Rosa's six-month letter

Rosa Jane,
Today, you are six months old!  Half a year.  Wow.   Of course, it seems like you've been with us for simultaneously much longer and shorter than that.  It feels like you have always been a part of our family, and yet also just like yesterday that you were born and on Mommy's chest and we were falling all over ourselves to say hello for the very first time.

All this is to say, of course, that we are absolutely over the moon about you, kiddo.  You are a very satisfying baby for many reasons, some of which I will enumerate here.

First, you sleep!  You go down around 7 pm and wake up with us around 6 am.   You almost always wake up to nurse in the night and spend the rest of the night in bed with us.  I sometimes don't realize that you've woken up until I look over and see your little face in bed next to me.  I love it.  You're the only one of our children to actually want to sleep with us during babyhood and we love it.

Secondly, you eat!  Oh, how you can eat.  We may be experienced in some areas of parenthood, but in dealing with babies who actually want to eat food, we have little to no experience!  It is so very satisfying to feed you and to see how worked up you get!  You often lunge for the spoon and end up with cereal or fruit on your cheek or in your hair, because your aim was slightly off :)  Mostly, you love rice cereal above all things except Mommy's milk.  You also like sweet potatoes in their pureed form, and banana mashed up and served to you on one of our fingers.  You hate baby food bananas, though, and pretty much all other types of baby food when served straight up.  However, you will eat almost anything if it comes mixed with rice cereal.  Peas, bananas, pears, prunes, you name it, you'll eat it.   It is awesome.

Third, most of the time you are quite simply a happy baby.  You will smile at almost anyone.  You still have two great dimples and you love to show them off.

You really only cry when you're hungry, have a wet diaper, are tired, or when your gums hurt.  This type of crying has been happening a lot lately, because you just got your first tooth!  It popped out two days ago, that ornery little left front one on the bottom.  You've been working on that sucker for a long time!  The gnawing and fussing and drooling hasn't let up, though, so we think you must have another one coming.  For some reason, having your first tooth makes it seem like you are growing up way too fast.

You're probably working on some milestones, but, as third-time parents, we have opted not to keep track too closely.  It just stresses us out and makes us feel competitive to look at those lists of when kids are supposed to do certain things.  I'm sure the doctor will remind me what you're supposed to be doing at your appointment on Thursday, so don't feel too neglected :)

You're definitely working on grabbing and are very interested in grabbing objects in front of you.  You try really hard to pass from one hand to the other, but then end up grabbing your other arm instead and then the wheels kind of come off from there.  In other news, you have mastered the fine art of rolling and can get placed surprisingly quickly by doing it.  You've even got down the complete roll from front to back to front again in one motion, although it always takes you by surprise when you do it!

Finally, sitting.  You don't, although not for lack of wanting to.  You have gotten so much tummy time (because you love being on your tummy) that your back is really strong, and so you tend to hurl yourself backward anytime we put you in a sitting position.  Your siblings both wobbled and fell forward when they were learning to sit, but you go backward and with vigor!  One of these days, you will do it and then just think of the possibilities.

Oh, and one more thing:  your siblings!  They love you and you love them, or at least we think you do.  You smile at them a lot and sometimes laugh, and generally let them hold you, help pick you up, and help roll you over.  You are going to have your work cut out for you, chasing them around, so it's a good thing you're such a strong girl!

Rosa, we love you just exactly the way you are right now, and we will always love you like that.  Now that you're six months old, just think of what tomorrow might bring!

with all our love,
Mama and Mommy

Sick

I woke up yesterday morning with a nasty cold.  I wasn't feeling my best, but I had registered to run a 5K that morning and so I went out and did it anyway.  Once the race started, I felt fine, although I could tell that my throat was taking a beating.  After the race, even after I changed out of my soaked t-shirt, I felt yucky.  So, I skipped out on the post-race pancake breakfast and went home. 

