We went to Richmond Virginia for my birthday weekend, flying on SkyBus, the new cheap airline that's based out of Columbus. I wrote about our whole flying experience on my Columbus City Guide blog, but just a quick recap here - the kids had their first flying experience, and it was a LOT of fun. They loved it, and we had a good time getting out of town and seeing new things. We went to the Richmond Science Center, the Richmond Children's Museum, and a place called Maymont. It is a 100 acre estate that includes a 1890's mansion, a petting zoo, aquarium, and BEAUTIFUL gardens. It was so nice! 

Natalie has now finished her first year of homeschool! (It went quite a bit into June because of the post-baby break we had to take.) We'll likely still continue with some things over the summer because she asks to do stuff every day, but right now I'm mostly focused on getting her curriculum decided for next year. This past weekend was the CHEO convention, and I got lots of ideas and tips from the workshop sessions, but the biggest help was the vendor hall. I found so many other options for curriculum that I had never known about. Now I just have to sort through it all and make a decision!

Last week Natalie went to vacation Bible school for the first time. It was ALL last week, every single night (yes, we've definitely been keeping busy for the past couple weeks!) Ethan loved having the time with us just "to himself", (with Ella too, of course). Since we live so far from church, every evening we dropped Natalie off and then the rest of us went somewhere for the evening. One evening we were at Easton, and Ethan walked in the middle of Phil and I, holding both of our hands (Ella was in the Moby). Ethan just looked like he was soaking it all in.  Natalie had a lot of fun at VBS, though. She learned lots of new songs, which she's been singing all week. She always has loved singing songs, of course. A week or so ago, she learned a song in children's church that went, according to her, "Life is good, turtle life is be-tterrrr." We tried to tell her that we didn't THINK it said "turtle life is better" and that maybe the word was "eternal" life, instead. She didn't believe us until we had her ask Pastor Kathy when we were at lunch last week. I think she gets her lyric-writing abilities from her dad.

I'll try to update as soon as possible after my surgery. I might have to ask Phil to bring my computer upstairs for awhile, since my desk is down here in the basement!

June 12, 2007
We were really late getting to bed on Saturday night, and I forgot to take my Zoloft pill for the first time since getting on it early this year. I realized on Sunday morning that I had forgotten it, but lately I've been feeling curious about if I was ready to go off of it, so I didn't take it and decided to just see how things went. Things didn't go well. I still felt fine on Sunday morning, but I started feeling pretty horrible on Sunday afternoon and it was still pretty bad yesterday. (Even though I took my next pill as scheduled on Sunday night.) Yesterday, I am amazed looking back on it now that I'm feeling a little more back to normal, but I felt like crying for absolutely no reason all day long, I had trouble getting motivated to do anything at all, and every kid thing the kids did bugged me more than it should have. I haven't written much about this since getting on the Zoloft, but it's amazing the way it just makes me feel...normal... again. They don't make me feel happy, and I still have emotional ups and downs, but for the first time since as long as I can really remember -- likely since having Natalie -- I just feel like myself again.  I think maybe the PPD I experienced after having Ella was just a ramped-up version of what I had been living with for five years. Having all those horrible feelings flooding back over me yesterday convinced me that my body is not yet ready to go without it!

We leave for our visit to Virginia in two days! The kids are so excited to be going on an airplane. (And the fact that they get to chew gum during the flight.) I've never willingly gotten up before dawn on my birthday before, so this will be a first for me. Our flight leaves at 6:30. AM. Well, at least we'll be getting into Richmond for breakfast. We haven't yet figured out our schedule, but our hotel has a pool, so at least if the weather is good we'll be spending some time there. We'll also probably go to the children's museum, the local science center, and maybe the zoo. With our local memberships, it makes for cheap activities! We were thinking about driving into D.C. for part of it, but with my ankle we really don't feel like doing all the walking D.C. requires. There's lots to do (to fill two days) in the Richmond area, anyway. I'd love to go to Williamsburg or Jamestown, which are really close, but those aren't going to be places the kids will appreciate yet. We'll see. The trip is really all just about being together as a family and letting the kids experience a plane ride, which they've been wanting to do for a long time. Hopefully that will go well...

June 8, 2007
I am so, so very proud of Natalie. There are two things I want to mention, but the chronological second thing needs to be said first. 

Natalie is reading.

Yesterday we were doing home school, and she was working on a worksheet while I was getting some dishes loaded. The page had several instructions on it, the first being: "Color the umbrella yellow and purple." I read this out to her (letting her read the color words, which she's known for a few months), then let her go to it while I went to the dishwasher. I told her to let me know when she'd finished that one, then I'd read to her the next instruction. After a couple minutes, she said to me, "And now I color the big ball red and blue, right mom?" (Almost every question these days ends in "right mom?") I looked over at her and asked, "How did you know that, Natalie?" She told me, "I read it right here."  I went over and read it with her, and sure enough, it said, "Color the big ball red and blue." (There was a little ball in the picture too, but she knew that she was supposed to color just the big ball.) She pointed out every word as she read it. I thought maybe it was a fluke, that I had forgotten that I had read that one earlier and she had just remembered what it said (she has an amazing memory), so then I asked her to read me the next sentence. She got stuck on the first word, "Draw" a little, but I helped her sound it out by covering up the "aw" and then the "dr", so she had to do each sound one at a time. After that word, she read the rest of the sentences by herself: "Draw a green X on the boat. Color 2 blue fish in the water. Draw a yellow sun in the sky." 

