Happy Thanksgiving 2013

It’s my favorite holiday time! I get a week off work, the weather is usually not terrible, and I get to eat Thanksgiving Dinner with my family. I am thankful for so many things this year, but I am not going to list them all because I don’t want to forget anyone or anything. We ate Thanksgiving diner at my parents and it was delicious. In fact, we have been eating a lot of goodies lately, beginning with cookies Fi and I baked to celebrate John’s becoming a US citizen on November 15, cupcakes we made for my mom’s birthday on November 24, pumpkin pie and pecan pie at Thanksgiving, latkas, Chanukah gelt, an edible arrangement sent by a friend, the best Rice Krispy Treats I’ve ever had at my cousin David’s house, and of course all of Thanksgiving dinner. It’s been a whirlwind month of eating, I tell you. It’s amazing any of us can still fit into our clothes.

We enjoyed a nice week at home. Fi’s school had a Harvest Festival right before Thanksgiving, so of course she had to re-enact it at home:

 

Everyone sat around while Fi read a book and many animals, including an alpaca named Stewart and a miniature horse, paraded by for petting. Her little green chair is now the Harvest Festival potty, so no one can sit in it unless they have to go.

Fi also built all sorts of things with her legos. This is either a robot, a sailboat, or a bridge:

Fi drew a triangle on her mini MagnaDoodle:

She is starting to intentionally write letters on paper. Sometimes she can make a very good M or L or various other letters, but she focuses mostly on those because M is for Mommy and L is for Love (she likes to “write” I love Mommy on things). She is also beginning to draw animals that actually look like what they are supposed to be. And it seems she is becoming left handed when it comes to the drawing and writing, but right handed with other things, like scissors or throwing.

Here is a bear she drew and a ladybug:

Like a true artist, she was not satisfied with the bear and eventually modified it. I took the photo before she did that because I like it just the way it is.

We sold our couch in a yard sale in October and ordered a new one. It arrived the day before Thanksgiving. We love it:

  

It is so nice to finally have a place to sit or lie down. I plan to donate the big nursing chair that used to be in Fi’s room, and then in our living room for the last six weeks, to the NICU, because we no longer have room for it anywhere.

The couch came just in time for Fi to get sick and need snuggling. She had quite a fever on Friday, but it was all gone by Saturday, just in time to celebrate Chanukah with my family.

John got the lights up early this year, so we can celebrate both Chanukah and Christmas, while Fi and I hung stockings and dreidels:

 

Fi did something that earned her an ice cream cone as a reward:

   

We all have jobs at our house. We get to pick them. I like doing Locks because it means I get to put a bear on the lock.

Fi is turning our house into an imaginary preschool, and re-enacts all sorts of activities here, including reading time when we put our listening ears on, choosing a job, clean-up, and project time.

The last week was so nice and relaxing. Fi was really happy to have me at home for most of the week, and John home for the long weekend. We ate so much yummy food I can’t believe my pants still fit, and the weather was pleasant, a little bit of rain, a little bit of sun. I learned that Fi knows a lot of nursery rhymes and would probably fit right in with a group of Victorian children.

We baked Chanukah cookies:

John thought they were Christmas cookies because of the colors. What can I say? We are a multi-cultural house over here.

Fi always helps me bake. She also helps makes pancakes or crepes. She is my official egg cracker and is very good at not getting any shell in the bowl. She adds pre-measured ingredients to bowls, stirs, can roll out dough with a rolling pin, and pours batter into the pan when that is required. I love that she is old enough to help out and I’m hoping all this helping will lead her to feel confident and comfortable cooking for herself when she is older (as opposed to always eating packaged food or fast food).

Here is John with some dolls on his head:

I’ll end with a video of Fi singing some songs:

National Prematurity Awareness Day

Today was National Prematurity Awareness Day. Even though Fi has been very healthy since birth, I still often wonder how different things would have been had she been born full term. Would she be taller? Would she weigh more? Would I worry less about her weight? Would I behave differently, especially the first year of her life? Would her first cold have necessitated a nebulizer? Would her personality have been different? For example, I never really let others hold her during her first year, and even though we didn’t stay locked in our home, we didn’t socialize that much either. We were relatively isolated, and I wonder if she would be a more social child if she hadn’t been born early. Not that I am complaining. I love her little personality. It fits in with our family very well.

