Sleeping 6 straight hours

Kelsey has managed to sleep 6 hours in a row the past 2 nights. Can we call it a trend? One can only hope.

Other news from Athens, Lily has graduated from Speech Therapy. She's been going to speech therapy for the past 6 months. During that time she has gone from saying no words to having a vocabulary well over 300 words and many 2-5 word phrases and sentences. The big challenge now is improving her pronounciation. Unfortunately the therapists she's been seeing don't believe they can help with that until she is old enough to comprehend the physical way sounds are produced (around 4 years of age). This Tuesday we return to Children's Hospital in Columbus to meet with the Cleft Team. One of the team members is a speech therapist and we plan to ask many questions about what we can do to help Lily with her pronounciation and what we should expect. About 30% of children with cleft palates require additional surgery to make it easier for them to produce certain sounds. We're hopeful Lily speech will be OK without additional surgery, but we plan to get an opinion from the therapist at the Cleft Clinic.

Addison and Lily have discovered a love for the playground. As a result their Daddy has turned our house into a playground. We now have a seesaw in the living room, a slide in the basement, and two swings hanging from our deck. Needless to say, Addison and Lily have taken to asking to go to the basement to "SLIDE!" or "SWING!" beginning very early in the morning. Mike does his best to keep them upstairs until at least 8:15a, but the slide has been used as early as 8am (much to Jessi's dismay).

This Thursday we are packing up the entire family and heading to South Bend for Mike and Teresa's 20th college reunion. We'll have an 8 hour drive (or at least we hope it is only 8 hours!) and we are staying in a dorm that has been designated as the Family dorm. Let's hope our neighbors are OK with Kelsey's middle of the night wake up call. And that the dorm is quiet enough for Addison and Lily to get their afternoon naps.

Kelsey's Room

Lily giving Kelsey a kiss

Lily being Cool in Daddy's sunglasses

Addison Being Cool in her own Sunglasses with Lily looking on

Kelsey pondering

Lily Swinging at the Park (note the ND Sesame Street t-shirt)

Addison Swinging at the Park (Same cool Notre Dame t-shirt)

Addison and Lily at the slide

Kelsey in Addison's lap with Lily looking on (outfits courtesy of Ted and Kate Smith)

Silly Goose Aunt Kathleen and Kelsey

Lily and Blue Dog outside on the deck

Silly Goose Aunt Kathleen and Addison

Silly Goose Aunt Kathleen and Lily

Kelsey after a hard day

A day in the life...

Some days are harder than others. Case in point, today. Let us start with Kelsey last night. Starting around 1:30am, she simply refused to stay asleep. She awoke every 30 minutes crying, loud crying, until around 6am. So Mommy and a lesser degree Daddy were a bit tired today. But, alas, our twin angels awoke around 7am with Addison calling out "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, etc." until I got her and her sister.

Usually in the mornings, I get the girls to myself for some good Daddy time. First there is the distribution of bananas, one to Lily and one to Addison. One must not "open" the banana before the owner is ready. Usually there is a chorus of "hold it, hold it, ..." (meaning they simply wish to hold the banana) until finally I get the green light "open it, open it, ..." (meaning, peel it). One must be very careful, because Addison is prone to say "open it" when she means "hold it" and, if you open it when she still wanted to hold it, her entire morning is shot and she remains in a bad mood until after her nap. You only make this mistake a couple of times before you realize you need to ask for clarification before opening the banana.

After banana time, comes milk time which has also morphed into cereal time. Usually the girls choose their seat, rarely wanting the same seat. And they are usually eating their breakfast when Jessi comes up to save me. Such was the case this morning. Other than it raining, all was going well with Lily and Addison.

Since it was Thursday, Lily has speech therapy on Thursday mornings, so I packed her up (actually, Jessi did all of the work) and put her in the car. Jessi took Addison downstairs to play. We got an assignment at speech therapy to count the words Lily uses since the supervisor at the speech therapy clinic was quite impressed with the number of words Lily has been using. So after putting the girls to bed for naptime (I had Kelsey, Teresa had Addison, and Jessi had Lily), I tallied up the words that I knew Lily was able to say, though some of them she does not exactly get the correct pronunciation (we had a list of words from the therapist as a starting point). I am proud to say that Lily has over 300 words.

The afternoon came and went without much of a problem. I got to feed Kelsey, did some work, and helped get dinner going. Even post-dinner seemed to be going well. The girls were laughing, chasing Jack, running around upstairs. Teresa was tending to Kelsey as I got the girls' bath together.

I must say that today was one of the few days where I actually needed to be someplace after the girls went to bed. The School of Accountancy at Ohio University had their annual awards banquet this evening. So, I had been mentally prepared to rush out the door as soon as the girls were asleep. But, alas, the girls had a different agenda. To help expedite my departure, Teresa put me in charge of Kelsey who only needed to be put to bed. So I did that, got her asleep, and changed into my suit for the banquet. As soon as I had my tie on, Kelsey woke up...crap. I could hear down the hall Teresa dealing with her own set of issues. Both Addison and Lily wanted to sit on the potty before going to bed. So she had them out of their beds and in the bathroom. In the meantime, I got Kelsey asleep again. So I went to check on Teresa, and Addison had, in fact, gone weewee in the potty for the first time. She was very proud, as were her parents. Not to be outdone, Lily refused to go to sleep and threw a fit when put into bed, yelling "Mommy, Mommy, weewee, poopoo..." In the meantime, Kelsey has awoken again, so I went to handle her and Teresa went in with Lily and Addison. Kelsey refused to sleep this time, so Teresa and I switched. I sat on the floor with Lily on the potty and Addison sleepy in my arms waiting for Lily to give up, as she often does. But alas after a long time of singing songs, I looked under her and saw a big poop! She was very proud. I was very late.

Lily seemed to want to bask in her glory because she did not want to go to sleep and cried until she was tired of hearing me sing the same song over and over and over again. So now it is 8:30 and the banquet was over. Teresa was back tending to Kelsey and finally around 9:00 we ate dinner. I went back to do some work (write a test). Now it is midnight, the test is half written, and Kelsey is back crying. Teresa had just gone to bed at 11:30.

If you are keeping score:
Good things that happened today: Lots! Including two for two on the potty.
Bad things that happened today: Enough to appreciate the good things.