I over think things. When I have an event coming up or am planning to host something at my house I often think through scenarios in my head and try to predict how everyone will behave and what I can do to lesson the impact of my hoard of small children. The rest of this post is a bit of a rant so if you want to read my rant, click on the words read more below.
Isaac’s school is currently having a variety of fundraisers (have I ever mentioned how much I hate asking people for money and thus hate fundraisers?) They were suppose to get as many donations as possible. Any donation would let them walk and it took $15 worth of donations to get a T-shirt. I was inspired by my desire not to have my son feel left out so I contributed the $15.
Parents were invited to witness the grand event which consisted of watching your child, walk, run, and hop around the track repeatedly with his (or her) class. Very few parents took the opportunity. 
I brought all three of my girls and we made some signs to cheer Isaac on. This sign says “Go Isaac Go! Walk your fastest walk!†Charlotte carefully colored each word. She received many comments on her sign and was even photographed by someone I don’t know who was taking pictures of the event.
Nicole colored the sign on the other side which read “Walk your heart out! We love you!â€
After watching him go around a few times, I gathered all the girls and we took a lap with him. Before long there was a flock of first graders hanging onto the stroller so that it constantly bumped into feet as it moved around the track.
Nicole picked up a purple cone, placed it on her head and took off around the track. She didn’t care that she was running with a bunch of strange kids, she was just happy to be wearing a cone on her head.
Once around the track with my stroller mauled by children was enough. I put the stroller on the sideline and carried Ila around the next lap. Charlotte held Isaac’s hand and they ran together.
After their laps, they each got a water bottle and some time to play on the playground. The girls stayed to play with Isaac and the other kids on the playground. I had to drag Nicole kicking and screaming off the playground to go home at the end.
Here is a picture of Isaac with his class. His teacher (Mrs. Rader) is in the back with the dark colored shirt and bunny ears.
Ila has learned to pull herself up to standing position, she has not learned to lower herself back to the ground after standing up. 
So she pulls herself up, is happy for a moment or two, then starts to cry for help. In the picture below, her little feet started to slide and soon she was almost doing the splits. 
She keeps having this problem in her crib at night. She pulls herself up to look at Charlotte, then gets stuck standing up.
I’ve been taking videos periodically. but I’ve taken more than I want to share in a blog. Some of them are not blog worthy, others are great, but I could turn my whole blog into video clips if I tried to post them all and I assume that there’s only a few readers who’d like that. So I am going to start uplaoding all my videos to a set on flickr for anyone who really wants to watch videos.
Or go to this link.
Sorry for another video, but I thought Grandma Cochran would enjoy seeing these little videos I took of her son and granddaughter having fun together:
I just thought these pictures were too cute not to post. This is Ila and her second cousin, Sam. Ila is 7 weeks older than Sam, but obviously the smaller of the two, just look at those arms and legs!
They were delivered by the same Doctor at the same hospital (their mothers were scheduled to be induced on a Friday and they came naturally on the preceding Tuesday). 
They each have a first name composed only of three letters. They also each have a darker spot of pigment (birthmark) in a similar spot.
This is completely unrelated, but I absolutely love Ila’s smile in this picture:
I wrote about Ila’s feet awhile ago, but she continues to amuse me with the way she manipulates objects with her feet so hopefully you’ll excuse a second post (third if you count mentioning them in a post about my mother’s visit) on the same topic. I imagine myself telling her about her silly feet antics when she’s older, maybe I’ll show her these videos too.
In this one you can hear Nicole singing in the background:
A lady at the gym commented on her talent this week and said that several of the other gals at the gym found her skills amusing. This woman has also started telling me each time I pick the kids up that she’d be willing to take Ila home with her. It brings me much joy to know that the people who take care of my kids while I exercise actually like them.
So the week was hard. I came home from the hospital in some discomfort, but not anything unbearable. Just the knowledge that something had really been trashed in the back of my mouth. (It took me a couple of days before I even wanted to get a flashlight and look back there.) I settled in to bed and tried to just sleep through the discomfort.
As the anesthetic from the hospital wore off, the pain started to get a little more intense. Kathleen went out right away to get my prescriptions, but it took a couple of hours since there were four to fill and the pharmacy is about 20 minutes away. I was getting pretty uncomfortable by the time she got back with the pills.
