This is Nicole’s current favorite book. She picked it out from the stack the day we came back from the library and she has talked about it or read it just about every day since. Some nights we read it to her multiple times:
She has several names for it. At first she called it a princess book. Now she either calls it “The Big Head King Book†or “His Head Goes Back to Normal book.â€
We thought it would be fun to start a new tradition this year and celebrate our wedding anniversary as the birthday of our family and have a piñata. We got a silly looking green dinosaur/monster and filled it with treats.
The kids enjoyed whacking it, but in the end it proved too tough and Zach had to help them.
I took Isaac, Charlotte, and Ila to their second cousin’s birthday party which featured a reptile show. They absolutely loved it and very excitedly told Zach all about it when they got home. Here are some pictures:
I love the range of emotions I was able to capture as they watched:
Ila was more interested in her second cousin (the brother of the birthday girl) than the show.
I walked into the bathroom recently and found the following scene:
(the black above her eyebrows is mascara)
Last night I found Nicole sitting on the changing table completely naked and pouring powder all over herself.
Everything was covered in a layer of powder and the air was so thick with it that I could taste it as I cleaned up the mess.
I have to say that I’m incredibly grateful to be married to such an awesome (and handsome) man who is now half way to 70!
We had a nice birthday celebration with just the 6 of us. We started the day off with a breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, and Orange Julius. We spent most of the day at home, but went out for lunch as a family at a little Mexican restaurant not far from our house.
I made his favorite cookies (pumpkin-raisin), and 7-layer bean dip.
He opened presents
with an audience:
Instead of cake, we had cookies:
And just for fun, we used re-lighting candles–the kids loved it:
Here’s a little video share of our Christmas Eve Nativity. It is by no means a well prepared and well executed Nativity, however, I thought it was worth sharing for those family members who weren’t able to be with us on Christmas Eve.Here’s last year for comparison. I think we improved a little—no one was crying this year and Nicole was able to at least say half her part before getting distracted.
Here’s another little nativity flashback (2008):
I’ve been meaning to write this post for awhile. As many of you know, we’ve taken Nicole in for some testing through the school district. 
Nicole is an energetic, friendly, creative little girl. She speaks clearly with good articulation and good sentence structure. She likes things that most little girls her age seem to like and she plays well independently. Of all our children, she is the most outgoing and friendly. It can be a little unnerving how easily she allows unfamiliar adults to pick her up and hug her. Many of our friends were surprised to hear that we suspected that something was not completely normal about her.
The tricky part is clearly defining our concern. Zach and I discussed for months whether we thought that maybe she has an issue/disability or is within the range of normal. Luckily for us, the school district is required by law to provide free testing for any 3 year old whose parents request it (there is testing for younger children through early intervention as well).
Her problems seem to lie primarily in the area of language comprehension. I say seems to, because it is hard to know what someone else comprehends. This problem is most clearly demonstrated
in a question/answer situation. She does not respond to most questions in a typical way. It’s almost as if she doesn’t understand questions or that she doesn’t understand that a question requires an answer. She does not answer even the most basic questions like “what is your name†or “how old are you.†When you ask her a question she often repeats part or all of the question or gives you a confused look and doesn’t respond at all. This problem was very clear in the testing situation because asking questions was their primary means of trying to evaluate what she knows. By the end of the first screening test, my concern had increased because I could see that if something didn’t change, she would have a lot of difficulty in a school setting. The official testing placed her at a 28 month level for comprehension which is more than a year behind her age.
She also has difficulty following verbal instructions. In a group setting if a request is made of the group, she will wait until the other kids respond and watch how they respond before responding in a like manner. She does not seem to understand unfamiliar requests without some sort of visual que. I say unfamiliar because there are some routine requests that she can do on her own such as put on her shoes or sit in her seat. An unfamiliar request can be as simple as “point to the purple block†or “stack the blocks.†I observed her in a group where she was asked to circle a snowman. She knows what a snowman is and she can draw a circle, but she didn’t respond to the directive until she looked over and saw a peer circling a snowman.