I gave my best shot at a normal morning but by afternoon, I was wiped out.  I finally took my temperature just for the heck of it and it was up a little.  By that point, Sacha and her mom (who is visiting for the weekend) were both taking naps (Sacha had been up in the night with Mateo), so I opted for a little of one of my favorite parts of fall:  college football!  I quickly made a bowl of popcorn and the kids and I just sat on the couch and watched the Oklahoma State/Texas A&M game.  I was hoping for something more local, but it was actually a great game. 

It was the perfect way to spend a slightly sick afternoon, although I did have to explain more than once to Mateo that yes, football is dangerous even though they wear pads.  He's kind of fascinated by things involving danger, which include motorcycles and football.  At this point, he thinks both are dangerous and bordering on bad, but we shall see what he thinks of them in a few years!  Having owned and loved a motorcycle in the past, I have no moral leg to stand on in that department! 

Anyway, the football game got us through the afternoon and pretty soon Sacha got up and sent me to bed.  I'm still feeling pretty icky today, but functional, and I hope tomorrow will be better. 

On a completely different and more fun note, Natalia is finishing Headsprout Early Reading as we speak.  She's on the very last lesson!  We are so proud of her and are planning to celebrate with fancy macaroons later this afternoon.  Go, Tali!

Lemon

It seems abundantly clear at this point that we have a lot to learn about buying cars.  I haven't blogged about it, but our minivan has had several major problems crop up in the year that we've owned it, including a leak in the back hatch, a back door that won't close on its own, and one of the side doors completely breaking while we were at our family reunion this summer. 

The last straw, of sorts, came yesterday, when I took the kids to the mall and was getting them out of the car only to hear a crunching sound from the other side door as I tried to close it.  It was so stuck that I thought I was going to need a tow truck, but I finally managed to wrestle it closed and then got it to the dealership, where they informed me that it would be $1,900 to fix it and no, it wasn't covered by the warranty.  I had the three kids in tow and we had quite the adventure of getting to the dealership, getting shuttled to a rental car place, and finally getting a rental van.  Each step of the way involved uninstalling and then reinstalling three carseats, so the whole process was slow at best. 

Anyway, at that point, we (and by we, I mean Sacha) entered into negotiations with the dealer about swapping our van out for a similar year and model, because Siennas supposedly don't normally have these types of problems, but those ultimately went nowhere. 

So, we are going to suck it up and pay for the fixing of the door and hope that nothing else goes wrong in the near future.  Then, when it makes sense financially, we will sell the thing and get an Odyssey.  I've had a Honda Civic for the last 12 years and nothing has ever gone wrong with it, and now we are kicking ourselves for not sticking with the brand that we know and love.  I'm really just venting because there's nothing else to do about it!  Let's hope we've learned our lesson from this and exercise greater caution in the future with such purchases.  Argh.

Photos of the new house being painted!

The new house is in the process of being painted. Here are some photos of how it is coming along!

The magic time

I don't know about you, but 6:45 pm is the magic time in our house.  The reason it's so special is because 6:45 is when our kids start getting ready for bed.  All I have to do is get them in their jammies and get their teeth brushed and such, and then I hand them over to Sacha, put the baby down, and then the house is quiet.  Soooo blissfully quiet.  Don't get me wrong - I love our kids to the moon and back.  However, everybody needs a break now and then, and, for me, I need a break every day starting at 6:45 pm! 

Having an evening is a great thing.  I can't recommend it highly enough!  It is especially sweet now that Rosa has the same bedtime as her siblings, because we have our evenings back again.  It's not like we have a party every night or anything; mostly we just chat or have tea or watch something online (right now we're obsessed with this series about the witness protection program called In Plain Sight).  Sometimes we even have a friend or friends over!  But mostly, we just enjoy the peacefulness of all three kids sleeping at one time. 

We really do need to enjoy this blissful quiet in the evenings, because it is frequently broken up by one or more kids in the middle of the night.  Most predictable is that Rosa wakes up for a night feeding and then spends the rest of the night snuggled in our bed.  Right on her heels, at the moment, is Mateo.  He has been coming to sleep with us for the past, well, probably a long time.  It used to be that he'd come in around 5 or 5:30, but it has moved earlier and earlier recently.  Last night, he came in smack dab in the middle of the night and just stayed.  We have a queen bed, but it gets quite crowded with Sacha and me and two of the kids.  At least (knock on wood) Tali stays in her bed at night!  One of us actually has to go in and get her up in the morning, because she won't get herself out of her room even after she wakes up.

