First Day of School Update!

We made it through the end of summer! I feel like I can think about life again now that summer is over.

We went in Friday to meet for about 15 minutes with Miciah and her teacher, Mrs. Parker. Mrs. Parker is nice and showed Miciah where her seat was and her cubby and all that stuff. Then she had Miciah write her name. She told Miciah that it was great, but that she would be expected to write in the correct lowercase and uppercase now. Miciah seemed not quite to know how to respond to that. But she immediately corrected her H to an h and handed it back to the teacher. Then, all weekend, she practiced her name (she wasn't quite sure how to do a lowercase a). Over and over and over. Until she got it down. She wrote it on paper. She colored it in coloring books. She wrote it in chalk on the front porch. Then she would run and say, "Mom, Mom! Come look! I wrote my name right and went, 'Yesss!' " Too cute.

First Day of Kindergarten

Miciah's first day of school was Monday. She has afternoon Kindergarten, which will work splendidly for us, I think. But Monday she woke up and asked about every 15 minutes from the moment she woke up if it was time for school yet. No. No. No, no, no, no. Finally, at 12:25 she sat down in front of the VCR and watched the clock. I had told her that at 12:30 we could walk to the bus stop. My mom tried to distract her by asking her to put her clothes away. She said she didn't want to. I told her it would help the time go by quicker. She said, unconvinced, "How?" Well, then you wouldn't just be staring at the clock. She got up and got the clothes. During that time the clock turned to 12:26. As she walked to her room, she glanced at the clock and said, "6! Yes!" Too funny.

We walked to the bus stop and the bus was very late. Late on her first day of school. Bummer. We also had our first real experience with how we shouldn't touch litter. You don't need details, all you need to know is GROSS! ...


While Miciah was gone, Elijah said, "Mom, where is Ciah?" I told him she was at school. He said, "But I want her!" It was cute. I think he'll miss her, but I also think the time will be really good for him. And it'll be nice to have the house not be so loud.

Second Day of Kindgergarten

She came back from school talking a mile a minute about how the day went! She was excited and ready to go back the next day. Fortunately, she wasn't quite as obsessed with the time yesterday. Elijah saw her off at the bus and was excited to go to school, too! He was a little disappointed that he didn't get to go, but still, excited just to see the bus.

She came home from her second day of school. I asked her how school was on her second day. She said, "Boring." Boring? Well, what did you do? "Nothing. We didn't do anything!" :) It's funny to me that the first day was exciting and the second day was boring. She told Grandma it was boring because they didn't get to play. Grandma told her that you go to school to work, not to play, so sometimes it might be boring. I thought that was a good answer.

Kids

And that's our main update. Miciah is now a Kindergartener and that's great. Elijah is still Elijah. He's cute and full-speed ahead. Teancom is still SO dang cute. He can stand up on his own and we'll stand him up and put our arms out and try to get him to walk towards the other person. He just laughs and either sits down or falls forward. Won't even take a step. But he's happy and healthy and that's wonderful. We take him in for a doctor's appointment tomorrow. A little late on his 1 year check-up. It's a new doc who hopefully won't be obsessed about the fact that he's a little behind on the walking milestone.

No More Cats, But We Still Have Ringworm

Oh, on other fronts. We gave Fumasa back to C along with our two cats, Cleo and Ceasar. It's a little sad to be without them. They're good cats. But it's also nice to not have to hassle with some of the things that are a hassle when you have cats. ... All of us have ringworm. Rob was the last holdout, but he has it now, too. We assume the ringworm is from the cats (C's kids have it, too, and had it first), but they couldn't find any ringworm spots on Fumasa (whom we assume is the culprit), and so they can't treat it. We are all being treated for it. We didn't have it officially diagnosed, but you treat it with over-the-counter stuff, so I figured it doesn't matter. We will ask the doc about it tomorrow, though. Teancom and Rob have 1 spot a piece. Miciah and Elijah have 2. And I'm the lucky one with 4 (and maybe a 5th if this random thing on my eyelid is one, too). Fun, fun.

And who knew that ringworm is a fungus? I guess a lot of people do, but I didn't. It should be a worm, shouldn't it, if it's called ringworm? Like roundworm. Or hookworm. Those are worms. But no, it's a fungus. Though I suppose ringworm sounds better than ringfungus.

So that's our news. Hope all is well for everyone!

Two pictures of my sleeping babies. I watched them sleeping and wanted to take pictures of them. They're not as enchanting in the pictures as when I was looking at them, but they're still cute. And the one of Teancom spotlights him sucking on those 2 fingers he thinks are tasty.

Tamra, Rob, Miciah, Elijah, and Teancom (with no cats, though we still have fish)

Pictures

I'll send out pictures first, then a short update. Oh, who am I kidding? My updates are never short, even when I think they are. :)

Cats

The kitten in the picture is C's cat. We're almost done with an almost-5-week-stint of cat sitting. The kitten now gets along with the other 2 cats, and has been fun for the kids. Teancom especially has loved the kitten being around. Soon, Cleo and Ceasar, our two cats, will go home with Fumasa to C's house and she'll be their new owner. Ceasar will have a heavenly home with tons and tons of space to hunt and run around in. And then we can still visit the cats when we go see C.

And this is Teancom sporting some awesome sunglasses. :) The glasses are G's. G is holding him in this picture, actually, but is making such a weird face that I cropped him out. Besides, next to Teancom, ... nothing's cuter than that!

My New Wedding Ring

Part of my update is that we bought me a wedding ring! If you remember, I lost my wedding ring in a car accident in Jan. 2004. So for 3 1/2 years I've been wearing one of 3 cheap rings I bought on eBay for $14 a piece. We have made it a date night to go ring shopping. We've never been meaning to buy a ring, we've just been looking for my "dream ring". We found one once that was amazing, but it was almost $3,000. We didn't have that kind of money. ... Anyways, we went on a date a few weeks ago and decided once again to browse jewlery stores. We walked into our third store of the night and there was my ring. We were both enchanted and amazed, and we bought it! It's exciting to have a wedding ring again.

This is kind of neat for me. The ring is a band that matches Rob's band pretty dang well. Rob's ring is yellow gold on the outside and platinum in the middle. My original matched his sort of. It was the same sort of design, but with alternating colors of white, yellow, and rose gold on the inside. We had bought both rings on clearance, and because of that, I wasn't able to buy my ring in the size I needed. It was a size 10 that needed to be squeezed down to a size 7. Well, after that, the ring wasn't quite the same (besides, I liked Rob's ring better for me, but it was too masculine--this new one, though it's white gold, is brushed, so that takes off that masculine feeling). I wasn't too happy with how it looked after that, but whatever. It was a ring.

So this ring matches Rob's ring better, it's very similar to my original, I like the white gold look better than the tri-gold, and we could order it in my size so it's infinitely more comfortable. All in all, I like it better than the original ring we bought for me.

This is exciting news for me, so thanks for letting me bore you with sharing it.
And these two pictures of Teancom are just so dang cute I couldn't resist sharing them.

Teancom

And now for the update part. Teancom's big news is that he chipped his top middle left tooth. Yep. On Rob's head. Yep. ... Don't ask, I don't know either. But the chip is very slight and won't be an eye sore or anything, so he'll just have a chipped tooth until he's 5 or 6. Not sure that's a big deal.

Teancom has now stood on his own three times that we've seen. He cruises along furniture, too, so that's progress. He isn't ready to try to take a step on his own yet, but that'll come with time. We have also just barely taught him his first sign: more. It's about that stage where signs come in real handy.

Elijah

Elijah is a monster, but we're learning how to deal with it. He won't take a nap for like a week and then he'll be so awful and so exhausted that he'll take 3 days' worth of naps. Then the cycle starts over. Obviously, the days with naps are infinitely better than those without. ... I have started joking with my friends that I'm offering him up for legal adoption. Miciah had a really yucky year 2 and wasn't as bad for year 3. So Elijah's great year 2 didn't prepare us for a crummy year 3. Oh well.

A funny story about Elijah. Elijah still gets his binky for nap time and bed time. He'll get up in the morning and I'll say, "Elijah, I need your binky" and he'll hand it to me. If he doesn't want to give it up, he has to go back to bed and be ready to give it up when he comes back out of his bedroom. Usually this works very smoothly. Well, a few weeks back he was really fighting us about it. After him pushing the line over and over, I finally told him that I was going to throw it away if he didn't give it to me (it's one of 3, so not too big a deal, just a lesson taught). He didn't give it to me, so I yanked it out of his mouth and threw it away. Of course he was upset. We talked to him about it and he calmed down. About 10 minutes later he came to us and said, "I look binky in trash can and say, "Binky, why you go away?"" That made us smile. ... If you're wondering, Elijah has had no problem since giving us his binky. In fact, the very next time he came out of his room, he put his binky on the table, unasked, and said, "No put binky in trash can."

Miciah and the Kindergarten Pre-Screening

Miciah is ready to start Kindergarten. We took her in for her pre-screening. You know, what is this color, what are these letters, what rhymes with orange. Stuff like that. She knew all of the answers, as she proudly reported when she got back to my side. :) ... Then this funny situation occured, and I wanted to share it cause it made me laugh (when it was safe to laugh). The next kid to do the pre-screening was a boy. The same lady who took Miciah back was there to take this little boy. She said, "Are you ready?" and then the kid takes off running down the hallway and out the school doors screaming, "I'm not ready! I'm not ready!" His mom is chasing out the doors behind him yelling, "A, stop it! A, come back here!" They have a chat outside and then A comes back in the doors. He waits until Mom is safely a few feet inside the doors, laughs, and runs back outside. Mom chases. A comes back in the doors again, and the lady says, "Are you ready now?" He follows her down the hallway, still shouting, "I'm not ready! I'm not ready!"

Made me glad my kid is Miciah. Though, I won't claim none of my kids would ever do that. They probably would. It was just funny.

Rob

Rob is excited about post-docs and about getting his first paper published. He is very near having the first paper ready to publish, and that excites me, too. It makes graduating seem like a reality. It will be interesting where the next stage of life will take us. Rob would be happy to go any one of a couple of places, so we'll see where we end up. It would be weird to think about the possibility of moving next year, but if that happens, I guess that's okay. One of the possibilities is in the DC area, and I think if that becomes a real possibility, Rob would love to go there (Army Medical Research and NIH are both there, and he'd love either of those). If that happens, we're probably back to an apartment, and I can tell you I won't mind that AT ALL. I've loved owning this house, and it's my baby, but I won't mind the lesser responsibilities of an apartment.

Tamra

It's my month to talk in church, apparently. I spoke in church last Sunday. I guess it went okay, that's what people told me. And I give a lesson Labor Day weekend on the miracle of forgiveness. I've been studying a lot about the topic and it's made me want to be more humble and repentant. It's a work in progress. :)

My Parents

That's our news here. My parents are joining us later tonight. Dad will stay until next Monday and Mom will stay until Sept. 1st. It'll be nice to have them here with us. They're always a delight, and we always get to see lots more family because they're here than when they're not here.

Tamra

Another Short Update

I'm not sure when Miciah became a grown-up little kid, but she's now a big little girl. :) I've been looking through older photos, trying to see when this magic transformation took place. I can't pinpoint it, but it's happened.

We're counting down days until school starts. It never occured to me as a kid that my mom would be counting down days until school started. Never realized she would be so done with summer, just like the kids. ... Miciah and Elijah are at each other's throats all the time. Elijah is hyper beyond hyper and Miciah, I think, is annoyed that she never has any time away from her brother. ... I told Rob that tomorrow, not only do I need time away from my kids, but we either need to do something as a family, or he needs to take one of them away so they're not with each other all day. Rob likes doing "dates" with the kids. They like it, too. Rob has only done one other date with Elijah. He liked that it was just him. It's a fun concept for him that he might be able to do something that Miciah doesn't also do.

Quick Trip to CA - K Marries S!

Other than being kid stressed (it must be Friday) and ready for school already (is it really still 3 weeks away? ), things are pretty normal. Rob and I did have a fun weekend, though! Friday we flew out to California. We got into my parents' house at 4 in the morning Ohio time and crashed. They let us nap Saturday, thankfully. We helped my brother move back into his place Saturday morning. Sunday we had a fabulous day in Carmel on the beach for my other brother, K's wedding party. K married S and it was a fun party. I thought about how much my kids would have loved being there, but I'm glad we didn't take them. It was a late night Friday and then an early morning Monday to go back home.

Thankfully we have friends who like us, or at least like our kids. The S's have 2 kids the same ages as Miciah and Elijah, so we left our two older kids with them. They had a fun weekend, I think, and hopefully the extra kids weren't too much trouble. Then we found a couple with older kids. They're just starting to have grandkids, so they were more than happy to take Teancom. They love babies and when we went to pick him up they told us we were taking their buddy away! I was glad that Teancom was good (like normal) and that they enjoyed having him around. Their two boys at home (older teenagers), they said, were trying to teach Teancom how to walk. :) Cute. ... She also said that Teancom was such a good sleeper, she should have sent all her kids to me for their first year. I told her that if Teancom's sleeping was MY doing, I would have done the same trick on Miciah.

"I Am Not An Authority As a Parent"

Which brings up a good point about parenting. I have a phrase that I tell myself, and others, often about parenting: I am not an authority as a parent. It's roughly the same phrase as the one I've heard my parents and other say about how you can't take much credit or blame (though I realize there is some in parental responsibility) for what your kids decide to do, or for how they came. Had I had Teancom or even Elijah first, I probably would have prided myself for being a great mom. An excellent baby who sleeps through the night and doesn't cry ever. What a good job I must be doing! But, instead, we had Miciah first. And she taught me to use, and love, the phrase: I am not an authority as a parent. :) Miciah isn't a bad kid, never has been (though she wasn't a good baby, that's for sure), but she does things her way and always has, probably always will. That's great! And I am not an authority as a parent.

Life is good. Count down with me until August 22nd. First day of school!

Tamra and family