Eye eye, Cap'n!

This week one of Michael's speech therapists brought us a talking device to try out with Michael.  Each button has a picture or word associated with it.  The idea is that when he wants something, he pushes the button for it and you hear one of our pre-recorded voices say the word or phrase associated it.  Things like "milk", "snack", "hug", or his favorite, "all done".  Spencer recorded that one and the kids still burst into giggles every time we hear his four-year old voice belt out "I'm...all...DONE!!!".

Michael's new talking machine.  We still need more pictures to go with the buttons.

Early on Friday morning I took Michael into the hospital for eye surgery to help correct his strabismus.  It has been almost a year since his previous eye surgery, and his eye surgeon said that statistically speaking this should be his last.  We're grateful that once again we could do the surgery here in Fort Collins instead of traveling down to Denver.  Liz stayed home with the other kids to help get them off to school and to keep Brooklyn well fed.

Michael's surgery went very well.  Since I wasn't allowed to go with him into the OR to help put him to sleep, the nurses him a little Versed to relax him and make parting with dad easier on him.  (Shouldn't they have something to give to dads as well?!)  An hour or so later the surgery was finished.  An hour or two after that we got to come home.  He handled the whole ordeal like a champ and didn't even cry very much.

His eye is very red and occasionally has bloody tears coming from it.  He's had a fever today and has been feeling kind of crummy.  (He's been saying "I'm...all...DONE!!!" a lot lately.)  But he should be feeling better in a few days.

Chilling out in his PJ's after getting home from surgery

We saw our first significant snowfall this week.  Only a few inches worth, which (shockingly enough) they didn't cancel school for, much to our children's chagrin.  Hopefully the weather will be nice this week as we drive out to Utah to spend Thanksgiving with the Bellamy family!

Sarah and Whitney arriving home from school

Time for some hot chocolate by a warm fireplace!

Babbling Brooke and Marching Michael

Brooke is four months old now and is as cute as ever.  She smiles brightly when someone is paying attention to her and gets upset when she's being ignored.  Not sure if it's a princess complex or the youngest child syndrome (it's probably both).  Fortunately she has lots of older siblings who love to give her attention.  Especially Spencer.  He's always making weird noises and pulling silly faces to try to get her to smile.  Liz and I laugh when we see his antics and comment, "Boy, it starts early, doesn't it?  The things a boy will do to try to get a girl's attention!"

Brooke is still up at night a lot.  Sometimes it's for social reasons and just wants someone to pay attention to her, but usually it's because she's hungry.  We eagerly awaited her four month birthday so we could start giving her solid foods with the hope that it would help her sleep better at night.  Unfortunately she has a really bad gag reflex, which is especially pronounced when we try to feed her rice cereal.  So if we're lucky we can get her to swallow a few tiny spoonfuls, otherwise it sometimes causes her to throw up everything in her tummy.

One of Michael's speech therapists works with a lot of children with bad gag reflexes and suggested we use one of the tools we've been using for Michael to help Brooke.  The tool looks like a lollipop, it's a white stick with a star-shaped sponge on the end.  You stick it in the child's mouth and twirl it and swab it around to help wake up the mouth.  The hope is that if we can wake up Brooke's mouth before she eats she won't gag so much.  The jury is still out on it, but we hope it will help.

Michael has a shiny new walker now, which he seems to like.  It has several features we can adjust as he gains strength and coordination.  He's still not strong enough to do much with it, but we're hoping that over time it will help him learn to walk on his own.  It has a strap around his waist to help keep him from falling down.  We usually keep the back wheels locked so that he can't roll backwards, he can only move forwards.  Of course, that means when he bumps into things he's stuck and needs help.  The front is open so that he can walk over to something and interact with it with his hands without having a big bar in front of him blocking his reach.

Michael's eyes are starting to have a hard time keeping straight again, which means one eye or the other will sometimes quit working.  So he's going in for another eye surgery on November 22 to try to correct the problem.  Fortunately we can do the surgery here in Fort Collins instead of driving down to Denver.

Sweet Sarah

Sarah turned eight years old on Friday.  It's hard to believe she's growing up so fast!