Anyway, I will close with this:  before bed, I tried to have a talk with Mateo about staying in his bed and sleeping in it all night long.  "Mama," he said, quite calmly, "I'm just not that kind of a boy."  There you have it, I guess.  At least he is the kind of boy who goes happily along with my 6:45 pm magic time.  Give me my evening, kid, and I will sleep for most of the night on the very edge of the bed, because there is nowhere else to go, for you! (Well, not really.  We must work on that.  Soon.)

Miles

We are definitely getting our money's worth out of the swagger wagon lately.  It seems like all I do is pile the kids in the car to go somewhere and then pile them out again when we get there, and then rinse and repeat.  A lot of it is shuttling ourselves back and forth between the old house and the new house, which is a good thing, just more driving than we're used to.  The good news is that things are coming along!  We painted more this weekend and I even got some painting done this morning while the two bigger kids were at preschool.  Then, we hired a friend to do a bunch more painting and we are hoping that he will knock out some big sections in the next couple of days.  After that, we think we can finish it off on our own.  We are not do-it-yourself-ers by nature, but we're getting a little better at it as we go!

Anyway, our day today was kind of relentless and it reminded me of this hilarious conversation we had with a neighbor the other day.  An inebriated neighbor.  Remember how I blogged about feeling invisible awhile back?  Well, we were not invisible to this guy.  We ran into him while out on a walk around the neighborhood, and, after he sized up the situation and established that (#1) I am a woman, (#2) all three kids were ours, and (#3) we had had them after we got married (this completely stumped him), he wanted to know what we did for a living. 

Sacha said that she was a teacher and I said that I stay home with the kids.  To this, the guy replied loudly, "YOU MEAN YOU DON'T DO NOTHIN'?"  It sounds insulting but really it was quite funny.  Trying not to laugh, I said "Well, I do take care of the kids," to which he replied, again very loudly, "YOU MEAN YOU COULDN'T FIND A BABYSITTER?" in this very shocked tone.  Again, in context it was hilarious, although it doesn't look very funny when I type it. 

Sacha and I managed to extricate ourselves somehow and decided that perhaps being invisible is preferable.  And, we've been repeating to ourselves and laughing, "you mean you don't do nothin'??  I had to laugh about it today especially, because I got everybody out the door, made all their lunches, did school dropoff, painted at the new house, got groceries, picked up the preschoolers, worked out, drove everyone to the new house to pay our painter friend, drove home, took them to a coffee shop for a treat, drove home, made dinner, played with them and Sacha in the basement, and then, now, finally, sat down after everyone was in bed.  You see, I really don't do nothin.  And I love it, nonetheless :)

Grass

I went out to a coffee shop for a little while this afternoon (thank you, Sacha!) and Sacha called to tell me that our littlest one had explored a new culinary sensation.  Yes, she had grabbed a handful of grass out of our backyard and stuffed it into her mouth.  Luckily, Sacha managed to remove it, but it was pretty hilarious to hear about!  Our baby #3 is exploring all sorts of new territory that her older siblings never did and she is keeping us on our toes.  We fed her some banana tonight for dinner and oh my goodness was that cute.  We are all just head over heels in love with Rosa and watching her eat that banana was just about the cutest thing she'd done, well, all day.  Going along with that, watching Mateo and Tali ooh and aahh over Rosa eating some banana made my day, too, because they dote on her so much.  I was worried that there would be a lot of sibling rivalry with three of them vying for our attention, but so far it really feels like she's our whole family's baby and everyone wants to help take care of her.  Let's hope it continues!

In other news, we had an adventure this morning.  We have picked out colors for the inside of our new house and are going to hire a friend to paint it, but this morning we felt like a project and so we decided to see how far we could get on our own.  Here's how far we got, with three kids in tow:  we painted one wall.  One glorious, victorious wall!  That doesn't include getting us all to the house, sending me to the paint store for supplies and paint, taping the whole area and getting the drop cloth positioned so that it was kid-proof.  Considering that we left our house at 10 and finished up at the new house around noon, we decided that our one wall was a pretty good start.  We're going to try taking food and napping paraphanalia over there tomorrow and see about spending most of the day there.  We'll see how it goes!

