Thirty-Four and Nine Months

Thursday was a big day in our household as Duncan celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday and Brady turned nine months.  I think it's neat that it worked out that they were both born on the same day of the month...the eighth.  Whereas Duncan is a very perfectly proportioned, if not exceptionally proportioned in my opinion, adult, Brady is still undersized, as expected.  I took him in for his check-up and here were his stats:

Weight: 15 lbs, 13 oz, off the bottom of the chart
Length: 26 3/4 inches, 10th percentile
Head: 17 1/2 inches, 25th percentile

He gained 1 lbs, 13 ounces since six months which dropped him from the 5th percentile to less than 0.  This is the first time I've had any kid not at least be on the chart.  Aubree, who has always been on the small side, was 16 lbs, 10 ounces at this age, in comparison.  The good news is that his length to weight ratio is very steady and has been following the same upward curve each time.  If his length was growing rapidly but the weight wasn't following suit, they would be more concerned.  As it is, the nurse practitioner said everything else was perfect health wise and developmentally so there isn't anything special I should do.  He's just, quite literally, a little man.  And that's okay.  I figure I would rather have this problem than a problem being too big.  Anyway, the appointment went very well with him pretty much smiling the whole time at the NP and barely whimpering when they gave him his one shot.

This week has obviously been a little different as we adjust to life without a dog.  The major downside, besides missing all of the love and affection, is that we no longer have a vacuum cleaner, mop, highchair cleaner upper,etc.  I don't know how many times this week I've thought to myself, "Oh Dewey will just get it" when the numerous peas, hot dog pieces, soup, you name it, have landed on the floor from one of the kids.  Not to mention all the bits and pieces Brady leaves behind in his highchair.  These things would have gotten eaten up in the blink of an eye before.  Now, gasp!, I have to clean it all up myself.  What a pain.  But there has been an upside too.  Aubree has been very nonchalant about Dewey's demise which was very clear on Sunday afternoon when she meandered into the living room with a bowl of food, set it down on the floor, and stated to me, "It's okay.  Dewey died."  Previously, you would NEVER leave a bowl of food on the floor because, well, you know what would happen.  A few days later Calleigh was struck with another bright idea, "Mom!"  She says to me, "Since Dewey died, can we put a playground on the back porch?!!"  Yes, this is another bright spot.  We can now take ownership of our porch back.  It was the dogs' hangout and litter box area.  Now it is a clean slate and a potential money saver since we were able to remove the doggie door.  I don't think we have quite the room for a "playground" but we'll try and do something nice out there. Despite these dog-free advantages, I still miss him like crazy.

Going back to the activities of the week....We had a nice Sabbath last week.  It was neat to hang out in Sabbath School like a regular person instead of teaching.  Duncan, however, got recruited to do the computer for the music again, much to his chagrin.  After some naps, we enjoyed the Minnehaha playground and then on home for some supper and then a big treat.  Calleigh somehow got it into her head that she wanted to watch a movie and have popcorn and hot chocolate.  I could not resist her enthusiasm so Duncan went in search of a suitable family movie and finally stumbled upon Babe, a story about a pig.  The girls set up all their bedding in front of the TV and got into their jammies but Calleigh told me quite sternly, they would NOT be brushing their teeth until after they had their popcorn and hot chocolate. The movie held their attention very well and was a great success which is more than I can say for Aubree's hot (aka, luke warm) chocolate drinking.  That's just not a good combination.

Fooling around in Aunt Wanda's classroom.

She's only in a diaper because she spilled the hot chocolate on her pajamas.  Shocker!

Pooped out afterwards.

Sunday morning, we were in the hunt, once again, for our new dining room table.  We went to Rooms To Go and Kane's but couldn't quite find what we were looking for.  The girls had such a great time looking at and climbing on all the kids' bedroom sets so the trip wasn't a complete waste.

Monday and Tuesday were pretty routine days with trips to the mall, playground, and Publix.  Wednesday morning I was off to the dentist for a cleaning so Elaine came over to watch the kids.  They traipsed off to Phelps Park and got completely worn out because Calleigh fell asleep for a nap at about 3:00 which almost never happens.  If she does sleep, usually it's like at 4:15 right when the other two are getting close to waking up.  The excitement of the evening was that our front door got stuck.  The metal thing that goes from the door into the door frame, wouldn't come out of the door frame when you turned the lock.  Duncan had to take the door of the hinges but that still wouldn't work.  He finally had to take a hammer and smash the lock as hard as he could to get it out.  Of course, that completely broke it so he had to head off to Lowe's to get a new doorknob at 8:00 pm.  Not what he had in mind after a hard day at work.  So we have a new doorknob which is a little annoying because now we have two different keys...one for the deadbolt and one for the doorknob.

Trying on Easter hats at JCPenney

Brady is thrilled to be mobile at the mall playground.