I am forever thankful that I have her. I really believe that had she not been born when she was, I would not be a mother right now. I’ve heard too many stories that did not have happy endings that share many themes with the day Fi was born. However, I do not want to dismiss or ignore the fear and utter hopelessness I felt on the day she was born and in the weeks that followed. Our journey has been a relatively easy one. Fi only spent seven weeks in the NICU. I thought that was a long time, until I met women whose children spent months and months in the NICU, who came home on monitors, who had all sorts of health issues and near death experiences while in the NICU, who continue to have developmental and health issues because of prematurity. Somehow, we escaped all that. And I was able to nurse Fi until I decided to stop.

So today, and every day for that matter, I am thankful for the research into surfactant that kept my daughter’s lungs from collapsing, and for the doctors and nurses who took care of her in ways I couldn’t, and for all the equipment that monitored her and made sure to let someone know when she stopped breathing so they could stimulate her to start again. I am thankful for having two insurance companies at the time she was born (John’s and mine), because between them, they paid out almost $600,000 to the hospital and doctors. I am so thankful for who she is becoming, a typical three and a half year old who has many imaginary friends and a whole barnyard full of imaginary animals, is the little captain of a whale watching ship, who informed me that soon it will be time for her to read her own toothpaste tube, and who still needs cuddling sometimes from her mommy.

However, I still wonder how different Fi, or really how different I would be, if Fi had been born full term.

All photo credits go to my friend Eliza, who took these photos of us a few weeks ago.

Family Photos

A few weeks ago, we took family photos. I am providing a link to the website where they can be viewed and downloaded for free for the next three weeks.

https://service.pass.us/client/event/gr5pb388189

Here is my new favorite photo of Fi:

Halloween, Etc.

I know a week has passed since Halloween and over a month since my last update, but I have been so busy lately, I haven’t had time or energy to write anything. Last weekend I went to a conference in Palm Springs. John and Fi joined me. We all came home with food poisoning. We are all fine now, it didn’t last more than a day, but it was horrible, especially for poor Fi. Even though she used to throw up a lot when she had reflux, she hasn’t vomited in years. I cannot remember one time in the last two years that she vomited. Her illnesses tend toward fevers, rashes,  and sometimes runny noses, but not regurgitation.

This isn’t going to be a super long update post because frankly, I cannot remember everything from the last month. I swear, I feel like it was non-stop with afterschool meetings, illnesses (I think Fi and John were both sick for about a week at the end of September or beginning of October), and community service stuff on weekends. I went to Austin at the beginning of October, the following weekend we drove to Redlands (it was a great trip and we got to see some dear friends we haven’t seen in a long time), and the weekend after that was spent running around town like crazy people trying to do all the errands we didn’t have time to do during the week. October was an exhausting month to say the least.

Anyway, here are some Halloween photos:

Fi wanted to be a lion. She told me at least a month in advance. We went Trick or Treating in our neighborhood this time, but continued the tradition of going with our friends. And we were joined by another friend, but I do not have any good photos. We started early and few people were home. By the end of the evening, the streets were crowded. Fi helped pass out candy before bed time. She collected a small amount of candy that John hid somewhere and she keeps asking for it, but I am not really sure where it is because I don’t really eat a lot of candy.

Here is a video of her riding a tricycle. She figured out how (or her legs were finally long enough) about a month ago, maybe a month and a half:

She is singing “Going going going, going on my tricycle.”

Fi likes to make up little songs these days. She is a regular conversationalist and has many imaginary friends.

One afternoon, there was a rainbow over our house:

  

The garden is finally done, we ate the last of everything, and ripped out whatever was left, except one tomato plant in the front that is still going strong. Soon we will plant winter stuff.

I hope everyone is having a pleasant Fall season. I am really looking forward to the upcoming Thanksgiving Holiday because I love Thanksgiving dinner and I get a week off work.

Cheers!

Is It The End of September Already?

