Weekly Picture Share (May 12-17)
This kid loves the swing. He always hated it as a baby, but now he loves to superman swing. He also loves to sit in my lap and swing while I hold him:
Author Archives: Kathleen
Weekly Picture Share (May 5-11)
Sometimes I amaze myself by how I continue to have enough pictures to share each week.
On Monday, I watched some of Ila’s favorite friends.
Nicole’s 6th Birthday
Weekly Picture Share (April 28-May 4 2014 )
Autism
If you read my previous post, you’ll know that part of Nicole’s diagnosis included Autism. It’s ironic that the kid who is in some ways my most social child, is the one who is diagnosed with Autism.
Weekly Picture Share (April 21-27)
The diagnosis of Nicole, part 2 (the results)
We met with the pediatric neuropsychologist (Dr. Julien Smith) to receive the results of her evaluation last Tuesday (4/22). Dr. Smith said that she would send the full report sometime in the next two weeks, so what I’m sharing here is from my memory and may not be complete. I literally did not even write anything down.
The diagnosis of Nicole, part 1 (before the results)
We started noticing that Nicole was different than our other kids in more significant wayswhen she was two. I remember as her third birthday was approaching, Zach and I were trying to determine whether her “weirdness” was on the normal spectrum or whether it was disordered in some way. We went back and forth a lot with Zach tending to put her on the disordered side and me wondering if it was possible that she was in the range of normal. You can get help from Law Offices of Ronald A. Ramos for truck accidents who will take care of all the formalities to obtain legal help from government. If you got into an accident and are injured, you can contact a reliable lawyer who can help you get car accident injury claims to cover for the injuries and treatments. Utica injury attorneys has said that in case of accidents injured people should get legal help as soon as possible to claim compensation. Accidents are inevitable especially when it comes to auto accidents in such cases you can consult lawyers for auto accident injuries in Ventura as they can help you in claiming the damages for the loss sustained. An experienced car accident lawyer houston can also help you in claiming compensation for the injury and damages caused. With the help of such experienced attorneys, you will be able to claim compensation if you are being hurt in a truck accident or injured in some other accidents. People can also obtain injury attorneys serving in NY from here! 
The week of Easter 2014
I’m late on my weekly picture share post, but it’s been a busy week this week.
On Monday, I spent the day in Salt Lake with Nicole for her Neuropsychological testing. That evening we went out as a family to pick out some things to plant. Here are all the kids in the car with our new apple tree:
Spring Break 2014 Stay-cation
This week was Spring Break for my kids. We started the week off with General Conference. You may also notice that my family room is currently full of things, we demolished our storage room shelves and Zach is going to rebuild them to better suit our storage needs.
March ends and April begins, with a little bit of silliness
Charlotte has adopted some of Nicole’s sense of style. Charlotte rarely wears jeans anymore. She started raiding Nicole’s closet which meant she kept trying to wear dresses and skirts that were too small on her, so I had to go out and buy Charlotte some more casual dresses and skirts to wear to school. I have a rule that they have to have sleeves and wear either shorts or “skirt pants” (leggings) under their skirts or dresses:
The last week of March in which it was almost hot and then too cold
I’ve narrowed it down to 44 pictures for the week. Sometimes it actually surprises me how many pictures I take in a regular week. This week I took 214 which is about 30 pictures a day. I just find too much beauty in every day life.
I love Ila’s eyes in this picture:
The last two weeks
I was going to try a weekly picture share, but I missed last week. In a way, Facebook has been detrimental to my blogging. It’s just too easy to share pictures and information. Things I used to write more about here are now often shared in a line or two on facebook instead. I am going to try to be better about blogging, even if it seems redundant and I repeat pictures or information.
We had a Monday when there was no school and the weather was nice so we went to the park, twice. We played with one group of friends, went home and then returned with another group.
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House Projects: Big Kid’s Playroom
This one’s still a work in progress, but I thought I’d share what we’ve done so far:
BEFORE:
The first thing I did was remove the wallpaper border:
I painted two walls “Charcoal Grey” and the other two walls “Apple Peal” (white). I also hung a thing to hang kid’s pictures. After the painting, we removed the flooring:
Once the floor was stripped, I used a special cleaner then a product to seal the floor before painting with Garage floor paint.
I still need to hang some pictures above the art string. I’d like to include a giant map or some poster-sized framed educational posters. We also want to install either cupboards or worktables around the room and possibly add a sink where we already have the plumbing. By the way, when considering plumbing adjustments, it’s important to be aware of what causes main sewer line to clog, especially if we’re planning new installations. Also, we need to cut some notches for the new doorknob I bought.
We also need to add some more plugs and properly run the internet cables.
House Project: repaint the bathroom cabinet
I have been wanting to update all our bathrooms and this week I finally got started. Since I don’t have the budget to replace the cabinets, I thought I’d try painting them and replacing the handles. Here are some before and after pictures:
I love how it turned out. Now I want to paint the cabinets in our other two bathrooms!
Pictures from the first full week of March
The weather has been so nice again this week and we’ve really enjoyed to sunshine and warmer air.
I am not quite sure what Nicole was doing here, but it looks like it was lots of work.