For a long time, we had a hard time getting her to understand discipline. She would cry when we raised our voices at any of the children as if we were yelling at her, yet she would smile and laugh or just look confused if we scolded her. It was as if we were speaking a different language, she often seemed to be trying to interpret our tone or facial expression more than our words. We finally had a break-through in discipline when we spanked her. She soon learned that if we said the word spank, then she needed to stop what she was doing.
I’ve also noticed that when she gets emotional, she seems to lose the ability to comprehend. She would understand and respond appropriately if I asked her to go get dressed, but if I yelled at her to get dressed she would seem flustered and confused and just cry.
Sometimes she’s just odd. The other night we had some people over for family night. In the group were some adults that she was a little familiar with and some adults that I don’t think she had ever met or interacted with before. She climbed on each guest’s lap, but only stayed for 2 seconds before moving on to the next adult. Then she hugged each guest’s knees. After hugging knees, she went around the room and felt their hands and announced whether they had warm hands or cold hands. Then she started stroking their shoes. She made no distinction between the adult she had spent some time with and the adults that she had never met.
Her social interactions with other children primarily consist of parallel play or copying what they do. She will play a cooperative game with Charlotte, but generally Charlotte directs the game and tells Nicole what role to play and what to do.
The results of her testing are that she qualifies for services under the classification of communication disorder and she will start 45 minute therapy sessions once a week at the school in January. I will be interested to see how she responds to these sessions.
I told Charlotte that she could invite 6 friends to a birthday party. She helped make the invitations by decorating them with crayon and cat stickers.
When her guests arrived, we put homemade cat headbands on and painted their faces. We had cat themed coloring pages/worksheets for everyone to do while we waited for all her guests to arrive.
We also played Jingle Cats music which is basically Christmas songs that have cats meowing instead of singing. Lunch was cat shaped peperoni pizza:
The girls picked out cat names and made cat collars (most of the girls decided their cat name should be “Hello Kittyâ€): 
Activities included “mouse-mouse-cat†(duck-duck-goose) :
pin the tail on the cat:
and musical cat beds (like musical chairs):
They also played a game where they had to find 18 toy cats that had been hidden, they had a meowing contest (they had to give their best meows in different moods = angry, sad, excited, sleepy), they played a game called poor kitty, and they played hot cat (hot potato with a stuffed cat toy).
The girls all gathered around for present opening: 
Also cake (the girls all helped put candles on):
They all helped blow out the candles and soon discovered that we had a few relighting candles mixed in:
Charlotte had a lot of fun and was very was happy with her cat party:
Here’s another catch-up post. We went sledding on the Saturday between the girl’s birthdays (December 10th) with some friends.
It rarely snows here in Seattle, and when it does, it doesn’t snow much–or at least that’s what I’ve heard. I haven’t been here through a full winter yet, but it hasn’t snowed yet this winter. We drove up into the mountains until we found snow and a good sledding hill. I think the pictures speak for themselves:
I took several short videos of sledding, but they’re not incredibly interesting so I’m only posting one:
After the snow, we warmed up and had a nice lunch with our friends before making a gingerbread house:
Charlotte’s birthday was on a school day this year which was just fine with her since she loves Kindergarten. We made cat shaped cookies for her class and decorated them to look like her cat (Jill). 
Charlotte helped me frost them. 
She started off her day with a special breakfast of sparkling apple-grape juice and a breakfast sandwich. 
I gave her the option of taking the bus or having me drive her to school. She choose to be driven to school. In the afternoon, I arranged a babysitter for the little girls and volunteered in her class from 1:00 until school ended at 2:38 then I was able to drive her and Isaac home from school. 
For dinner we picked Zach up at the Park n’ Ride and then went to Pizza Hut where she and Isaac were able to spend their Book-It certificates on their own personal pan pizzas. We skyped present opening and cupcakes with the Orem Cochrans (grandparents and aunts). Here is her cake (we ate cupcakes for her birthday so that we could save the actual cake for her party).
We also celebrated her birthday on the Sunday before with a dessert and some local Cochrans (Great-Grandma, Great Aunts, and Great Uncles) and on the Saturday after her birthday with a cat-themed birthday party (blog post to come).
Charlotte turned 6 on the 14th. I had so many things to do to get ready for her birthday and other things, that I had to post pone the post about her until now in favor of getting some sleep.
