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!

Heat Day

On Friday our school district declared a "heat day" so all the schools in the district were cancelled.  Never heard of a heat day?  Neither had we.  Apparently only a handful of schools in the district have air conditioning.  Zach, which is the school our kids go to, is one of them.  But with unseasonably warm temperatures in the forecast (not to mention a 3-day weekend soon to be 4-day weekend *cough*) the district decided to close ALL the schools in the district, regardless of whether they have A/C or fans the teachers can bring in from home.  Strange.

Michael had the cast removed from his leg on Friday.  Yea!!!  Of course, since school was cancelled that day Liz got to take all five of our kids in for his appointment.  Other than a giant sore on his ankle, he doesn't seem any worse for the wear.  He's starting to get more interested in walking, so his physical therapist ordered him a special walker.  We're borrowing one he can use in the meantime.

One year later

It was a year ago this month that Michael finished his grueling cancer treatments.  His cancer was so aggressive there were times we wondered if the treatments were even making a difference.  Today he went down to Children's Hospital for another MRI, his fourth since he finished radiation.  We were thrilled to learn it was another clean scan!  It's nothing short of a miracle that his cancer hasn't returned, and that we get to enjoy four more months with him until his next scan!

One year later and I'm still cancer free!

We're in our new house!

The last few months have been absolutely intense!   Here are a couple of highlights.

After Brooklyn was born we spent the next few weeks taking care of our newborn and packing up our house in preparation for our move.  Liz's parents and sister Julie came out to help.  We also celebrated Michael's second birthday on July 2nd.  Last year at this time we didn't know if he would even have another birthday, so it was awesome celebrating another birthday with him!

+

We closed on our new house on July 12th and spent the next week with Liz's parents working on a few pre-move-in house projects and doing more packing.  That Saturday a group of friends and neighbors helped us transport two Uhaul truckloads to the new house.  We saved some of the really heavy items such as our piano, some dressers, couches, etc. for the professional movers, who came a few days later.

 

Liz's parents took our three oldest children with them back to Utah on the day of our move.  They enjoyed having a week to play with their Bellamy cousins while we moved to our new house and started the unpacking process.  We drove to Utah the following weekend to pick up our kids and for Brooklyn's baby blessing.  Brooklyn looked like an angel in her blessing dress.

 

One evening while we were in Utah, Michael was playing on Grandma and Grandpa's bed and tumbled off it.  With his poor balance he's already prone to falls.  We protect him the best we can while still letting him explore and develop, and fortunately none of his falls have been serious.  But after this particular fall Michael just wanted to be held all the time, cried a lot, didn't want to sit up, crawl, or do much of anything.  We couldn't figure out what was wrong until a day or two later as we were preparing to drive back to Colorado, we noticed he wouldn't put weight on one of his legs.  That night after arriving home we took him to the ER, and sure enough he had a broken leg!  It's not a bad break, so the ER doctor put a splint on it and referred us to an orthopedic surgeon.  The surgeon, Dr. Baer, happens to be one of our friendly new neighbors we had just recently met, and he put a nice waterproof cast on Michael's leg.

Interestingly enough, Michael's physical therapist has wanted to put weights on Michael's right leg to help him with learning how to walk.  The cast has fit the bill nicely and has been a blessing in disguise in that regard.

My parents drove out to Utah from California for Brooklyn's baby blessing and caravan-ed with us back to Colorado to spend the week with us.  It was great spending time with them and their help was invaluable as we worked on more house projects, unpacking, cleaning out our old house, moving the rest of our stuff over to the new house, taking care of the demands of five young children, and so on.

In the midst of all this moving, Whitney and I celebrated our birthdays as well.  It's a real treat sharing a birthday.  I took Whitney on a special birthday date and asked her where she wanted to go for it.  None of the options I presented sounded all that appealing to her, such as Fort Fun (miniature golf, arcades, etc.), bowling, and the like.  But when I suggested taking her to McDonald's where she could order anything she wanted, her whole face lit up and she was sold!

On August 14 we closed on our old house on Willow Creek Drive.  What a bittersweet moment it was for us.  I bought that house 12 years ago as a single bachelor.  I proposed to Liz in that house and together we brought five children to that beautiful home.  We spent many years making memories and getting the house just the way we wanted it.  But we were bursting at the seams and it was time to find a bigger home.  The family who bought the house from us has two children, a girl and a boy.  When we met the husband and wife on our closing date, they seemed absolutely delightful.  They even brought a baby gift for our little Brooklyn.  As sad as we are to leave our beautiful home, we're so glad that it's going to a wonderful family.

Even though we now live in a new neighborhood, we had originally planned to keep our kids at Liberty Common School.  Liberty is an amazing school and has been so good for our family these last two years.  But as we looked at the logistics of a longer drive to and from school on top of an already packed schedule, we decided to give the local neighborhood school a try.  We've heard a lot of great things about Zach Elementary, and like Liberty it's considered one of the top schools in the Fort Collins area.  The bus stop is on our street, so commuting won't be a problem.  So we're sad to leave Liberty, but hope that Zach will be the right fit for our family at this time.