Ila and McKell had a blast playing Go Fish together (I’m not sure why Ila was dressed as an elephant):
The next day they played Go Fish outside:
Charlotte and Nicole played a game where they kept changing the direction they were facing while swinging. They’ve been playing together almost every available minute.
Zach would probably be unhappy with this next picture, but I thought I’d share it anyway. Thomas and his friend had a little fight over an eating area, so I solved it by letting Thomas eat on the counter while I cooked dinner.
My washer instruction book warned me that I should close the door if I have kids or pets. I usually don’t close it so that any moisture can dry, I guess the washer people knew what they were talking about:
I love Charlotte’s silly face here:
I thought I’d share several pictures of the kids blowing bubbles partly because these pictures actually have Isaac in them. He tends to like to play inside with Legos and with the computer games and I don’t usually take many pictures of those activities.
We’ve probably just doomed ourselves to a late snow by planing flowers, but we did.
Thomas brought all the flowers over to Charlotte and started to pile them on her lap.
He likes to peak through the railings and say “at me” meaning “look at me.”
Some jumping attempts:
On Sunday, Ila and Charlotte watered the flowers:
Thomas is a little grumpy about not being able to just walk through the flower bed anymore.
Another look at me moment. Unfortunately, his mother forgot to wipe the chocolate milk off his face.
Thomas loves to run into my arms. He’d run back to a certain spot on the sidewalk and wait for me to say “Mark, set, go!” then he’d take off running and laughing with his mouth wide open:
This is Charlotte after returning from a visit with our sweet neighbor who gave her a bag of chocolate.
Pictures from this week
In my attempt to stay regular with my blog, here are some pictures from this week:
The weather has been nice this week. It’s probably just a tease and we’ll have snow again, but we’re trying to enjoy it while we can. Here’s Nicole enjoying her lunch of Mac ‘n Cheese outside:
Ila and Thomas enjoyed a walk in our double stroller. We always go around the block to look at the chickens. They love to yell at them and tell them to become chicken nuggets.
The girls had fun bouncing around:
When it rained, Ila asked if she could go out and splash in the puddles. It reminded me of our walks in Seattle.
Thomas and his little friend watching from the window:
Nicole’s indoor picnic. Partly I loved this because it was so nice and neat:
I loved her bedtime for monkeys for the same reason. She carefully spread the blankets out. What can I say, I’m a little obsessed with cleanliness and order and it makes me happy to see my children play in a neat manner:
The rain stopped and Ila went back out to jump in the puddles again:
Meanwhile the monkeys woke up and Nicole made them food. She pretended the book next to her was a cookbook.
At scripture time each night, Thomas runs to get a book and then sits down and starts flipping pages. It think it’s adorable, but the picture doesn’t quite do it justice:
Yesterday the girls were best friends all day long. They pretended to be magical princesses banishing naughty guys with beautiful things. They even went over with Charlotte to practice piano and insisted on going to her piano lesson as well.
Thomas loves listening to nursery rhymes on the computer. He spent a lot of time this week on starfall.com.
The many faces of Nicole
I just love how expressive Nicole is. Check out this myriad of emotions and expressions. She was telling me she’s concerned because she doesn’t know who she’s going to marry yet and she wouldn’t consider any of the boys in her class because “all the boys are bad.”
Recent snapshots of our life
I’m feeling a little uninspired, but it’s about time to update my blog, so here are some pictures I took recently.
This is Isaac making his Valentine’s box. He wanted something with some mechanical function, but he wasn’t all that concerned about how it looked. I never saw how it ended up, he had to deconstruct it to take it to school because it was too big.
Thomas’s 2nd Birthday
I made his cake the day before and he was very pleased with it. He kept trying to taste it. He did succeed in sampling some of the frosting in one spot on the front before I pushed the cake all the way back. He was so upset when he couldn’t reach it, that I had to hide it in the guest room until he forgot about it.
Since he hates getting dressed so much, as a birthday treat I let him wear the clothes he fell asleep in the night before. He started his day with one of his favorite activities, playing with cars on the floor.
I made Cinnamon Crumb cake for his birthday breakfast. He loved it.
Everyone loves to make the birthday kid happy. Here is Charlotte making him laugh:
Isaac made Thomas a birthday train track to play with before going to bed the night before:
His birthday happened to fall on a day we watch Ian. Ian is also 2 and gets along really well with Thomas. We took Ian with us to Walmart to buy birthday balloons and diapers. As a special birthday treat, I bought the kids a cup of popcorn chicken and popcorn shrimp to eat as we shopped. Thomas loved the shrimp the most. I didn’t bring my camera with us to the store.
Thomas played with cars most of the day and was as happy as can be.
Zach gave Thomas a plane that he had purchased in Seattle on a work trip the day before:
Thomas loved it:
He even pretended to feed the plane Smarties:
Here’s the full view of Thomas’s outfit for the day. He seems to like to have either just one sock or just one shoe on:
We played one of his favorite games, where I pretend to be a slide. I only got one picture before his foot pushed my camera into my face and I decided that not all memories can be captured:
He played with trains some more:
Nicole made Thomas a special train out of medium sized Legos (Duplos):
After school, Isaac redesigned the train tracks for Thomas:
We went to a McDonalds with a Play Place for his birthday dinner. Then we had presents:
Last was birthday cake:
He fell to sleep pretty soon after cake.