Charlotte likes to draw. Her artwork makes a sharp contrast with what Isaac 
produces. He always creates some kind of ship or machine that usually needs some explanation to understand. Charlotte’s drawings are more typical and resemble things like cats and people and bananas. The other day she was doing her homework and the assignment asked her to draw 10 animals and she drew them all with bananas on their heads and talked about how it would make her teachers laugh. When she had to draw 10 things she drew her cat with a disproportionately large body and 10 spots. She was so proud of her drawings, she imagined her teachers laughing all day at them. As she was drawing a picture of a friend with short dark hair, she announced that if you do a good job drawing her, she will look like an Astronaut.
I love this self portrait that she made at the beginning of the school year. The teacher gave each student a mirror and Charlotte noticed things like the freckles on her nose.
Charlotte loves having something to anticipate. She has been eagerly anticipating her birthday since October when she announced that it’s getting close to her birthday. She regularly tells me that she’s so excited for Monday because it’s family night. She also gets very excited about fun things they get to do in kindergarten.
Charlotte is very clever. I was worried about her having a hard time spelling her name since it’s both long and phonetically irregular, so I posted her name on her wall. I think she was about 3 when I found that she could spell her name both forwards and backwards. 
She learns things easily without being taught. I’ve often discovered that she has learned concepts that I was teaching Isaac. She figured out basic addition all on her own and started teaching herself multiplication the other day (she told me she had X sets of Y and that equaled Z –I wish I could remember the numbers that she used).
Charlotte is very confident in her opinion and personality. She’s proud of who she is and happily declares her favorite things to anyone who wants to know. Today she was talking about the differences between girls and boys. She said that boys like things like fighting and stupid stuff, while girls like beautiful and lovely things like cats, bananas, and princesses.
Charlotte likes to talk about marriage. I remember when the subject first came up that she wanted to marry Isaac. When I told her she couldn’t marry her brother, she said she’d marry his friend Sam. She said if Sam didn’t want to marry her, then she’d just marry someone in Isaac’s class that is nice to him. Now that she’s in Kindergarten she is finding her own marriage prospects. She told me about a week ago that she was going to marry a boy from another kindergarten class. Recently 
she has changed her mind and told me that she would marry Ander who is in her class because he is her friend. She even told her grandmother on the phone the other day that Ander is her boyfriend. I’m not a fan of kids pairing off so young, but after asking her several questions, I found that her understanding of the term boyfriend is nothing more than a friend who is a boy and that they spend their time pretending adventures involving prates and spaceships at recess.
Charlotte seems to do well socially. She considers anyone who knows her name to be a friend. Shortly after school started, she said that Catherine said she stinks. She didn’t seem embarrassed at all about it–her grandma asked her about kindergarten over Skype and Charlotte proudly proclaimed “Catherine says I stink.†Charlotte said that she was friends with everyone in her class except Catherine, even though they still know each other’s names. She eventually overcame that issue and now considers everyone in her class a friend. When we go to the park, she approaches other kids and introduces herself and then considers them friends as soon as she knows their name.
Whenever there is a birthday in Charlotte’s kindergarten class, all the students draw a picture about what they like about the birthday kid. The birthday kid draws a picture about themselves. This is what Charlotte drew:
She interpreted her writing as “I am OK when I fall down.†It’s funny to me that of all the things she could write/draw about herself, that is what she came up with.
With all the pictures and videos I took on Ila’s birthday, this post should be the next best thing to actually being able to celebrate Ila’s birthday with her!
It’s wacky hair day at school today:
One of the neighbor boys had some party poppers this morning, so Isaac added some color to his crazy hair on the way to the bus:
Here are some fun recent videos of Ila:
One of her favorite activities is having me write her name:
She was making our little nativity figures play ring-around-the-roses, but when I got out my camera, she decided to play the game herself:
My little Ila turns 2 tomorrow. She was named after my beloved grandmother, Ila O’Bryant. 
My grandma always seemed to just radiate love. My little Ila is the same way to me. Her siblings genuinely love her and enjoy being around her and she loves them too. There is some indescribable quality about her that draws us to her. After I pick her up from nursery, she’s always eager to go find the rest of her siblings. She’ll start calling down the hall “Charlotte, I’m coming.â€
I love her laugh. She finds joy in simple things and just seems to be genuinely happy most of the time.
