FLYLADY!

Well, I'm starting the flylady program. Today is clean my sink day. My house isn't totally out of control, but I feel like I'm starting from scratch every day. I've heard about fly lady for so long, and I think today is the day to do it!

I've been feeling like a zombie a lot lately. B is working midshifts, and both of the kiddies have been waking up at night a lot lately. Garin seems to be moving out of it, but with Brianna, you never know if it's going to be a good night or not. They're both teething, but fortunately, this is it for Garin, the last two are just about there.

But Brianna always seems to be struggling with teething, her reflux, a cold, or some combination of all three. Some nights she'll be up every hour and takes 30 minutes or more to fall asleep! She had three good nights recently (of course Brant was off work, she must have a sixth sense). Last night was OK (Brant was working), she slept a good 4 hours, but after 2:30 she had a hard time falling back to sleep. Finally was good around 3:45, but Garin woke up at 5 and came into bed, then she was up at 5:30 and well, we're all up now.

So, I think I'm going to jump in the shower and go shine my sink! We'll see how this fly lady thing goes! Garin has his art class at Gymboree this morning, I'm going to try to take my camera and get a couple cute pictures.

Moving In!!!

So, what a crazy month it's been. We moved into our house on the 30th of July. Wow. It was definately an adjustment. We've downsized from a 1900 sf house with a 2 car garage and attic, to a 1200 sf house with a carport and a small storage room. Hmmm. And we have this little problem called "we never get rid of ANYTHING". So we're trying to cure ourselves.

Meanwhile, our household goods arrived on the 14th and our house has virtually exploded its contents out into the carport and beyond. We're slowly sorting our way through things. A HUGE pile is being donated to Heather to have a garage sale to raise money to take things to the orphanage in Ethopia where they are adopting their daughter (who is only 2 weeks older than Brianna!). The pile is expanding by the day as we slowly make our way through the boxes - no easy feat with an active 2 year old and an almost 1 year old that needs almost constant attention. It's exhausting.

We hope to have sorted through everything and gotten our house in livable order by the end of next week. B had last week off, but he's back to work today. The bright side is that he doesn't work days, and really only works about half the month, so he's around during the day to help, and has a lot of time off!

So here are some pictures of our exploding house:

This is the outside last weekend - we couldn't fit everything INSIDE the house, so we had to fill the carport. The delightfully ugly furniture is the "loaner" furniture we used for three weeks while we waited for our household goods to arrive.

B taking a break from the hard work - this is the backside of the family room, we're making it into a playroom for the kids and my desk will be in the corner

The family room, with the gargantuan television that is about half the size of the room - but B refuses to get rid of it. Don't worry, some of that furniture will go in storage...eventually...

The laundry room - it's a little more organized now, but has three piles of boxes stacked about 7 high filled with books. I have a book collecting problem.

The kids room - the first one that I unpacked all of the boxes, for fear that Garin would try climbing and be buried in them. We still haven't put up the crib yet, that'll probably be the last thing we do:

Our room, which is a daily project. We just have so much stuff. I'm trying to get rid of a lot of our clothing.

This is our problem room. It's the guest room. Well, it's SUPPOSED to be the guest room. The idea was that I'd put both of the children in one room so we'd have an extra room to put guests, and we could put one of our desks with the computer. Well, B gets this idea that it's HIS room. I'm working on getting that idea out of his head, because for three years in GA he had "his" room that was filled with "his" stuff that never really got put away. It was a nightmare. So I refuse to have that problem here. Meanwhile...where do we put "his" stuff (his stuff is all of his "gear". I'm not really sure what that means, but I think it's something to do with a nuclear holocaust and having all the equipment to meet up with the other survivors to start the new society. Or something. It's probably really just a lot of paintball equipment and the surround sound for his computer gaming system).

The one room that is finished - the kitchen. Thank you Heather. It really is vital that the kitchen get set up and ready to go right away. I'm at peace here. The drawers may only be nine inches wide and the counters are made for someone in a wheelchair, but at least everything is put away.

I've learned many lessons from this move. Most importantly - get rid of stuff BEFORE you move, not after.