I'll leave you with a picture of our little grass-eater.  Just look at that baby chub!

Letters

I might have written awhile back about our oldest kiddo's reluctance to try writing.  It seemed like kids all around us were bursting into the written word and not only did Te Te have no interest in trying it, but he had an active disinterest in it.  We tried to coax him with tracing workbooks and doing lots of art projects around drawing, but he was having none of it.  Eventually, we decided that he would get there in his own time and so, while we hadn't been pushing it in the first place (more like offering it as an option), we just let the whole writing thing go.  It was pretty interesting, actually, to watch him blast through the whole Headsprout reading comprehension program, reading and answering more and more complex passages, while having no interest at all in even writing his name.

Anyway, Headsprout ended and, since we have been in the habit for a long time now of doing something educational during rest time, we started the new Funnix math program.  It starts with the most basic of math, like identifying numbers, and moves up slowly from there.  It also includes a little workbook that you print out and that the kids work in lesson by lesson.  Almost imperceptibly, it gets them to write numbers on their own. 

We didn't even know this was part of the program at first, and once we did, I, at least, was skeptical about whether he would even do that part of the lesson.  But, do it he did.  He wrote lines, then traced numbers, then wrote numbers on his own.  And then came the big surprise:  he started wanting to write letters.  He learned to write all the letters in his name and now can write his name. 

He would and will sometimes go right from a Funnix lesson to his little notebook and practice writing letters or asking how to write a certain word.  He still needs help with a lot of letters, but he has come very far.  

It came home to me yesterday in particular when he wanted to write a whole sentence on his own.  He did the first one in chalk ("I love Mommy and Mama") and the second two in his notebook ("I have robots" and "I have a book about me").  It's exciting to see him learning a new skill and having so much fun with it. 

A few recent photos

Here are a few recent photos!

Here's Mateo with his fabulous balloon octopus from the farmer's market:

Big brother reading to baby sister:

She LOVES rice cereal!

Fun with bubble wrap on a totally plan-free Wednesday morning:

First day for three of us!

Today was the first day of pre-school for both Natalia and Mateo, and was my first day back with the students too! They were both really excited to be going back to school.

At bedtime, Mateo told me all about how he is now a Caballito - the oldest group at preschool. He explained that he put his lunch box in the space for the Ositos, because he thought he was still in that group and didn't realize that he was older now! Too cute.

Natalia spent much of night time chatting about how much she loved Mateo's friends.

My day went fairly well, especially considering that I had a 100 degree fever yesterday. I ordered a sub for the second half of the day, and got through the first half. I am just thankful that I had a great sub that I could call on for help!

Going back to work

The last five months have been amazing. I have had the opportunity to stay at home with Alayna, Mateo, Natalia and Rosa thanks to the timing of her birth.

What a gift. To have the time to spend with family, to get to see all three of our children get just a bit bigger, older and more skilled. To see the older ones sweetly talk with Rosa and play with her.

While there were plenty of times when I was ready to go back to work and thinking about the upcoming year, I'm not ready. At the same time I am ready. I'm excited about being back in the classroom and at peace knowing that the kids are with Alayna and in a fabulous pre-school for part of the week. As I'm sure you know, I'm also sad that I'll be seeing so much less of them.

This last week I worked long days for two of my days. What that meant was I left home a bit before 8am and was back at 5pm. I know it is silly to think of those as long days, but they sure felt that way to me. Sure, those are normal hours for most people. And getting to stay 5 whole months home with the kids was a luxury (though it should be normal in my mind. . .).

I vacillate between being excited about the new year and teaching a new grade and feeling like I want just a bit more time at home. I think about all of my plans and the great lessons I have in store and feel ready to take on a new grade. Then I remember how I just have those two weekend days a week with the kids and feel like it is never enough time.

