This one is probably my favorite. It makes me laugh:
Ava fell asleep eating lunch! This girl never stops. She has been saying the cutest things lately and also has been coloring on everything.
We're in that horrible hair-in-the-eyes phase...at least it motivates me to do her hair each day.
Isa has gradually progressed to wearing a boot. It was a blessed day when we gave the wheelchair back. Its amazing how heavy that thing gets! I learned new appreciation for anyone who has a child with disabilities. She still limps around, but at least she can walk.
She still doesn't speak much to anyone other than friends or family. I tried taking her to a pyschologist to see if that would help, and it has a little. She was filling out a form for parent teacher conferences about her strengths and weaknesses as a student. One of the questions asked which rules the student was already good at following. She was having a hard time thinking of one (she can be a little "cheeky" to use the English phrase), so I started going through some hypothetical rules to give her an example, such as no running in the halls or raising her hand to talk. She said "well, I hardly ever raise my hand to talk." Okay, oops, I guess I wasn't thinking about that one. Almost every rule I mentioned, she'd say things like, "but I do run in the halls sometimes." This was just not working out. Finally, I had a stroke of brilliance. I said, "do you ever talk out of turn or interrupt the teacher when she is talking?" She acted frustrated and said, "but Mom, I hardly ever talk at all!" "Exaclty. So if you hardly ever talk at all, then you can't be talking out of turn, can you? I think we have found a rule you obey VERY WELL." She giggled about that for quite a while, and wrote it down with a huge smile on her face.
We went on a trip, just Miguel and I, in October. This is HUGE news, if you know us at all. We never leave our kids. I have been dying to blog about it, but all the pictures are on Miguel's phone, since dummy here forgot the camera., So, here are the highlights:
1. A couple of days in upstate New York when the leaves were brilliant. (Loved the people, too)
2. A quaint old B & B that we never would have taken kids to.
3. Church historical sites which we tried to rush through because we were pressed for time. Ironically, I was the one getting frustrated at the missionaries (poor kids, they were like vultures...we were pretty much the only tourists) who cornered us at each location and bore their testimonies like crazy. It got to be a joke Miguel teased me about, wondering what had happened to me, and me dreading each new site and almost (this is horrible!) laughing at our final church site as a missionary started crying as she was bearing her testimony. I know where I'm going.
4. Niagara Falls. Stunning. More stunning than I had imagined. More touristy too.
5. Niagara-on-the-Lake. Charming town I'd never heard of before.
6. Toronto. A little disappointing. Still, I was determined to do gourmet in a big city, so we trudged through Chinatown and some rough parts of Toronto at 10pm at night to go to a Spanish tapas restaurant. Worth it.
7. Our friend's wedding. Entertaining (at 28, marrying a beautiful girl with teenage daughters who weren't sure about him yet), beautiful, biggest Chinese buffet I've ever been to (I ate every fried thing in sight and no veggies), so great to see his family again, who we bonded with in England.
8. Tim Horton's. Disgusting.
9. Thousand Islands region. Too bad we were out of time-- it was breathtaking. We want to go back with the kids some day.
10. Running out of gas on our way to the Syracuse airport, being helped by a stranger, then being told at the airport that Miguel's flight had left at 6am in the morning (booked wrong by his travel lady at work) and that there was no room on the flight home on a standby basis. Then forgetting the liquid restrictions and having to chuck our brand new maple-leaf shaped bottle of maple syrup. Miguel said he wasn't willing to pay $25 to check a bag for a $13 bottle of syrup, and who can blame him? At least they didn't lock us up for trying to sneak it through.
Pictures to come later, I guess.
Nothing else going on around here worth mentioning just yet.