Boy it’s been a busy month! It’s already the end of September, and I haven’t written any updates.

School started for both Fi and me at the end of August. Fi was in two different classes and that didn’t work out, so now she is in one class, and loving it. My classes are going really well and I love my students (again). It’s so nice and relaxing having all honors classes. Almost everyone does their homework, there are no discipline issues, and they remember stuff from previous years. I can get used to this (but I won’t because it will probably never happen again).

Between work commitments and meetings, birthday parties for Fi’s friends, and other miscellaneous things, we’ve barely had a chance to catch our breaths. I think this is the first weekend we’ve had with no commitments and no grading for me! And that’s only because the community service project I was supposed to do with students was canceled at the last minute. I guess everything happens for a reason.

Our garden is still going strong. We still have more beans and tomatoes than we can eat, including yellow tomatoes that are dwarfing some of our roses, enough zucchini to feed a small army (I just made delicious zucchini muffins from some of it), a little bit of corn, some squashes, and this baby:

Do not be fooled by the lack of scale in that photo, that baby weighed almost 27 pounds. Basically, it was another Fiona.

Here she is sitting on it:

 

We put it in the BOB before putting it on the scale:

It was a very tasty watermelon that we are still eating.

There are a few more in the garden and we even gave one away. We took out the cantaloupe finally, and gave away our last eggplant. But, the cucumbers are still growing, we just cut some butternut squash, and there are a couple rogue tomatoes that are starting to produce. These are tomatoes that we did not plant, but grew from seeds of older plants.

In other news, both Fi and John were sick, first John, then Fi. She missed school for a week. I think I may have a cold now too, and I am hoping it doesn’t get any worse. No one was sleeping for at least a week around here.

Speaking of sleeping, Fi is doing it in a new bed:

We went to Ikea and Fi let Fi pick out a bed (from a small selection) as well as her own bedding. I wanted something much cutesier, but she insisted on the owls. Fi loves and it has come in handy when I’m cuddling her through a fever (and half sleeping in bed with her). There is no way I could have held her in her old bed and she really dislikes sleeping in our bed, so it was sort of a coup that we got the bed when we did.

The transition has been very smooth and she still takes nice long naps in it. It is very close to the ground, so we did not put up any sort of barrier. She doesn’t use the pillow at all, and I think she sleeps either diagonally or across the bed most of the time, but she sleeps none-the-less, and that is all I care about.

Other than losing sleep and Fi losing weight due to not eating during illness, nothing much exciting has happened around here. Fi is honing her humor skills:

Takes her “babies” to swim lessons:

 

Plays “airplane”:

Let me explain. The stones are seats in an airplane. I sit in front of her and Cece (one of her imaginary friends who is sometimes a dog) flies the plane. But this time, Fi was not feeling well and told me her seat was uncomfortable. So she got her chair and put a pillow on it, then later, brought me a pillow too. Then she put everything away by herself, without being asked, while I was making dinner.

We’ve been taking walks with Fi in the stroller because she doesn’t have a lot of energy:

This summer, we were attacked by ants. They seem to be mostly gone now, but for a month or more, if we even thought about food, ants swarmed the counters. Nothing worked but to store everything in airtight containers and wait.

Fi’s school lunchbox:

I think she has a thing for owls, even though she says her favorite animal is a lion. She doesn’t need the lunchbox anymore because she doesn’t stay at school late enough to eat lunch there anymore, but it was nice to use while she needed it.

Here is a before and after, about a month apart:

The little bud turned into a big melon. I don’t know how much it weighs, but I’d guess maybe 10 pounds.

That’s all for now. I’m hoping Fi is fully recovered by Monday so she can go to school again and I hope I don’t get any worse than the stuffy nose I have right now. On the development front, Fi is definitely into 3 year old sizes now, in all clothing brands, she is becoming quite the conversationalist, makes up songs and stories, and corrects John whenever he misspeaks. And everything that happens to her or in her life also happens to her “babies”. But really, you need to be here to understand and to see it.

I probably won’t write again for another month because October promises to be as hectic as September. At least the weather has been really nice, although I think I am ready for a little bit of rain soon.

Have a great weekend!