Elyse, along with nearly half of her 1st grade class, is out with the flu today.  She was sick all day yesterday too.  Camille, for the record, wants everyone to know that she had the cough first.  Her nose is a bit out of joint that Elyse gets to eat jello on the couch all day long.  “I’m sick too” she bellows.  Harry has decided to make his 2 cents known as well.  He is just plain LOUD lately.  In the car you can’t even talk because he is calling out nearly the whole ride.  Either he is just discovering his voice, or we are in for a very challenging kid.  Chris and I got to go out for dinner, luckily, before the flu hit full force.  We celebrated his birthday early because this was the weekend that we could get our babysitter.  We went to a “savory vegetarian” restaurant called Carmelitas in Phinney Ridge (Seattle).  We would have loved to had some time to check out the neighborhood, but we’ll have to do that when we aren’t paying a babysitter.   The food was interesting and fun.  I’m glad we went.  Another couple came with us and so we got to sample not only each other’s food, but also theirs.  ANd they had a 3 for $30 deal going which means you got an appetizer, entree and dessert all for $30.    Apparently lots of restaurants are doing this to encourage business but it’s for a limited time.  I would love to get to explore more restaurants, but we have to space them out on account of the budget.  I am glad we got an afternoon of sun yesterday because the gray & rain are getting very old.  I can see why people take their winter and spring vacations to warm sunny destinations very seriously here.  You HAVE to get away to be able to handle the gray.  Next year we will definitely plan a warm sunny vacation.

God Bless Harry

We had a very busy and eventful weekend.  On Saturday, the girls and I went to a very special dance performance at McCaw Hall.  The Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB) does a special program with the Elyse’s school where they have a professional teaching artist come to the school and help the 4th graders choreograph their own dance to perform on the big stage where PNB performs in downtown Seattle.  The kids incorporate something that they are learing (in this case the Oregon Trail) into their choreography.  In addition, we got to see some young teens who were part of REACH dance troup perform a jazz number and an African dance, and the highlight for me, were  excerpts from PNB’s Swan Lake.  It was a really great variety of dancing and great music (some of the kids danced to live drums which was really fun).
Chris meanwhile started working on the front lawn, with Harry in the hiking backpack.  Wish I had a picture of that after 2 hours!  I can’t believe Harry was content up there for that long!
Sunday we had Harry’s baptism.  The 9 am contemporary service (which seems to work best with Harry’s nap schedule lately)has a very talented band that plays.  Chris and I find ourselves singing the songs all week long.  Pastor Rody has been doing a series on Forgiveness which has been outstanding, and so we had a great service.  Harry loved the music and even clapped along.   He smiled and didn’t mind the water on his head during the actual baptism.  He let Pastor Rody hold him and show him off.  After Camille’s beautiful baptism in the outdoor chapel over looking Cleveland’s Metroparks with Rev. Joan (who I loved) I wasn’t sure if a baptism could ever compare, but this one was extremely special.  The only thing we were missing was our extended family and close friends.  More pictures can be seen on the picasa site:  http://picasaweb.google.com/chris.browder/HarrisonBaptism# 

Afterwards, we spent most of the afternoon doing spring clean-up in our yard.  The girls picked up hundreds of pinecones, Chris raked and mowed the grass, and I cleaned up the flower beds and the kids play area.  The yard looks awesome and we were so pleased.  Harry was a sport and played in the exersaucer  and took a little nap. 
Unfortunately, Harry, Camille and I all have colds.  We are trying to fight these with lots of sleep, but this is trickly since we are also trying to train Harry to sleep through the night without waking.  And, to add to this, Chris has to travel to Minneapolis tomorrow for work.  He will be gone until Thurs night.   He says he tried to get out of it, but  I think he just wanted some peaceful nights of sleep in a hotel…

St. Paddy’s day pics and sleep update

An update on the sleep situation:  we thought Harry had been having some rough nights of sleep, but those were nothing compared to last night.  He is reaching new levels of night waking.  He was up from 10-11:30, 2:30-3:30, and then again at 5:30-6:45.  Ferber method begins tonight.  I do feel a bit guilty doing this when he has a cold, but Chris had to call in sick today from work, so it’s getting way out of hand.  We shall break him of this.  Pray he is easily broken.  I feel like a train reck.

