Milestones

Mom here (I know...ME again?)! What a month it has been! As the title suggests, this has been a month of milestones for us. Although one was not a particularly great milestone...

Milestone: First trip to the emergency department at the hospital. A few weeks ago, Sunday night, Carly was in her usual avoidance measures at bed time. Kate was finally asleep, after hours of crying from a sore tummy that afternoon. Daniel, Carly and I were in our room and I told Carly it was really really (no, really) time for bed. She said no, ran into the living room, we heard a thud and some crying so went out to the living room to see what had happened. Somehow she had ended up over our recliner chair and up against the corner of the wall almost upside down. I picked her up, thinking she just needed a quick cuddle, and quickly realized I had blood all over my hands from the back of her head. We stopped the bleeding but we couldn't see her head very well and didn't know how hard she had hit it so we woke up a very unhappy Kate and headed to the hospital (thanks, Brian, for being on call for the location of the closest hospital). We arrived at about 8.15pm. They did registration, then a while later an inventory of what had happened. After a while Carly perked up and even tried to play a bit with a little boy who was there. At one point I asked her if her head hurt. She said 'yeah....I need ice cream.' I told Daniel she was going to be just fine...the cheeky thing! Sometime after 10pm they got us into a room, then we waited and waited and waited. The doctor finally saw us, said she was ok, was going to do a staple but said we could go without and just check it for infection. We headed home at 1:30am. Kate was awake that whole time too. When we got home, Carly walked in the door, into her room and put herself to sleep. She is fine now. Tough as nails, I tell you.

Milestone: The dummy fairy. 'The Who???', you ask. Australians call pacifiers 'dummies', so that was the term we adopted for Carly's. She has been very attached to this piece of plastic for several years and has clung to it even more in the last 6 months with all the changes in her life. However, now that we are more settled, we felt it was time. A friend here said they did the 'fairy' thing, so we thought we'd give it a go. For a week ahead of time, we hyped the fact that the dummy fairy was coming, that she was going to take Carly's dummies but leave her presents. She was pretty excited about the presents and was usually fine with leaving her dummies, but as the day approached she kind of wanted the presents without leaving the dummies. But by the time the day came around, we left it up to her to put her last dummy on her night stand. Then the dummy fairy quickly swooped in when Dad and Carly went outside to check the mail. A little while later we asked her if the dummy fairy had come and she went to the front door and said 'nope, no dummy fairy'! She walked into her room after we suggested she see if her dummy was still on her night stand...we heard this 'OH WOW, IT'S BIG'! The big purple bag (she requested a purple present from the dummy fairy but the dummy fairy couldn't find a purple present thus the purple bag) contained a microphone, a 4 pack of dress up princess shoes, some fruit snacks and a jump rope. Though she really liked her presents, there were a few times though the next few days that she said she wanted to give her presents back for her dummies. I'm not actually sure she's a fan of 'fairies' any more but she's doing great anyway! This afternoon she said to me 'fairy took my dummies but I don't need them anymore 'cause I am a big girl and I can go to sleep by myself'!

Milestone: Mouth madness. Kate now has her two bottom teeth. They have given her a bit of grief so she has passed on the favor to us, but she has really done pretty well. I think she's actually on her way to getting a third. She also started eating food about a month ago. Her favorites are peas, carrots, pear and, believe it or not, rice cereal. She is definitely not a fan of peaches. Obviously she is well nourished- she just had her 6 month checkup (3 weeks late) and she weighs 16lbs 12oz (7.3kilos). They say she is 27.5in (70cm) but I think they measured a bit wrong and she's probably a slight bit shorter. While we were there, I took Carly's measurements- about 30lbs (13.5kilos) and just over 3ft (91.5cm).

Milestone: Crawling. Kate is well and truly into the crawling phase. She started wriggling a lot more a couple of weeks ago. She looked a bit like a thorny devil trying to walk- for those of you who have not seen a thorny devil walk, it's basically some rocking/wiggling back and forth, eventually followed by forward movement. But now, put her down and she won't be there for long. And I'm not sure why she likes the kitchen so much, with its hard wood floors, but there is just no stopping her from eventually getting in there. I think she's just foraging for food- it would not take her long with Carly's crazy way of eating sometimes! Kate really enjoys her toys now, wrestles with her stuffed dog and chews the heck out of anything she can get her hands onto. Oh, and give her anything that is NOT a toy (her current fav is shoes), and she's a happy camper.

Milestone: House hunting. We must be entering the land of 'grown ups' now since we are officially house hunting. We met with a realtor to look at 3 houses on Tuesday. Neither of the houses is our future home but we have another house to look at in a couple of weeks. After being here for a few months, doing lots of driving and looking online, talking to friends and taking into account the proximity to work and the housing prices, we have a very good feel for where we want to live and it's pretty close to where we are renting now! We have this place until next June, so if nothing looks great and at a great price, we'll stay put until then. We'll keep you posted.

So much has been happening and we're still sort of settling in as well. I will probably feel that way for the next year! Daniel is doing well at work and is learning lots in his truck factoring 101 course. He even got to go to a big trucking show on Thursday! I told him I bet that was something he never thought he would do! The girls and I are enjoying not being entirely surrounded by boxes every day at home! We have finished going through the boxes in the house, now we just need to spend some time out in the garage going through the rest that wouldn't fit in the house. The girls and I meet weekly with 3 ladies and their kiddos who we met at Kindermusik when we first arrived. We have several other people we see occasionally and my new friend Stephanie has three girls, 7, 5 and 2 so that's great.

Another huge thing for us is that we have found 'our church' here in Fort Worth. It's Solid Rock Baptist Church in White Settlement (no, we're really not racist...it's historical). It's a small church which has a country feel about it. The preaching is very Biblical and often very challenging to both Daniel and I, which we find really great! The music is contemporary with acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass and drums currently. The kids ministry is great and Carly is sooooooooo happy there. She jumps up and down and really gets her act together to get out the door when we say we're going to church. The first week, we kept Kate in with us but since then have left her in the nursery. They have done such a good job with her- one week she was happy as a clam, one week a lady rocked her to sleep and last week they came and got me as no one could calm her down (she just wanted to nurse). Having both kids well taken care of also means Daniel and I can concentrate on the teaching and worship time a lot more too! We really look forward to meeting more people and getting more involved in the life of the church there.

We're busy...last weekend we had a wedding shower over in Dallas and a birthday party for our friend Natalie and this weekend is our niece Whitney's birthday party and then our friend Matt's bachelor's day before he gets married next weekend so we are staying the weekend in Dallas for the festivities. The next weekend we head to Kansas City for a visit over Labor Day, the next weekend we have baby Jake's 1st birthday party then later in September our friends the Sosnas come to visit from Australia and Daniel's birthday (33)is upon us! Take a look at our most recent pics (videos are coming, I'm just having problems with my video editing software crashing before I can do anything)!
'Til next time- Mom