First day of school!

Michael had a multi-disciplinary clinic at Children's Hospital a week or so ago.  That's where doctors and surgeons from many different fields related to Michael's illness meet with him to see how he's progressing and decide on his next steps.  The clinic was long and Michael has a lot of challenges ahead of him, but overall it went about as well as expected.  Michael's next MRI is this Friday.  We're praying for another clean scan!

The last few months have been absolutely exhausting and we sometimes wonder if we're ever going to come up for air!  Our kids have needed a lot of attention to help them get through this transition.  Poor Michael would scream and cry for up to nine hours a day, and who could blame him?  Bringing home a baby from the hospital and moving to a new house completely rocked his two-year old world.  On top of that Brooklyn is going through a really fussy period right now.  The combination of just those two kids has made it tough to get much done, including sleep!  Our three oldest children are adapting to the changes in their own ways, and we try to find the bandwidth to give them as much love and support as we can.  We don't know why we have felt impressed to make so many big changes at this time in our lives.  We feel completely overwhelmed, but we've seen the Lord's hand in our lives a lot lately, helping us, guiding us, and reassuring us.

Brooklyn Renee

Wow, what a week!

The three older kids participated in a soccer camp in the mornings so I could spend my "overdue" week resting and getting a few things done.  There weren't any major signs the baby was coming until Wednesday morning when some mild contractions started.  Wednesday afternoon we had a home inspector coming over so we had spent Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning getting the house spotless. I got up from resting through my contractions in the afternoon and found the kids had gotten bored of the movie they were watching, and had "forgotten" to not mess up the house.  There was powdered sugar all over the floor in the kitchen, toys strewn everywhere, the fridge raided and food left out, and the kids had set up an elaborate pretend play.  Just then, the doorbell rang - the home inspector had arrived 30 minutes early!  Tim just happened to call home to see how everything was going right at that moment.  I was in a bit of a panic  - early home inspector, messy house, sleeping Michael, in labor... thankfully we managed to get everything cleaned up while the inspector was outside.  It was 103 degrees outside so we headed to the library so I wouldn't melt in the heat.  Tim had left work to come help me and met us there and then we took the kids out for pizza afterwards.  During dinner my contractions started coming less that 5 minutes apart, so we headed home, found a babysitter for the night and took off for the hosptial.  The labor and delivery was different from our other four kids and went really well.  The best part was the doctor sprinting into the room and nearly missing the delivery as things at the end went really quickly.  Our little girl was born at 1:41 AM on Thursday, June 27.  She weighed just shy of 8 pounds and is 20 1/2 inches long.  She's our second smallest baby (Sarah still holding the reigns as our smallest) and has a ton of dark hair.  She definitely looks like she belongs to our family!  We named her Brooklyn Renee and call her "Brooke" for short. 

Late Thursday afternoon Tim brought the kids to the hospital to meet their new sister.  Sarah and Whitney immediately were doting on her, Spencer had to feel my belly several times to make sure there wasn't a baby in there anymore, and Michael - well, the minute he saw Tim holding our new little girl, he started crying and screaming.  It was like he was saying, "What?!  Mom and Dad, you traitors!"  He was practically inconsolible the entire time we were there, but we did manage to get a picture with him and Brooke.  I had two dear friends come to the hospital at the same time as the family and one of them had a camera and caught some priceless images of our family.  The noise in the room was deafening - the kids started having a pillow fight, Michael was howling in misery, and the grown-ups were trying to talk.  It was the perfect moment of the pure chaos of our new family.

We are now home from the hospital (oh, there's no place like home!) and spending our time recovering.  The best part when I arrived home was Michael putting his hands on his lips to try and close them and say, "Mmah" for "Mom."  He then saw the baby in Tim's arms and signed "Baby."  He's much more content today with the baby.  The kids are exhausted from finishing up soccer camp and art class.  I think we will be laying low for the next several days. 

Dr. Kozak made it to the delivery room just in time to deliver Brooklyn

Wow...check this place out!

Happy and content

Proud parents

Mom needs a bigger hospital bed

Pillow fight!

Sarah and Brooklyn

Whitney and Brooklyn

Spencer and Brooklyn

Michael and Brooklyn

Poor Mikey is no longer the baby in the family

Slipping schedule

At work we say that our schedule is slipping when we have to push out the date we expect to hit a certain project milestone.  After Liz's due date came and went last Friday with no sign of the baby, our schedule has definitely slipped.  In fact, at her doctor's appointment two days before her due date, the doctor said the baby isn't showing any signs of being anywhere near ready to deliver.  Liz is convinced she'll be the first woman in history to be pregnant forever.  So we're hoping the baby will come this week sometime, otherwise we'll have to induce and the baby could potentially be born on Michael's second birthday, July 2.