I was given four (eventually five) prescriptions:
As of today, I’ve lost about fourteen pounds. It’s kind of a combination of nothing being appetizing, and everything being really painful to swallow. I had the weight to lose, really; I’ve been getting kind of fat in my old age. This took me from 190 to about 174, which is better for my size (I’m 5’9â€, with a kind of skinny frame anyway). That’s not the healthiest way to lose weight, but hey, I’ll take it.
The foods that worked for me were tuna sandwiches, gummy worms (you can get sugar-free energy chew here), applesauce, and otterpops. Last night, I begged Kathleen to run to Taco Bell and get me a Baja Gordita (also a Baja Chalupa, as backup). It stung a little bit going down, but it was so nice to eat something tasty.
So the past nine days are kind of a mélange of grumpiness, hunger, pain, and boredom. However, I find myself breathing through my nose more comfortably already (the doctor went ahead and took my adenoids as well). If I have any improvement in the number of throat infections this next year, I’ll call it a win. I had eight throat infections over the last twelve months.
That’s the summary for now. I’ll post more when I have my post-op appointment with the otolaryngologist.
My mom came down to Tennessee to help while Zach recovered from his surgery. She 
arrived on Friday night and was able to stay with the kids while I picked up Zach from the hospital and then got his perscriptions. Zach was miserable all week and barely emerged from our room. He ate almost nothing and mostly just wanted to sleep the week away (perhaps he will post more details about his torturous recovery). His reclusive recovery meant that my mother and I spent the entire week taking care of the kids together.
Charlotte really enjoyed lots of one-one time with her grandmother. They played games and read together and Charlotte invented several new kinds of hugs just for Grandma. On Thursday when I asked her if she wanted to go to the library with me for some one-on-one time she said “no, I like grandma Bunny more than you, mom.†Charlotte is generally always eager for time with me, so I could tell that she was loving every minute with her Grandma (and I wasn’t worried, I know deep down she loves me more).
Nicole was charming and cute, as always, and she took to her grandma right away. Nicole gave her Grandma great hugs and Grandma enjoyed hearing her cute funny vocabulary. When I took Isaac to school in the morning, Nicole came with me a few mornings and was very worried when Grandma didn’t get in the car too. She’d start to cry and call out “Grandma, where are you?†On Friday Grandma followed us to the gym in her car instead of riding with us. Nicole fell to pieces when she saw Grandma get into her own car. She screamed and cried and called out “Grandma, where are you?†and didn’t calm down the whole drive.
Ila is still mostly a mommas girl, but on Thursday when I went to Isaac’s school, Ila finally let Grandma hold her and play with her without crying and was good the whole time I was gone. She even ate the green beans that Grandma fed her. Grandma was especially impressed with Ila’s great skill in playing with toys with her feet.
Isaac really enjoyed reading with Grandma. He read some books to her and listened as she read to him. Grandma remarked on how neat it was to read with him because he asked such thoughtful and intelligent questions and he really seemed to be enthralled with every topic they read about. Grandma’s visit also gave me the opportunity to spend some time with Isaac at school which he was very excited about.
Upon orders from my doctor, I am having tonsils and adenoids removed. I’m 33, which people tell me is rough.
I’ve made as much preparation as I can think to do. I’ve purchased a number of soft foods, got some drinks, got my Camelbak filled up and ready (they say fluids are very important), and I’ve got a lot of technology and reading to amuse me.
Videos follow.
Because we miss you a lot and wish you were here.
Charlotte and Nicole Dancing:
Informative little Nicole:
Ila eats, claps, and “talksâ€:
Sorry, no Isaac video, I’ll have to capture one of him afterschool sometime for you.
I assume most of my readers do not want every particular about Isaac’s school experience, but in the interest of family history, I will be more complete than I would be if I were just writing this post for casual blog readers.
The first day of school was August 17th. We met his teacher the night before at a back to school night. Her name is Mrs. Rader. She has taught school for 37 years and this is her second time teaching first grade (she taught 2nd grade last year). She seems like the kind motherly type which I think is a good fit for Isaac since he tends to be shy and scared.
School Bullies?
The first day was a half day so we picked Isaac up at 11:15. He got in the van and started complaining right away that the van smelled like “stinky†(poo). When he got home, he was convinced that the whole house stunk and he only calmed down after I let him spray air freshener all over. I asked him lots of questions about his day and he had no complaints. He said Anne and Emma were at his table along with some kids he didn’t know and that his seat was on the end. He said that he enjoyed his first day. Later he complained that a boy was holding him and trying to hurt his head at recess. I emailed his teacher.