Harry visits the allergist

I am sitting in the car while Harry snores peacefully behind me.  I cannot bear to transfer him into the house for fear he’ll wake up, and after 2 weeks of horrible sleep, it’s the least I can do to let him nap in peace, at least until we have to pick up Camille from school in 1 hr.  Last night he actually slept better (not great, but better).  I was starting to wonder if perhaps the little guy was just hungry, so I had Chris pick up some soy formula on the way home from work last night.  My plan was to stuff full of 8 oz. of formula right before bed so that if he woke up I would know he wasn’t hungry and i could let him cry.  AHHHH, best laid plans.  Chris tried to feed him the bottle while I was putting Camille down (and trying to convince her to stop thinking about rats).  He maybe drank 1 oz. of the bottle and then Chris put him to sleep.  Geez, i could have nursed him and provided more than an ounce!  OH well.  I wasn’t going to wake him to try to nurse him.  He stirred a bit around 11, but this is nothing compared to his usual of late–screaming out at the top of his lungs.  He put himself back to sleep until 2:30.  I went and nursed him for my personal comfort, and he slept until 6:30.  He wakes up with a runny nose.  Probably the lack of sleep over the past 2 weeks.
So, this morning we drop Elyse off at the bus stop, Camille off at the before school day care (what a great feature in a preschool to have flexible extended care) and head to Dr. Jackson’s office.  We are a bit late because of course there’s no left turn onto 112th (where the doctor’s office is located) and there is no U turn anywhere nearby.  I had to cut through Whole Foods and back track.  Anyway, the doctor actually comes out to greet us in person and walks us back to the patient room.  Nice personal touch I thought.  He checks out his ears, his runny nose, throat and skin.  I am so stupidly proud that his skin is like silk–no eczema here doc!  Anyway, he says he doesn’t think there is a food allergy but that with the family history (Camille) it’s a good idea to check.  They do a scratch test (little pin pricks) for the big 6 (wheat, eggs, soy, dairy, cod, peanut) and cat and dust mites, which I could care less about.  As I am waiting for the 10 min. wait to be up, I check out his back and see 2 big welts.  Since I have done this before, I know that one of those is ok–it’s the hystamine that is supposed to show a reaction, but the other one is a bummer.  On the other hand it’s only 1 so that makes me pleased.  The nurse and dr. come in, start measuring the welt, and tell me that the one he reacted to is soy.  OH great, I said, recalling the soy formula I had Chris buy at the store last night.  The dr. also said that they examined the runny nose and found bacteria and cells that fight bacteria in there.  SO, the dr. said that he may be fighting something which is why he’s sleeping so badly.  He put him on augmentin.  Then, the nurse came back in showing a welt on her arm.  Look! she says, the soy test is making me react too, maybe a faulty test!  Yahoo, she retests him and he has NO soy allergy after all.  (Apparently they had a problem one other day with 4 different people showing false positive soy allergies).  Anyway, I couldn’t be more thrilled to have a kid who can eat anything.  The other interesting thing he said was that he just returned from and allergy conference in Washington and that now there are studies showing that perhaps waiting to introduce kids to the common may be the opposite of what we should do and that they are then missing their window to build up antibodies to these foods (hmm, I think my mom actually said this very thing not long ago!).  So that is the good news from Bellevue.  harry’s up.  Guess we can exit the car now.

Failed attempts 1 and 2

I’ll be honest, this wasn’t our best weekend.  We really tried to make the most of it, but we just failed miserably.  Saturday after spending much of the morning picking up and cleaning, we decided to have an outing.  It was raining/snowing so we decided to go to the mall to exchange some kids foaming soap that didn’t work and then let the kids play at the kids play area.  Unfortunately, the Bath and Body Shop was “coming soon”  to that mall, so we had to stop at a different mall first.  By the time we got to the first mall, Elyse was already complaing of being hungry (this is a constant with her).  After exchanging the kids’ soap for lipgloss (heck, I was just glad they picked something after 20 min. of shopping).  We pressed on to mall #2.  We parked at the wrong end of the mall, walked 2 blocks toward the play area, had to stop off for a piece of pizza for the girls, and then rode the elevator up to the 3rd floor play area.  Total MOB scene.  We didn’t even go over–way too PACKED.  Rediculous.  We hopped back on the elevator, went down and watched a bit of dancing (a fundraiser of some sort in the middle of the mall) and then went home.  Failed attempt #1.
Yesterday we woke up to SNOW again (i feel like i live in cleveland) and that set the tone for the rest of the day.  I tried to take a walk when a bit of sun shone through, but mid way through was pounded with sleet.  nice.  It dried up a bit once I got home so we decided that the kids needed to go outside to get some energy out so we took them to a huge play park with hiking trails.  The first thing Camille did was go down a slide, which was wet, and then I had to drive her home because her rear was soaked.  She had to change pants.  We returned,  tried to walk around a bit but Harry was not amused, it was crazy windy, and decided to head home.  We did take a detour drive up Cougar Ridge just to see what was up there (we found more hiking but the girls wouldn’t get out of the car).  Harry cried miserably the whole time.  Failed attempt #2.  We gave up.
SO, Harry has now been sleeping horribly for 2 weeks now and is 2 seconds away from serious TOUGH LOVE.  He is going to the allergist on Thurs. to check out a possibly milk allergy but I have cut the milk out and he still is sleeping horribly and is now even grouchy during the day.  We shall see.
OH, and the forcast is calling for “More Wild Weather” for the rest of the week.  C’mon.  How about SPRING??