Elaine put him in the kitchen sink while she made lunch for the girls.  Why didn't I ever think of that??

Although we have plans to go out tomorrow night for Duncan's birthday, I thought it would still be nice to do something with the kids to celebrate the day.  That's when I got the bright idea to go to Kobe, Japanese Steakhouse for dinner.  We've been wanting to go there because the chef makes the food right at the table in front of you and I had heard how neat it is for the kids to watch.  The best part is that you get $25 towards you meal on your birthday.  So I thought...Perfect!  We made a plan to meet Ron and Elaine there.  Things did not start off on a good foot.  We made a reservation for 6:00 but then at about 5:15 Duncan calls from work to tell me that his truck won't start.  That's very typical since about every four to six months, his truck will randomly not start for several minutes or hours.  We've taken it in and they can never find anything wrong with it.  We just deal it and hope it doesn't come at an inopportune time.  Fortunately, one of Duncan's colleagues was able to drop him off here...where I was going crazy because Aubree would not get dressed.  She is going through this phase where she only wants to wear long dresses (what we could call "Ellen White" dresses when I was a teenager) and unfortunately, most of her wardrobe does not meet this criteria.  She's even taken to wearing some of Calleigh's clothes since they're obviously longer but the ridiculously long sleeves make it completely impractical.  At any rate, she refused to get dressed because there wasn't a suitable dress.  Finally after my threats that I would take her in just her diaper but I was sure they wouldn't let her in the restaurant and she would have to stay in the van, she finally gave in, very begrudgingly.  I finally got us all downstairs and that's when I noticed that Calleigh's shirt had a bunch of stains on it.  It's those kind of stains that must occur when detergent gets directly on it.  The type that you can't readily see when you're putting something on but then when you look at it in good lighting you see what a mess it is.  So that prompted a whole wardrobe change for Calleigh who freaked out because it had matched perfectly with her new purple flip flops.  Then, finally, to top it off, Brady spits up on himself and we have the perfect trifecta of clothes changing.  And that, folks, is why it is impossible to get out of the house in a timely manner when you have three kids.

We finally make it to the restaurant and get seated with another couple.  It kind of reminds me of a cruise where you get randomly seated at a table with strangers.  The tables seat ten people and since there were only seven of us, they put us with two other folks. It turns out that the guy works at Cribs For Life which his father owns.  That's where we got our two cribs which we LOVE.  So that was kind of neat.  The waiter comes and asks us if anyone was having a birthday and Duncan raises his hand and goes to his wallet to get his ID...which is when he realized that he left it in his shorts pocket from when he went to the gym the night before.  Devastating!  Of course, they won't just take our word for it, who can blame them, and there went $25 down the drain.  Things didn't improve from there.  Being the horrible vegetarian that I am not liking tofu (other than the stuff Allen made), the only thing on the menu that appealed to me was some side order items like noodles and veggies.  Well, I could only make out about 25% of what he was saying (because of his heavy accent) but I was told emphatically by the waiter that I had to order an entree.  I could not order side items.  I was also trying to order that for the kids since the kid meals were all meat.  It was quite the ordeal.  In the end, I had to pay a $7 charge to "share" Duncan's meal (which obviously I wasn't going to actually share) so that I could then order those sides.  It was all very confusing and frustrating.  Thankfully the couple seated with us were good sports because I felt bad for them.  Anyway, after we got over that, things went pretty well the rest of the way.  The kids were all intrigued with the cooking process although Aubree cowered a little in my chair when the fire and smoke first started.  Brady was just wide eyed the whole time but didn't cry or anything.  In fact, the kids were all really good and surprised me with what they ate.  All in all, it was a great time although the check was obviously much steeper than I had anticipated.

Brady watching in awe.

She gave chopsticks a whirl.  

They at least gave him a birthday cupcake..much to Calleigh's delight.  

Afterwards, Ron took Duncan back to this office to see if the truck would start while Elaine came home with the kids and me.  Thankfully the truck started right up... a real answer to prayer.  When they got home we had cake and opened presents.

Decorating Daddy's cake on Thursday afternoon.

This morning we did our yard sale-ing and save for a few shirts for me and one for Duncan, it was a dud.  I was excited to be looking for stuff for our porch but didn't find anything.

One thing that I wanted to mention was this really cool app I found for my phone.  Have you ever wished when you were grocery shopping that you had some way to quickly tell if something was good for your or not?  Yeah, you can read the food labels but sometimes it's hard to tell or often, if you have your kids with you, you don't have time to go through all that.  Well, I found this app where you can just scan the bar code and it will immediately give you the grade (A through F) of the product, give you a description of why it got that grade and then also give you better alternatives.  The app is called Fooducate and it's free.  It's really, really nifty.

That's a wrap.  Have a Happy Sabbath!

Calleigh is really into climbing things lately.