I'm not sure if I have a point, just that it has been a wonderful 5 months. I'm so thankful that I've spent this time with my family and enjoyed getting to know our growing family during this time.

Another reader

At some point a few months ago, Sacha decided to try out the Headsprout early reading program on Talia.  She was starting to recognize a few words (her name, Mateo, and Rosa) and Sacha thought it might be time to give Headsprout a try.  She turned out to be right! 

Yet another benefit of Sacha being home this summer was that Tali got to do Headsprout with an actual teacher, and that she and Sacha had a special thing to do together.  Tali has been challenged at times, but is still trucking through the episodes and rarely needing to repeat.  She just finished episode 32 out of 40, so she's closing in on the end. 

I commented to Sacha that I was amazed that both of our kids had been able to do this program at a relatively young age, and she said that she thinks that little kiddos can get their minds around a lot more than we give them credit for. 

It has also been interesting to watch Tali get more interested in books as she's progressed through the program.  This makes perfect sense, of course, but I had never thought about it in this way:  that of course reading is more interesting when you can recognize a few words and sound some things out!

Anyway, we are very proud of her and look forward to celebrating with her when she finishes episode 40!  I remember baking a cake for Mateo the day he finished the early reading program (which was on the same day that Sacha had that ruptured ovarian cyst), so I may have to do that again this time.  My mom just sent me this great cake book with all kinds of cool designs, so this will give me an excuse to try one out.

Oh, and, in other news, we went by the new house yesterday, armed with cleaning supplies and amped-up children.  We managed to mop the whole downstairs and vacuum the whole upstairs while the kids played.  Mateo even helped run the little hand vacuum on the stairs and in corners and such.  We were exhausted when we were done!   We didn't consider that when you buy a house that is significantly bigger than your current house, that cleaning it will take a lot longer.  Let's hope we can keep up with this thing!

New house!

Soooo, remember that short sale we bid on back in April?  That would be the one that we have been waiting for five months on the bank for.  It would also be the one on which, in the meantime, we have both publicly and privately changed our minds several times.  Our main issue was that this house is on a cul-de-sac that connects to a very busy street.  The street is busy enough that there's no way the kids will be able to ride their bikes around the neighborhood or do anything near the street at all, for now, and only with close supervision as they get older.

But.  But, it is the house of our dreams in nearly every other way.  Five bedrooms, three baths (we currently have three bedrooms and one bathroom) and over 3,000 square feet, which is nearly triple what we have now.  And, it's in the area we want, which is generally pretty spendy, and yet smack in the middle of our price range.  It's more house than we could dream of owning anywhere but way out in the country.  It definitely needs a little work, but it's of the minor rather than major variety.  It's practically around the corner from my grandma's house, which is a very good thing.  It's also very close to the school that we hope our kids will attend. 

Nonetheless, the very busy street issue has been a big one and caused us to agonize for months over whether this was the right decision, all while not knowing if the bank would even say yes.

So, finally, about a month ago, the bank did say yes.  And, once and for all, we decided to say yes, too!  And now, after even more hemming and hawing on the bank's part than one might believe possible, it is finally ours.  Ours!  We have a new house!  We find ourselves loving it more and more and haven't even had buyer's remorse, which we take as a sign that we made the right decision.   

We're lucky enough not to have to sell our current house right away, which will give us time to do the work on the new house and take our time shuttling things over before we move in.  It will mean a longer commute for Sacha when we do move in, and a longer commute to the kids' preschool, but just for one year, and did I mention that we are soooooooo excited?  So excited!!

Sacha and I carted almost all the toys in the kids' playroom, which have not been touched in months, over there last night and set up a play area in the front room.  The kids and I are going to be over there quite a bit for awhile as we get bids for different things that need to be fixed and such, so we thought it would be good for them to have stuff to do while there.  We had a great time this morning, as we waited for the insulation contractor to come, playing with all their stuff and doing a puzzle and running wildly around the downstairs.

We have hit Angie's List in a big way and scored a deal on a few hours with an interior decorator, so she's going to help us pick paint colors and such, and then the painting will happen, and then eventually we'll move in. 

So, that's the big news.  We're so excited!!