I was, and am, amazed. She's been sounding out words lately a lot, and one of her most frequent car games lately is writing out words (phonetically -- not always correctly) that she thinks of. We've been reading a few phonics books at nap/story time lately, but more often then not I think she's been guessing what the word says by the pictures on the page, and not sounding out the words themselves. Yesterday was the first time she really fully read words without any visual cues. Amazing. My baby girl, the one who just a few days ago (it seems) was snuggled up nursing in my arms 24/7, now has two adult teeth popping up and is reading.

This has been a week of big things for her. On Wednesday, we had speech therapy as usual, and at the end of it her therapist told me that next week will be Natalie's last session. It's hard to imagine a Wednesday without "speech class", as Natalie calls it. I forget how long we've been going, but I think it's been more than a year. Sara, her therapist, has been saying for several weeks that she was almost done. But to know next week will really be it feels very strange - almost like Natalie deserves to go through a graduation or something. To think about how she spoke when she started, and how understandable she is now, I know I've already said this word several times today but it is just amazing. She's been a little sponge with learning these speech sounds. Sara told me that Natalie is now saying words better than the average 6 or 7 year old; meaning, she's able to say sounds that most 6 or 7 olds still struggle with. Over the last week or so she even started saying "hydrogenated" oil instead of the oh-so-cute "hydrogenaked". So I don't have cute "Natalie-isms" to write about on here anymore, but she's also not getting the "huh?" and "I don't understand you"'s from everyone, which is a wonderful thing. 

Last night, to celebrate, we let Natalie pick wherever she wanted to go for dinner. So we went to the Polaris Magic Mountain. 

June 4, 2007
Ella got her third and fourth teeth sometime today. And they aren't the top center teeth -- they are the two next to the center (canine? or eye teeth?)! I've been expecting her top center teeth to pop through, since they usually go in pairs and her first two were the typical center bottom two. I was feeding her some cereal tonight (more on that in a minute) and giving her nibbles of wagon wheels interspersed. She bit down on my finger and I felt sharpness on both sides of my finger, so I thought it was the upper left one. So I peeked in and didn't see it right away -- because it wasn't where I was looking! After probing around more, I saw a big edge of sharp tooth on the left side, and on the right side a little edge of that tooth. So that might explain some of her fussiness we experienced this afternoon!

Natalie is getting two new teeth, too. She already has her grown up teeth erupting in her holes. She's very excited about that.

Ella has been a bit of a challenge at meal times lately. The girl will hardly ever touch anything that's mushy or at all reminiscent of baby food. She'll occasionally eat some rice cereal (and she did a great job at it tonight, actually) but whenever I give her any fruits or vegetables, or even mix any of those in with her cereal, she spits it out. And she spits it out with fervor, too. Just like (my mom insists) I did with carrots all over her. I guess it's only fair that I get food spit all over me then too, right? Though with Ella it's EVERY baby food, not just carrots. It's not that she doesn't like flavors or is not interested in food yet, though. She just doesn't want it mushy. She will munch on just about anything we give her. She really enjoyed a spear of steamed broccoli the other day. She can scoop food and pick it up with her whole fist, but she hasn't gotten the pincher grasp going yet, so the food has to be big enough for her to grab. The problem is, since she knows she likes "real" food and she spits out any baby food offered to her, she's very hard to dine with - especially when we're out. She's not yet solid sitting yet for the non-secure restaurant high chairs, so she usually sits in my lap. And then she reaches for everything on my plate and within her grasp. So lately my meals have been with all my food pushed mostly across the table (which then makes her get angry), and I just keep offering wagon wheel snacks to distract her from my plate. It sometimes works. At home we've been trying to give her food in the mesh bag thing (Ethan loved it) but she doesn't seem to have much interest in any food that doesn't look just like what the rest of us are eating. You would think she would still be too young to be so opinionated...

She's pretty much crawling now. I can't say a definite "yes! This was the day she started!" but she's been working toward it all week, and sometimes she actually gets both knees going forward for a "step". The left knee will move forward, followed by the right knee, then she plops back down. She's up on her hands and knees within moments of being put down (on her back) on the floor, though. Can't keep her down anymore. She's mobile enough that I've sounded like a broken record: "Natalie, pick this up. Ethan, put this in your room. We can't leave this out anymore."

Natalie usually does okay with keeping most of her little toys in her room. (Whoo boy does her room get BAD quickly these days, now that she regularly plays with Polly Pockets AND Barbies!) Ethan, on the other hand, usually will drag all his toys out into the main room to play, and only play in his room when either Natalie is in there with him, or it's the every afternoon-enforced "quiet time". (Which today entailed him crying and coming in and out of his room every two minutes for a full hour, each time asking if nap time was over. Ugh. ) He does have one incentive for playing in his room now. We found him a fire truck bed on Freecycle this weekend. He is LOVING it. Ethan is very rarely "Ethan" these days. He's usually "Billy Blazes Firefighter", Superman, or Anthony (from the Wiggles). When we ask him where Ethan is, he says, "I think he went on vacation. To a hotel."