Within a few days he started reporting more incidents of kids picking on him. He said a kid was biting him on his arms and legs and that another kid told all his friends to hit him and that someone tried to steal his lunch. I became very concerned and called the school to set up a meeting with his teacher. She called me back a few hours later and said that she had talked to the boys and that it seemed to be a misunderstanding and that she didn’t see anyone giving him a hard time, but she’d keep an eye on him. Not knowing if he was making things up, I tried not to put any ideas into his head and I avoided questions about if other kids were mean to him that day. He had a few days where he reported nothing unusual, but before long he started telling stories that made no sense. He told me in a very heated voice that a boy in his class was trying to give him more math to do because the boy wanted him to stay at school for 100 years! I asked if someone tried to get him to do their math and said no. He said someone took his lunch bag, ate his lunch, then returned the bag. His stories have become so outrageous that I can’t believe them, however, I am concerned about why he’s telling me these obviously untrue stories. Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to spend some time in his class when my mom comes to visit so that I can get a first hand view of what’s going on.
Reading
I went into the school to pick up Isaac for a Dr. Appointment on Monday. 
The teacher said she was really glad to see me because she was excited about Isaac’s reading and wanted to talk to me about it. She had screened kids by having them read a list of words. Isaac was one of six kids who could read all the words. Those six took a test that gave them a reading level. Isaac’s level fell somewhere between 1.7 and 2.7 (first grade, 7th month and second grade 7th month). Without seeing the test, I assume that he was able to read some words at both levels, but did not read every word within that range perfectly. Because his scores are sufficiently high, he has started reading books at school and then taking quizzes on the books he’s read so that he can earn points towards rewards at school.
This doesn’t really relate to school, but a few weeks ago I had sent him to his room to get dressed and when I went in to check on him, he was standing in his underwear reading a book. I was very excited that he was enjoying reading enough to get distracted by it!
I’m also starting to wonder how he does in math since it sounds like the worst fate he can think of is having more math to do. Perhaps I should spend some time working on first grade math concepts with him.
Charlotte announced one morning that she had three dreams last night. One was good and two were bad. The bad dream was that ants would turn her socks into “sticky socks.†The good dreams were (1) watching something change colors that is not sticky and (2) sleeping in a downstairs room.
One day Isaac excitedly proclaimed “My reading skills almost go the whole way!â€
Charlotte has been telling me that she’s growing up. One day she was so convinced that her growth was obvious that she told me Dad would say “Oh Charlotte, you’re growing up.†when he saw her after work. The other day she said “Mom, you’re growing up. You’re growing up to be a grandma!â€
Charlotte announced: “When I grow up, I will be a mommy and I will have 4 kids. I will name the first one Isaac and I will name one Charlotte and Charlotte will be first, but not very first.â€
Nicole loves to color, but for some reason her favorite thing to color on is words. This means that every-time I write her name on one of her drawings, she scribbles all over her name. Here is an example of her Art:
While scribbling some of the red scribbles she kept saying “oh, no Bunny.†I don’t know if she was referring to an actual bunny or her Grandma Bunny. She also calls squirrels bunny for some unknown reason so she may have even been drawing a squirrel.
I started tutoring the kids this summer at the gym. Isaac has done really well at reading so I tried to focus more on his writing. I asked him write a sentence everyday and while he wrote, I worked with Charlotte. I had him to compose the sentence, then I’d write it out so that he could copy it.
Click Read more to read his Journal entries
I’ve been tutoring Charlotte in reading and she’s making good progress. I’ve been using a book I bought as part of my teaching program at BYU (Teaching Children to Read by Grant Von Harrison). It teaches a variety of skills including blending, sight words, and reading for comprehension. She is doing quite well with each skill. Blending has been the most challenging of the lot. Her tendency is to sound out individual letters, but just in the last week or two she has started really blending the sounds much better. Her reading fluency is good and continues to improve.
Here is a sample of her reading skills. I post this with the idea that this is the sort of thing that grandparents would be really interested in watching, but friends and casual blog readers may want to skip the video
Isaac doesn’t always take the time to add much detail to his drawings, or at least he hadn’t in the past, so when he came home from school with this drawing, I was impressed and decided it was worth hanging on the wall. I asked him the name of the picture and he said “wide seat for passengers†thus the title of this post.
Here is a copy with labels to help you decipher the drawing
