catch up

Well, between birthdays, kidney stones and Christmas, I never gave you the stats from Penny's 12-month check-up!  Here they are:

19 lbs, 5.5 oz

28 5/8 inches

I was stunned that I would still have to hold off on turning her car seat around!  I thought to myself that if I had given her that 6 oz of formula before her appointment, maybe she would have topped out at 20 lbs!  Besides, she was so far ahead of Bethany at each appointment that I thought for sure she would be 20 lbs.  Oh, well.  We waited a couple of weeks and then turned her seat around anyway!  That seat was a pain in the neck facing backward.

She still refuses to walk.  She's taken two steps on a couple different occasions.  She's enjoying all of her new toys that she got for Christmas.  She's a whiz at the ring-stacker and loves playing her instruments.  

On another note - we've begun our annual spring cleaning.  Yes, we have spring cleaning in the winter because that's when we have off the most time.  Nathan is usually catching up on grading during spring break.  We purchased a free-standing pantry for the garage to help with our kitchen pantry and paper goods over-load.  We also purchased some baskets to organize our bookshelf of toys in the living room.

Next on the list is cleaning out old toys from the girls' rooms.  We had to rearrange the set-up of Bethany's room to accommodate the doll house.  It looks really nice, I think.  Bethany says it's beautiful.

I'm going to consolidate the Christmas madness pictures into one page and then post it to the girls' website.  Look for that in the next couple of days. 

Merry Christmas!

Now here is day two of Christmas for us.  These are at Nathan's parents' house.  Click below to view!

Christmas at the Wolek's

Okay, we've now had Christmas at Amy's parents.  Below is a link to those pictures!

Christmas at the Friend's

We're all done here at our house.  We had a good morning.  Here's a link to some pics.  I'll add more over the next couple of days.

Christmas morning

Track Santa in Real Time

This is pretty cool. Norad + Google = Real Time Santa Maps. Download it and share the fun with your kids.

Merry Christmas!

the week from h-e-double hockey sticks

For those of you that I have not had a chance to talk to this week, I've been stuck in bed with 3 kidney stones, the largest of which is 6 mm.  My dear hubby took me to the ER Monday afternoon after I experienced some stabbing pains in my left side along with dizziness and nausea while driving home from Orlando that morning.  They gave me fluids, drugs, a CT scan and an X-Ray.  They gave me the bad news and then sent me home to lie in bed.  Well I was over that after a couple of days.  

As many of you know, I'm not one to be still for very long.  Fortunately (in a sick way), the pain was so bad that I had to take the Percoset they gave me which pretty much left me no choice but to stay in the bed.  

I was drinking so much water that both of my kidneys started to feel funny; I guess just from system overload.  The dizziness and nausea came back.  Then I got sick - literally.  I cut back a bit on the water so all of that went away.  Between the drugs and the pain I basically had no appetite and then my whole system just got screwy.  I went off of the Percoset yesterday since the pain was practically gone and I just couldn't take it anymore anyway.  How anyone can want to feel like that on purpose, I'll never understand.

The pain has subsided now and I saw a urologist this morning.  He basically said all I can do is wait.  Fun.  There are procedures that I could go under to remove it/break it up but that they would *love* for me to pass it on my own.  I'm all set with some Flomax (yes, the prostate drug - apparently some recent studies have shown that it also helps kidney stones move down more quickly and easily) and some Percoset, in case the crazy pain returns.

Thank you to everyone who called to check on me and sent good wishes and prayers our way.  Nathan was a trooper with the girls this week.  He even got some laundry done!

So it could still be a couple of months before I'm out of this.  And I'll have to cut back on that Chick-Fil-A tea!  Darn!

One Year

I write a lot less than I used to.  

Tomorrow, Penny will be one.  I can't believe it.  Where did the time go?

I remember thinking it took forever for Bethany to turn one.  But I feel like only six months have passed since Penny joined us.

My baby is one and yes, I'm a little sad.  How fast will the second year go?

Let's lift the mood, shall we?

Here are some things that I never got around to blogging about.  These are things that Penny does that are just too cute (in my mind, anyway!):

When she is sitting, she'll turn herself around in a circle.

When she is standing up and decides (again) not to try walking, she gets back to crawling by very slowly squatting down and putting her hands down in front of her.  She then takes off crawling at lightning speed!

Playing peek-a-boo with her burp cloth (yes, still using them, though more for lovies than spit-up)

She loves cars and trucks and pushes them all over the house

When we are getting ready to eat dinner, she folds her hands; I'm assuming that's because she knows it's time to pray

She would much rather play with ordinary objects than most toys we have

She loves going into her sister's room to play

She loves her sister

Happy Birthday, Penny!  We love you!