I think she is our best talker. She regularly uses 5 word sentences and even attempts to say ridiculously hard words like Zarahemla. It’s funny to hear her talk so clearly because she’s still so small that 12 month jeans are loose on her.
She loves to read and count and sing. Whenever she sees letters somewhere, like on a sign, she starts singing the ABC song. She sings along with several of the songs on the CD in our van and has picked up many of the songs they sing in nursery. She knows all the words to the first verse of “You are my sunshine†and has even started to memorize parts of books that we read to her regularly.
When she wants to tell me something, she points her little pointer finger
at my mouth, looks directly in my eyes and tells me what she wants. She’ll often say something like “I want lunch.†I respond by saying “you want lunch?†and she’ll say “ok†in a cheery little voice. It’s funny because sometimes she turns my confirming that I understood her request into what sounds like I’ve just offered her exactly what she wants and she has agreed to accept it.
We color code things for our kids based on their favorite colors (Isaac = green, Charlotte = pink, Nicole = purple, and Ila = orange). [There is still some debate in our house over whether Ila’s color should be orange, but she was born in Knoxville and if you’ve ever been to Knoxville on a Friday during football season, you’d know exactly why her color is orange] 
Today, when we were at a preschool, Ila picked out a green bead and then said Isaac. Then she picked out a purple one and said Nicole. There were no pink or orange beads in the box, but after picking out several “Isaac†and “Nicole†beads, she picked out a red and named it “Charlotte.†The point of this story is that she makes connections easily and seems to have a high natural intelligence.
She is still the pickiest eater I have ever known. I could write several paragraphs about how illogical and odd her eating choices are, but for this particular post, I won’t describe them in detail.
What more can I say. I love my little Ila with all my heart. She brings such joy to my life and I am so incredibly blessed to be her mother.
I just noticed the other day that the pictures from my phone were mysteriously on my computer. This is good, because I have never taken the time to figure out how to get them from my phone to my computer (I know, I should be ashamed of myself). Anyway, here are two that I took at the grocery store one day (9/6/2011) that are amusing to me:
Charlotte loved to tell people that they had a banana on their head. It was a running joke in our house that was used daily for a long time. I think one of Ila’s first sentences was about bananas on someone’s head. On this trip to the store, I had put the bananas next to Ila and she immediately put them on her head and started saying something about having bananas on her head and, of course, Nicole reached over for her own bunch and joined in the fun.
I just love the surly look on Ila’s face in this picture. I think she wasn’t pleased when I placed a watermelon next to her in the cat.
This is Eustace:
This is a Eustace colored bunny that we saw at the pet store:
Here is a Eustace cow:
The kids love finding animals that look like Eustace. I can’t remember a long drive that we have taken where we haven’t found a whole pasture full of Eustace Cows. We call him our cow-colored cat and his coloring is so common, that we regularly find pictures of cats that look like him in adds or on bags of things such as cat food or cat treats. We sometimes jest that he has a secret life where he sneaks out to be in commercials or photo shoots.
Instead of an all inclusive detailed retelling of our day/weekend, I decided to just post a few pictures and comments on our Thanksgiving this year.
This is the Thanksgiving pie we made. We covered the top with cut outs of things we were thankful for that I also had cookie cutters in the shape of. The letters symbolize each member of our family (Dad, Mom, Isaac, Charlotte, Nicole, and Ila). We are also thankful for cars to drive, Christmas, cats, football, delivery trucks, a house to live in, stars in the sky and all the people we love.
I bribed the kids on Thanksgiving morning to do chores for me in exchange for a special snack. The snack consisted of min-egg rolls, pizza rolls, and sparkling juice.
We had a nice Thanksgiving meal at Zach’s Aunt and Uncle’s house. While the rest of us enjoyed a nice traditional Thanksgiving dinner, Ila refused to even taste any of it and only ate a bowl of peanut butter with some water to drink. She wouldn’t even taste the pie and ice cream we had for dessert!
On Friday we bought our first real Christmas tree and then decorated it. It looks rather small on top of the van, but it almost touches the ceiling and fills out it’s space in our living room well.
