I don’t know why she didn’t just set it on her plate while she took a drink):
Zach’s sister Bethani sent a little soldering project for Isaac’s birthday. Isaac loves building and creating things, so he was thrilled. It inspired him to start collecting odds and ends which he wants to build into a robot one day. Here are some pictures of Zach and Isaac working on Isaac’s project:
Zach ended up doing the actual soldering part since he wasn’t quite ready to let Isaac work with such dangerous equipment.
Here’s what they made:
It’s a name tag that with LEDs that light up to spell Isaac’s name. He can push the button on the front to turn it on and then modulate which LEDS light up.
I am always taking pictures that I intend to post with a comment or two, but i’ve gotten way behind on my blogging, so here are some pictures starting on July 20th:
Movie night is always on Friday night. Before wondering where to buy adjustable beds, we used to make beds on the playroom floor and let the children watch movies tll they fell asleep, but they started taking longer and longer to fall asleep so now we give them one movie after bedtime in the living room and we usually provide popcorn or some other snack:
I’m still trying to figure out the best way to grocery shop. I don’t want to go after bedtime because I have so many other things to do then (it’s my first time all day that I can do whatever I couldn’t get to while the kids were awake). So I go during the day which means during the summer I have 5 kids to take with me. Usually I put 3 kids in one cart and have two kids walk. On this particular day I tried two carts. I had Isaac push the second cart. 
Only it didn’t work out as well as I had hoped. Isaac could barely see over the top of the cart and he was terrible at pushing it through the store. He would make wide turns at the end of isles and I had to grab his cart to stop him from running into other shoppers many times. I soon felt silly and embarrassed about the spectacle of me with my two shopping carts and 5 children. So now I’m back to one cart and looking forward to having a few less bodies on it when school starts back up.
On Tuesday we went to Kelsey Creek Park in Bellevue with a friend. I think we arrived at the park around 1:00 and didn’t leave until almost 5:00—we had such a great time.
The park is awesome for little kids. Everything was small enough for Ila and the bathroom was right next to the playground (it’s the white building behind the second picture):
Name: Thomas Deane Cochran
Age: 6 months, 4 days
Weight: 16 lbs. 25th percentile
Length: 24 1/4 inches 5th percentile
Head Circumference: 18 inches 95th percentile
Last well check (4 month) comparison:
Age = + almost 2 months, weight = +2 lb 9 oz, length = +2 inches, head = +1/8 inch
I can’t remember why were were talking about it, but I told Charlotte about a time when I was a member of a secret club that did nice things for people (I think it was called the Merry Men and Women or some such and my older sister Barb was a founder, but I don’t really know how it was founded exactly and by who).
Charlotte decided that she wanted to start a club called “The nice club†and do nice things for people. She asked me for ideas for what their club could do. I recommended picking up trash around the neighborhood, but I couldn’t come up with any other ideas that would actually be helpful to my neighbors and require no work from me. The kids decided to give little gifts to people and gave away some of Thomas’s toys which I had to ask them to retrieve. Then they decided to give away some of their own old and broken toys which, as you can imagine, were not cherished as they had hoped.
But I like the idea of them thinking of other people and doing nice things. So I ended up committing to bake something for them to give away. I gave them some paper, stickers and pens and had them make little cards that said “from the nice club†to attach to a treat:
So the next day I made them the simplest, cheapest thing I could think of—little chocolate cupcakes with no frosting. They were from a box mix and were not very tasty, but I didn’t have the time or energy to make them something better. Here they are getting ready to deliver some treats:
Do you have any fun ideas for The Nice Club which would require little work from their mother?
Now that I’m not sharing all my pictures on flickr, I am trying to share a few more here. Here are some recent pictures:
I was having one of those days when Thomas wouldn’t let me put him down, so I had Zach hold him, only Thomas was only happy if he could see me. Zach’s solution was to lay on the couch and prop Thomas up so that he could see me over the top of the couch while I made dinner. Every time he lowered Thomas down where he couldn’t see me, Thomas would cry:
