christmas cards and thank yous

I finally got my Christmas cards done last night. What a job!! We also got thank-you notes and gift cards for the girl’s teachers this year. That was quite the job too. Av has 6 teachers (2 preschool 9-noon, 2 after care noon-3 and 2 after after care 3-5) and 2 therapists (speech and hbr) and Camille has 5 teachers (3 from her infant room and 2 from her new explorer classroom). I am so grateful for each and every one of them. I wish we could do more for them. I think teachers in general are amazing people. It takes a very special person to be a teacher. All of the girl’s teachers go above and beyond. You can tell they truly care and I just wanted to make sure they knew I noticed and how much we appreciated it.

Holidays

I am so out of this world excited for the holidays this year. I am having a hard time contracting on anything else. My sis and I went in together and got the best most perfect gifts for our parents this year. They are going to be blown away! They deserve them so much because they go above and beyond for everyone they know and gave us everything we needed and most everything we wanted growing up. Sorry Mom, I am not going to say what they are. Hehehehe As for my girls I think they are going to love their chairs along with everything else they get to unwrap that day. They are lucky little girls. Av is going to be so excited by a piggy bank G&PP are giving her and a coin purse full of coins from AA and UM. She will also be getting several things on her “list.” We have a few things for Camille but I think at this age we could wrap up diapers and she would not care. Just the wrapping will be fun for her. We did get them a cardboard playhouse. It is one that you set up and they play with it until it falls apart and then it’s done. The girls will be able to draw on it and color/paint/glue stuff on it anyway they want. It was $19.99 and I think it might be a big hit. It is a toy that won the best toy of 2008 award. This Friday we have a little holiday party set up with the Shumans. They will come over and the kids will play and exchange holiday gifts. Then we will put the babies to bed and we have a babysitter for the big kids. The adults are heading out for dinner. After that we will have a slumber party at our house and make a yummy breakfast in the morning. Saturday night we will have Christmas with John’s Dad’s family. They are a blast so it will be a good time. On Sunday the girls and I will get up and head to WV. We will be there for almost a week. I can’t wait to veg and hibernate at their house. John will fly in on the 22nd. On the 23rd we will drive into Pittsburgh and have Christmas with the Werner side of the family and then on the 24th we will have the day/dinner with the Welsh side. Then back to WV to wait for Santa! On the 26th we will head back home. That night is John’s annual chili cook-off that him and his friends have been doing for YEARS. John’s little brother will come and sit at the house while the girls sleep. I have Christmas week and New Years week off work!

Fussy, fussy, fussy Camille

Well I officially stopped nursing Camille for good. It is sad, but had to be done. I was only nursing her right before bed. On Wednesday I was at the immediate care with Av so John put her to bed. On Thursday I was home alone with the girls but I knew a sitter was coming the next night so I thought if I was going to do it now was the time. She cried when I put her down on Thursday but not too bad. On Friday Heidi came so John and I could go to one of his Holiday parties. My mom ended up coming for the weekend and surprising us. It was so nice to have her and we took advantage of it by getting dinner together on Sat. So both Friday and Saturday we left Camille before bedtime. On Sunday Camille was very clingy with me. I think I left her a little too much over the weekend. Poor thing was out of sorts. She is teething too so that is not helping matters but she has just been very fussy. I was kind of glad to drop her off at school today. I hope she does not spend the whole day crying and biting other kids. Hehhehe The other fussy thing she has been doing is refusing to sit in her high chair. In her new classroom the kids sit at a table in chairs. At home Av sits at a small table and chair so I think Camille feels she needs to too. UGH She arches her back so it makes it next to impossible to sit her in her high chair and then when you do get her in it, she just screams and will not eat. So we have been trying to let her sit at the little table but she makes such a mess there plus she does not want to sit and eat. She wants to walk around the house with her food. UGH I think we are just going to have to put our foot down and wait her out in the high chair. She is just not as big of a girl as she thinks she is.

list

Recently Avery has started to see things in the store that she wants and will ask for them. This really is the first she is asking for things and she is good about it and does not “bug” too much for things. With Christmas coming I have started to tell her “you can ask Santa for that.” When we tried to see Santa but she would not go near him so we started a list for Santa. Now when she sees something she wants she tells me she wants to “put it on her list for Santa.” The other day after saying that for the 20th time she looked at me and said “my list for Santa is getting big.” Heheheh She is pretty funny. I’m not sure what I am going to do after Christmas is over and I can’t tell her to “put it on your Santa list.”

sick again

Wednesday Av came home from school not feeling well. As the night went on I got more and more worried about her. Her breathing was just off. It was hard for me to decide if it was just fast from the fever or if something was off with it. So I decided to play it safe and when John got home Av and I left for a Take Care Clinic at Walgreens. I had called and they said they could see a 4 year old. So we got there and it was a joke. The lady tried but ended up saying she thought she had pneumonia but didn’t know for sure and didn’t have the equipment to tell for sure. She sent us to an immediate care. By the time we got seen at the immediate care Av’s fever was back up so they thought the breathing was just fever breathing. They checked her all out and decided it was just a virus. At that point Av kind of perked up so I was feeling better about the whole thing. At 8:30 she was hungry. She ate her dinner well and went to bed. The next morning she woke up pretty okay too. By noon though she was heading down hill. Her fever came back, she was breathing fast, her heart seemed to be racing, she was moaning like she was very uncomfortable and she was not making sense while talking. I made a dr appointment and sent her to bed for a bit. She fell asleep and when I woke her for her appointment she seemed better so the whole time we waited at the dr I was second guessing myself. Kept thinking they were just going to tell me the same thing they told me last night. They didn’t though. He said she had an ear infection and was going to give us an antibiotic for that but still wanted to send us for a chest x-ray. He said the meds would clear up pneumonia if she did have it but he thought it would still be worth it for us to know for sure if she did have it. After sitting in another waiting room with a limp 4 year old in my lap for an hour we finally got the x-rays taken. We had to wait again for the results. Before leaving Av’s dr he told me he would be the one to give me the results over the phone while we were still at the x-ray place. Well when we got on the phone his nurse told me that he needed us back in the office. That scared the crap out of me. She said he needed to see her and he wanted to do something else. I didn’t know what he had seen on the x-ray (tumor???) but I couldn’t call John or anyone because I didn’t want Av to hear that I was scared. So back to the dr I drove us. Come to find out the pneumonia was in her left lung right behind her heart and he wanted to make sure her blood pressure and oxygen levels were okay again. They were thankfully, but if they had not been he was going to admit us into the hospital. The whole day I was telling Av that the stuff the drs needed to do might be a little scary (x-ray) but none of this would hurt (like a shot would). Well the dr decided to give her a shot of an antibiotic to get it going. By that point though Av didn’t even really have the energy to fight it. It was quite the day but thankfully we have wonderful doctors that care so much. She is much better and will soon be back to herself.

bully

Camille has become a big bully. Well maybe some of it is that she just does not know better but I do think some of it is a bully personality. She will just take a sippy cup and whack Av on the head with it. She has started biting too. As soon as she gets mad/frustrated she opens that mouths and goes for it. She bite Av twice yesterday. Av needs to start playing a little defense too though. You can see the biting coming from a mile away so I have tried to get Av to yell NO and back away. Av is so innocent yet and just thinks that things like that are mean and so people should not be doing them. She does not understand that her sissy does not know that yet and it’s our job to teach her. Last week at the doctors as I was talking to the dr all the sudden Av said “sissy standing on the chair.” I looked over and sure enough Camille had climbed on a chair and was standing on it. Ugh. Av never stood on a chair in her life!

Pictures of the pictures