It's our family tradition to come into the bedroom of the sleeping birthday child and sing Happy Birthday to get them out of bed.  Of course, Sarah had been awake and bouncing around the house for hours beforehand with anticipation.  But she still wanted us to sing to her to get her up, so when it was time she ran back into her room and dutifully pulled the covers up over herself, then acted surprised when we came into her room singing Happy Birthday to her.

She opened her presents before breakfast and her siblings and parents did her morning chores for her.  It was a school day, but Liz and I took her out of school for lunch and treated her to Hu Hot, which is a fun Mongolian grill where they cook the food in front of you and rate the spiciness of the food on a scale of 0 to 5 burning villages.

After school we threw a birthday party for Sarah and invited a bunch of her friends over for pizza, pinata, presents, cake and ice cream, and a fairy movie.  It was with no small amount of trepidation that we invited such a large group of eight year old girls to our house, but they were remarkably well-behaved (as were our own children!) and they all had a great time.

Halloween

Lately we haven't been able to stay on top of even the basics, let alone find time to update our blog!  At four months old, Brooke is still sleeping like a newborn, and is often up 4-5 times a night.  She and Michael often won't nap at the same time in the afternoon either, so poor Liz is running on fumes.  (If you're thinking about all the diapers, yes, those fumes too.) :-)

Michael's and Brooklyn's needs are really intense right now, and we're still trying to squeeze in time for our three older kids as well.   So much has happened in the last few months, so I'd like to take the extra hour we get at the end of daylights savings time to capture a few of them.

Michael and Brooklyn sure are a handful but they're starting to grow fond of each other.  The other day I watched the cutest thing as Brooklyn was lying on the floor and Michael crawled over and tried to give her a kiss.

When I was a kid, Halloween was one day a year where we dressed up in our costumes and went trick-or-treating at night.  This year our kids had at least five or six events throughout October where they got dressed up and that involved treats and candy.  And even though we have tons of dress up clothes, they always wanted to wear something ELSE for Halloween! 

We had a great Halloween this year, the kids are getting old enough to really start getting into it.  Here are a few of their creative decorations they came up with.

Spiders hanging down from the ceiling

Our house is now officially haunted by "Frank Einstien" (any relation to Albert?)

One evening a few weeks ago, we had a mysterious friend visit us for dinner.  She told us it was unfortunate that Whitney wouldn't be able to join us, but she assured us that she was Whitney's friend and that it was okay with Whitney that she have dinner with us.  We had never met her before and haven't seen her since.  We've also never seen her and Whitney together.  But she was a delightful dinner guest and she let us take her picture before she left.

One of our October traditions is eating dinner in a pumpkin.  We had the missionaries over for dinner the night we served it, so they were able to share in our tradition.

Liz took the kids to Utah for a few days when they were out of school.  The Bellamys are big into holidays and have a legendary annual Halloween party at their house.  This was the first time our kids were able to attend and they had a blast!

All dressed up for the Bellamy Halloween party!

Unfortunately I had to stay behind and work, in more than one sense of the word.  Some of the main rooms in our new house don't have any overhead lights, so I remedied the situation in our living room.  I was able to route most of the electrical wiring behind our crown molding.  The room was a complete mess for a few days and I couldn't even blame it on the kids.

We had a Halloween party at church about a week before Halloween.  Zach Gormley is one of the top yo-yo champions in the world and happens to go to our church so he wowed us with his talent at the Halloween party.  What an amazing teenager!  At the end of the Halloween party the kids went trunk-or-treating by gathering candy from cars in the parking lot (unless the car was owned by one of the many dentists and orthodontists in our ward, in which case they got pencils or stickers.) :-)
 

Brooke's first Halloween!

All dressed up for the church Halloween party

When the kids started getting low on candy from trunk-or-treating, we knew it was time for Halloween day to finally arrive.  The kids had another Halloween party at school, followed by trick-or-treating at Intel where their daddy works, followed by another round of candy gathering in the neighborhood that night.  Our new neighborhood has lots of families with kids, so we had plenty of trick-or-treaters at our house as well.

Spencer has really been into spiderman lately.  Towards the end of October he mostly rotated between wearing his spiderman pajamas and this spiderman costume.

In case we didn't already have enough candy, let's go trick-or-treating one more time!