Baby Food

Well, we've entered the world of baby food. Since the only thing Brianna can eat is pureed foods, I decided to try to avoid jarred food as much as possible (because, really, have you TASTED that stuff?)

So here are some of our ventures:

Sweet Peas:


The stash (sweet potatoes, butternut squash, acorn squash, sweet peas, pears, apples, butternut squash stew):

Mommy and Brie in the kitchen:

My failed attempt at making the asparagus risotto - undercooked the rice, ugh

the butternut squash stew: butternut squash, apples, potatoes in a homemade vegetable stock

Crazy Life

It's been such a whirlwind. I moved us out of our apartment the first week of June, and flew out to California to meet B when he finished up his outprocessing in Georgia. Two weeks in Cali and he was finallly back with us! We spent another two weeks between there and Nevada and then we were finally heading back to Hawaii.

We're currently staying at the Navy Lodge on Ford Island (part of Pearl Harbor Naval Base) waiting for our home to open up on Hickam AFB. We'll be moving into our house on THIS FRIDAY - YAY!!!!!

Meanwhile, we're getting back in the hang of family life. We took advantage last Sunday to go out and drive out to the northwestern part of the island. We found a neat area that didn't seem to get much traffic and showed Garin the tide pools - it was a good time.

Checking out the fish and crabs in the tidepool:

Cool tide pool:

We're also back in our crazy appointment cycle. Brianna met with the pediatric neurologist and the feeding time. The neurologist checked her kidney function (okay) and had them take blood to send off for genetic testing. It'll take a few weeks to get the results back from that. They sent some off for chromosonal testing, and others off for other genetic testing - there are hundreds of different possibilities there. If those show anything abnormal then B and I will get testing to compare the results. Yipee.

The feeding team was interesting. It includes the pediatric neurologist, a child psychologist, the nurse for the GI doctor, the speech pathologist and a nutritionist. Dr. Pederson (the neurologist) suggested that she may have GERD (reflux) and put in a prescription for that - we start her on that today. Hopefully this will help her gain weight. She doesn't spit up a lot, but has other flags for reflux, and it's possible that once the reflux kicks in, she stops eating and just snacks all day and never quite gets the calories she needs. Which is possibly why at 10 1/2 months she's only 13 pounds.

The speech pathologist also told me that her muscle tone weakness also seems to extend to the muscles in her mouth and esophogus, so we're going to continue to stick with the baby food. It takes her a while to eat it, since she doesn't really use her tongue and swallowing muscles ver well.

The nutritionist also instructed me to feed her solids more often (she can only handle baby food at this point) - about every 2-3 hours, since she can only eat about 2 ounces at a time. The child psychologist wanted me to "replace" two of the times I nurse with feeding her baby food. I had to bite my tongue, because that made no sense to me at all. Her reasoning was that for her psycho-social development she needs to focus on eating solids and less on breastfeeding. Which I could maybe get if she was over a year and we wanted to focus on her feeding herself, but to me, I don't quite get how spooning baby food into her mouth over nursing her will help her psycho-social development. But whatever.

I AM however adding some powdered formula to her jarred baby food (at the suggestion of the nutritionist) to bulk up the calories, which makes sense to me (breastmilk would thin it out and kill the consistency). Once I able to make my own babyfood again I'll use breastmilk when I can since it has more calories and better nutritional value than formula, but for now this method makes sense.

I'm giving her baby food about 4-5 times a day right now, she's totally not interested first thing in the morning, but it seems that as the day goes on, the more she likes to eat - and she DOES enjoy it, lurching towards the spoon with open mouth. But she can only do so much before she starts to cough and sputter, and then I "top her off" by nursing her. I nurse her whenever she wants, because she can certainly use it, and she needs it.

But she is doing so much better. My next post will be highlighting all about the things I have to be thankful for, because she IS improving and it's not all gloom and doom. =)

Garin had his speech evaluation two weeks ago. No surprises there. His ability to understand language and follow directions is right on target, but everyone else's ability to understand what HE'S saying, well, not so great. He has a difficult time translating what he hears into proper pronunciation, so he has some speech idiosyncracies (his hearing is fine, however). His vocabulary is great, and he speaks short phrases, he's just ridiculously difficult to understand. He mis-matches a lot of his consonants (he replaces many sounds with f-, g-, k- sounds). But he's getting speech therapy, and the speech pathologist was confident that with some work, he'll be right on track, so that's good!!