The good news this week is that we sold our house in only two hours!  It went on the market Monday afternoon, had five showings within the first two hours, and we accepted a fantastic offer. What a relief we can focus more on getting ready for the baby to come.

Summer "vacation"

Since Memorial Day, our summer break went from being pretty busy to crazy hyper-drive!  We have been swamped boxing and cleaning our house to get it ready to sell, handling some challenging decisions with the new house, hosting lots of family, starting new and intense therapy with Michael, getting the kids in the new summer routine, and keeping Liz's feet from swelling too much.  The baby is due this Friday and Liz is ready for the baby to arrive sooner than later.  A friend recently said to Liz, "I don't know anyone who has ever put their house for sale when they were 39 weeks pregnant."  This is not what we would have imagined for ourselves either.   Our house will be on the MLS Monday morning.

We can hardly believe this is all happening at once.  We also had a big hail storm last night so we've got leaves littering our lawn to clean up in the morning.

Last weekend Tim's sister Emily came to visit us with her husband, Tony and their kids.  The intent was to help us get ready for the baby to come, little did they know what that implied!  They worked hard helping us with landscaping, decluttering, cleaning, moving stuff to storage, and helping to watch our kids.  It was amazing to see what we were able to accomplish in a weekend with their help.  Their timing couldn't have been any better.

Riding the local kid's train with the Bradshaw's

On Saturday just as Tony and Tim were driving away from the house to take a load of our belongings to storage, some of the kids came running out of the house to tell us there was water dripping from our basement ceiling.  Tim went to investigate, and sure enough, one of our water pipes was leaking.  He cut open the drywall and fixed the leaking pipe, but here we were, just days away from listing our house on the market, and our basement ceiling looked like this:

The earliest we could get someone to patch the drywall was on Friday, the same day the real estate photographer was coming to take pictures of our house!  Talk about cutting it close.  The photographer came in the morning with the instructions to use a camera angle that didn't show the hole in our ceiling.  The drywall guy came in the afternoon and did a beautiful job repairing the hole. We are finally ready to go!

Here's some more of our summer fun:

The water table Grandma got for Spencer and Michael's birthdays has been a super hit.  Michael's Real Kids Shades have transformed his life as he can be outside in the sun now without his eyes killing him because he can't squint.

Michael has had several evaluations and therapy appointments in the past couple of weeks too.  We started a new speech therapist in Denver that focuses on oral-motor skills.  She is fantastic!  Here she is working with Michael to teach him how to blow into a whistle, something we wondered if he could ever do.  She is confident Michael will be able to eventually say all vowels and consonants.  We are going to try and see her often as possible during the summer with our busy schedule and then see her weekly when school starts.  She also recommended we see a regular speech therapist once a week locally as well to work on Michael's language acquisition and vocabulary skills so he will eventually have two speech therapy appointments a week.  While he understands just about everything we say to him, he is about 75% speech delayed, so we've got a lot of work to do to help him catch up.

Tim's brother, Scott, and his family stopped by for a day on their drive from California to Nauvoo (Illinois).  He and the older 3 kids spent the day with them at Rocky Mountain National Park.  It was so fun to see them.

We had a great night out with good friends in Fort Collins at the local dinner-theater.  It was great to get together and catch up.  Tim started out with these guys as friends at BYU.  They all eventually married and we now have almost 16 kids between all of us!

The kids just finished up 2 weeks of swim lessons.  On the last day, Sarah had the courage to jump off the diving board for the first time!  She did awesome.  Whitney and Spencer were in the same class and unfortunately still haven't made progress in getting their faces wet.  Whitney is almost too old for the classes offered for her skill level since she hasn't made progress for a few years so we will be looking into a good private teacher to help her.  Any suggestions?

Next post:  hopefully about a new arrival or a house sale!

We're Moving!

It's been a very eventful last few weeks.  For this post we'll talk about the house.  We've known for years that we'd eventually outgrow our starter home and need to get something bigger.  So we've been looking off and on for the last few years but never found anything we liked well enough to justify a move.  And with Michael's illness, any thoughts about moving have been put completely on hold for the last year and a half.

About a month ago Liz and I had a conversation to see if wanted to start looking at houses again.  We're starting to feel awfully scrunched with another baby joining our family in a few short weeks.  She's literally going to be sleeping in a bassinet in our upstairs hallway when we bring her home from the hospital.  But we decided there's no way we'd want to move this year, with a baby being born in June and how intense Michael's therapies have been.  We decided that if the right house came along we'd wouldn't turn it down, but we wouldn't be actively looking and we'd plan to stay in our current house at least another year.

Within a week of making that decision, we put an offer on a house.  It was a great house, in a great neighborhood, had everything we needed except a yard.  The next day we decided the lack of a yard was enough of a deal breaker and withdrew our offer (it hadn't been accepted yet).

A few weeks later we saw another great house in another great neighborhood and ended up putting an offer on that house.  Our offer was accepted!  So now we have to get our current house ready to sell, and we're going to be moving, and we're having a baby in a few weeks.  Are we insane?! :-)