Monday, August 20, 2012




I loved how Isaac was being so organized as he played outside the other day so I had to take a picture.  Isaac says the funniest things lately.  I'm kicking myself that I can't remember his latest conclusions he has drawn from our lives, which are always so funny.  But here are some other funny things he says:

Let's get the bad guys, right?
to James:  NO, we do NOT do that!
comsquitos
Mommy, I don't want to go to the temple.  I don't want to get baptized.
Let's put salad in our smoothies!  It's so yummy!  (salad=spinach)
Mommy, I am bigger too!
I be nice to my brudder.
dirty diaper!  dirty diaper!  dirty diaper!  (over and over with wild giggling after each one)
Sister Newman, James is making a mess!



Oh, yes!  I just thought of one of Isaac's conclusions:  So I was taking dinner to a neighbor and Isaac asked why we would do that.  I said, "You know Aurora?  Her mommy had a baby so we are taking them dinner."  Isaac says:  "Yeah, we already had a baby, right?"  Me:  "Oh, is James our baby?"  Isaac: "Yeah, right?"  (as in been there, done that, won't do it again...)

Andrew's white coat ceremony


For those who care:
 





Thursday, August 2, 2012

Every day

The kids eat breakfast.  I take the kids for a walk or a run or we trade going to the gym and watching kids with our friend up the street.  Then we eat a second breakfast.  Then we play outside.  Sometimes on bikes, sometimes at the playground, sometimes in the dirt outside our house.  Whatever it is, we end up super sweaty and usually we have to hose off dirt.



Then James takes a nap and Isaac gets to watch 20 minutes of a movie.  Then I try to pay attention to Isaac and work on something like a workbook with him.  Then Isaac takes quiet time in his room.  Then we go swimming.  (Sometimes we swim in the morning and play outside after naps.)  James always needs a snack at the swimming pool because he doesn't enjoy it as much as Isaac does.



Isaac got some prizes for working on his workbook with me.  He's been doing really well to sit down and try writing, which has never been on his top fun-to-do lists.  One of the prizes he got was this set of diving toypedos.  He LOVES them.  After playing with them for two days and wanting to dive for them at the bottom, he started swimming!  So Isaac now pretty much knows how to swim, all on his own!  He can't swim very well with his head out of water but as long as he puts his face in he can swim pretty far.  We are so proud of him.  Now my trips to the pool are slightly more stressful because I feel like I have to watch Isaac a lot more than I used to.  So far he hasn't needed any help but it makes me nervous when he spends more than half the time at the pool with his head under the water!




James always has to wear his floaties, even if he doesn't want to get in the pool.  One time I let him take them off and then 10 minutes later he forgot they weren't on and decided to jump back in the pool.  I got him right away but I always hate to see the kids struggling under water.



I had to take some pictures of Isaac's new-found skill.  He also likes to swim to the bottom and pretend he's cleaning the sea-lion tank, because last week we went to the zoo's new exhibit where they have a tunnel you walk through and can see the sea lions; but instead of there being sea lions, we saw divers vacuuming the tank.




Isaac has such an active imagination and is always pretending he's packing up his moving truck or being a space turtle or being a crocodile.

James is getting pretty stubborn and will scream when things aren't going his way!  Yesterday he climbed in his booster seat and put the tray on and insisted on sitting there until the pizza I was making was ready.  He sat there for over 20 minutes waiting and intermittently screaming "pzza!"  James has learned how to run.  He gets going pretty fast and sometimes it's pretty out of control.  He has gotten many scrapes lately.  Recently he really banged up his face while on a Sunday walk.  The next day I started making bread by scalding some milk.  James had a runny nose so I wiped it and reopened one of his wounds.  Then Isaac was yelling to me that James was bleeding all over.  I walked into the family room and sure enough there was blood on the carpet and couch.  I cleaned it up and James started wiping his nose on the couch again so I decided it was time for a nap.  I took him upstairs and was getting him to sleep when the smoke alarm went off.  I ran downstairs to a smoke-filled kitchen and a scorched pan where the milk had been scalding.  I had to throw the pan away and air out the house and wash the walls.  I've been having more and more of these multi-tasking errors.

Anyway, James loves to flip through books and point out items of interest and he also loves playing legos with Isaac.  This is their best thing they do together.  James makes a pretty good lego tower.  He also makes a pretty good tower of little yellow heads.

We've been pleasantly surprised by this year's schedule.  We weren't happy that they changed the call schedule to 1 in 4 days but it has actually worked out pretty good because he gets to come home at 11 after having spent all night in the hospital.  On the old schedule they took overnight call 1 in 6 days but had to work the full day after.  Plus he gets home around 5 the other days.  So it's actually pretty good!  He still only gets one day totally off a week but we keep ourselves busy swimming, etc when he's not home.  I didn't love his first month where he was on a consult team that took patients until 7 pm.  The kids had many days where they didn't see daddy even after switching their bedtime from 7 pm to 8 pm.  But even when we were on that rotation a couple days he got to go in late in the morning so it evened out.  So we are all feeling like life is pretty good right now and we are all happy and doing well!