Another weekend has come and gone.  Despite the pictures below, and the feeling that spring had arrived, we had a rather snowy weekend.  We made the most of the few hours of sunny weather today though, with an impromptu drive downtown.  Chris had been working on taxes (UGH) and I had been finding a unique way to work my abs (cleaning my kitchen floor on my hands and knees) and the girls were wrestling on the couch.  ENOUGH! we cried.  Let’s get out of here.   SO, we hopped into the car, made it all the way to the end of our street, realized that neither of us had actually grabbed a coat for Harry, and had to turn around to fetch it.  This was not a very promising start.  SO, there we were in the car, but we weren’t sure where to go.  We talked about the zoo, but we were not sure how long Harry was going to last until his next nap.  We thought about a park, but the girls didn’t really want to do that either.  Where to go…(meanwhile it was sleeting as we crossed the I-90 bridge into downtown).  As we drove up I-5, we looked over and saw the Space Needle.  We decided to go to City Center and just walk around a bit.  We found an awesome free parking spot in the middle of everything–SCORE.  We took a walk along the Puget Sound (my favorite part) and found a bike path, saw a train up close (Camille had been hoping for this), geese and ducks (Harry’s highlight), and a bald eagle (Chris was pretty excited about this).  We also saw some gorgeous cakes in a little bakery we passed.   Then we headed over to the Children’s museum for a short visit.  On the way home, dark clouds moved in but the sun was shining through the clouds in a way that made downtown Bellevue sparkle, literally.  And the view on the south side of the bridge was equally stunning.  Unfortunately we didn’t bring the camera so I have no photos.  Just imagine.

Camille overheard me say on the telephone that Harry was almost 10 months.  When I got off the phone she said “Harry is turning things too fastly”.  Camille, I 100% agree.  Harry is growing up too quickly.  He is getting pretty good about using sign language–he signs light, and ball, and today he signed for more Cheerios.  Yippie!  We are actually communicating and he’s only 9 months.  It’s so exciting.  I don’t know if you can see it in this picture, but he’s getting a little bit of curl in the back of his hair.  He is cute, even though his first top tooth is not one of the front 2 teeth and he has a huge permenant rash on his chin.  Friday evening I decided to let him have a leisurly bath and so I bathed him early.  He must have been in there for 20-30 minutes.  The best thing was that he accidentally fell back and was lying with his head in the water on his back.  HE HATES lying on his back.  BUT, he discovered he actually likes lying on his back in the tub.  He did it several more times on purpose and smiled.  It was great!!

I had Camille grab my camera for me because I wanted her to take a picture of Harry, and she went a bit wild with it.  Here is one of the pictures she took:

 

 

She also took some other funny one of Elyse which I’ll put in the picasa album.  http://picasaweb.google.com/chris.browder
We were invited to a family friendly party last night at one of Elyse’s classmates house.  We were only able to stay for a bit, but I’m glad we got to go.  They have a modest house, but they have done a ton of work on it, and it’s still in progress.  I like that they were ok with having tons of people over even though it wasn’t done.  Who says your house has to be finished in order to have a party?  I need to remember this the next time I want to entertain.  No one CARES!!  They had good food, lots of kids running around, and lots of new toys for Harry to enjoy.  
I have to share these pictures.  Last weekend our deck was crazy warm and Camille & Elyse and I did a bit of sunbathing:

 

 

Today we went to church and it felt and smelled like Easter.  It was so warm.  Our church has 2 services, 9 am jean service where they have a band, and the 10:30 which is a traditional service.  Today Harrison’s schedule allowed us to go to the 9 o’clock service.  The leader of the band, sadly, is moving for a job promotion.  Dwight sang his heart out, and played his guitar, and wiped his eyes repeatedly.  I SO felt for him.  Moving and leaving your church (and your band in his case) is hard.   The girls drew pictures of all of the band singing with their microphones and drew little musical notes at the top and gave it to him at the reception following the service.  He said he’d put the pictures on his frige.  I wished we’d had more opportunities to enjoy him singing.  But I am glad we knew him.  He will be missed.