So that's it for now. I plan on posting in the next couple days with LOTS of pictures showing how great Brianna is doing!!

God bless!!

A Day at the Zoo

Last Thursday we went to the Honolulu Zoo. I bought our annual pass ($30!) and I've decided to make this at least a bi-monthly occurance. It gets us out and Garin LOVES to look at the animals. Since I pack a lunch it's a very inexpensive occurance. Less than $1 for parking!!

I'd like to point out that Garin knew many of the animal names courtesy of Eric Carle's books.

Pointing out the pink Flamingos (King-go)

Garin thought the tortoises were really cool. He came back later and accidentally donated his apple to them. I figured it was okay since they were over at a big pile of fruits and vegetables that included apples. Garin calls them Kuh-kahs

Love this picture of Garin looking at the giraffe (Ja-yaf)

Really cool video of a rare sighting of a hippo out of the water - Garin thought it was really cool until the hippo came up to the window. That kind of freaked him out.

Garin checking out the elephants on our way out of the zoo. Garin refers to them as "phants"

Garin with the goats - note the one at the end butting him - TOO funny!

Mealtime Progress

One of Brianna's challenges has been feeding. She has struggled to gain weight since she was three months old. I found out when she was six months old that she had a weak suck, which was making it difficult for her to draw milk from me. On top of that, she has a severe gag reflex that prevented me from supplementing her with pumped milk or introducing solids to beef up her caloric intake.

So we seem to have been successful in getting her to be able to nurse better. I believe part of the problem is her sensory issues. She is very sensitive to her environment, and I believe that the energy level at my sister was so high that she couldn't relax, and she was also feeding off of my stress. Since we've moved into our condo, she really seems to be thriving. Between increasing my supply and the relaxing environment, her weight gain seems to be picking up. She really seems to have made some big leaps in her development since we arrived here as well.

We've also embarked on the world of solids. She still can't work food to the back of her mouth, but she's started accepting a spoon in her mouth for a brief period of time, and so far has tasted rice cereal mixed with expressed breast milk and mashed avacado. I wish she had the motor skills to pick up food because I think she would figure it out much better if she could self feed. But she's not gagging as much unless I miss her STOP cues (watery eyes and drool) that indicate a spew is on the way. Today I used the babyfood book my mom got me for Christmas and made some pureed roasted sweet potato. I tasted it and it was yummy! Which meets an important rule I've made - not to make my children eat something I wouldn't eat myself (I made an exception for the rice cereal...) My next endeavor is pureed sweet peas. And while I hate peas, my husband loves them, so I figure that's okay under the rule.

Here's a picture of Brianna sitting in her high chair getting used to her spoon.

Garin wanted in on the picture action too - he's eating his oatmeal (I mix in natual peanut butter and wolfberries YUM!)

I also made the orange puree that the sneaky chef uses. It's a good way to get some added veggies into our meals. It's made of sweet potatoes and carrots. I like to mix it with pasta sauce. It's great with a ton of things though. Mac & cheese, cheese sandwiches, etc. There's also a green puree (spinach, broccoli and peas), a purple puree (spinach and blueberries), a white puree (zucchini and cauliflower) and white bean purees. It's an easy way to get all those extra vitamins and antioxidents and such.

I also wanted to throw in some pics of us breastfeeding, since this will be the most important and her primary source of nourisment for probably at least the next year.

Videos!!!

Here are some videos I took the other day!

Brianna Squealing in delight at her brother

Garin Showing Daddy how much he loves him!

Conversations with a 2-year-old

Brianna is rolling over – and not happy about it!

Garin is trying to figure out what everyone’s name is – and no, Brianna’s name is not “CRY?!”

Garin is sitting on his sister!!! But she thinks it’s funny

The babies are being NOISY!

Garin is stuck!

Another video of silly Garin

Garin trying to “help” Brianna roll over

Just playing with Brianna