Sweet Pea Alyssa turns 5!

Alyssa turned 5 today! I can't believe she is getting so big! We celebrated today with a dinner of hot dogs and french fries, per her request, and ice cream for dessert while we sang her the "birthday song", also per her request. Grandma and Grandpa came over to eat dinner and dessert with us. Here are some things Alyssa has done in the past year:
-Just last month she started riding her bike without training wheels.
-She takes dance class and performed in her first dance recital last May.
-She loves to play make believe, originally starting as her being a baby, cat or dog to me, then changing to Cole being her baby, cat or dog (usually dog) when he was old enough to want to play along.
-She loves to help me cook and bake in the kitchen, always eager to pull up a chair to stand on and stir something.
-She loves to sing and make up songs of her own, so she got a mini piano with a microphone and recorder on it to make her own music.
Alyssa has the sweetest heart and tells us she loves us all the time, always giving big hugs and kisses. She is gentle, sweet, kind and sharing, with some spitfire and independence in there to keep things interesting. With her tiny voice and cute face, she can't possibly be ready to go to kindergarten in 5 months!? I will miss having her around all day. She truly warms my heart.

Brooke's missing tooth

Brooke lost her third tooth on Wednesday January 22. She made a deal with her Daddy to get her a treat at swim team practice if she let Mommy pull out the tooth later. So, after we got home, and much deliberation, Mommy pulled out the tooth. A paper towel and an ice cube made it all better, and here is her tooth, and her new smile!

Cute (or not so cute) things Cole is doing

-He loves to wear his car hat, boots, and any clothes or pajamas with cars on them. Sometimes he even refuses to wear something that doesn't have a car on it. I thought only girls were picky about their clothes!

-He loves his dump trucks and cars. He put on a plastic yellow firefighter hat, backwards to make it look like a hard hat I guess (don't know where he saw that before), and went to work dumping cars from one dump truck to another, or from his front loader to the truck. I was pretty impressed by his skills! I made him come back to take this picture, so he's not very happy with me.

-Last week he got a big spray bottle out from a cabinet and wanted water in it. He figured out that it was too big to fit in the water dispenser on the fridge, so he got a smaller spray bottle, filled it with water a few times and dumped it into the larger bottle. He then put the sprayer on top and started squirting everything with water. I gave him a paper towel when he sprayed my sliding glass door-what a good helper he is!

-He was standing by the sliding door in the kitchen last Thursday and just started counting out loud-he counted all the way to 7! Pretty good for a two year old.

-He likes to sing along with me when I sing him songs at night-"Twinkle, Twinkle little star" and "Jesus Loves Me". He has been singing "Twinkle, Twinkle" by himself all day long recently.

-He loves to dance to music. We have magnets on the fridge that play music and he will push the buttons and dance in front of the fridge while I'm doing dishes or cooking. (I dance with him, of course)

-My neighbor watched him when I took Alyssa to the doctor last week. Cole and her little girl Lilly (who is 3 months younger than Cole) went into her half bath when she went upstairs for a few minutes. They turned on the water in the sink and pushed the stopper closed. She didn't hear any noises and came to check on them-she found them in the bathroom, water overflowing onto her floor and two 2 year olds soaked from head to toe. Apparently with Cole's and Lilly's previous individual bathroom water playing experiences, they came together to create a big mess!

-He shows me a car and tells me who is in it. He showed me a red car and said "Grandma in there." Then he showed me a red truck and said "Grandpa in there" and pointed to the bed of the truck and said "My in there". This needs a little explanation. Grandma and Grandpa recently got a truck with an open bed, and Cole loves to stand in it when they come over and it is parked in front of the house. He says it is his! Then he showed me a blue vehicle and said "Daddy in there, and my". Now I just need to work on him saying "me" or "Cole". I'd take either.

-The kids have an alphabet puzzle with pictures under each letter of something that starts with that letter. There is a train under T and a xylophone under X. Cole thinks the xylophone is a traintrack, so he kept pointing at the train saying "Choo choo" and then pointing to the xylophone and saying "on there". He did this for about 10 minutes while I was trying to get Alyssa to say which letters I was holding up and find where they go in the puzzle until we covered them up.

Germ Sharing

The whole family is sick now. Brooke and Cole started with fevers last Wednesday night, terrible coughs followed and got worse everyday. By Saturday afternoon, they were miserable. We took them to a nighttime pediatric place that night after I got off work at 9pm. After chest x-rays and oxygen level monitoring, we got our diagnosis. Cole has a double ear infection and some inflammation of his lungs-given antibiotics. Brooke has pneumonia with low oxygen levels, even after a breathing treatment there, so they decided to admit her to the hospital to keep her on oxygen until her levels went back up. They said I couldn't just take her over to the hospital, she had to go by ambulance to keep her on oxygen. BJ was home with Alyssa, so he had to call his parents at midnight to come back and watch her so he could meet us at the hospital to get Cole. We got to the hospital around 2am, and they said her oxygen levels weren't low enough to have her on oxygen, even though they were the same as they were at the pediatrician's office. Whatever. BJ took Cole home (after he was such a trooper to keep falling asleep and waking back up so many times), Brooke and I spent the night. They gave her breathing treatments every 4 hours, and antibiotics and a steroid in the morning. She had another chest x-ray at the hospital because they couldn't get the one from the pediatrician's office. She got flowers,a balloon and teddy bears from Grandma in Ohio, and a visit and a heart-shaped pillow from Grandma and Grandpa here. (We didn't know if she would be staying another night or not:)-these things brighten her up! The pediatrician at the hospital said it wasn't pneumonia but a viral infection that has the large airways of her lungs inflamed (can't remember the exact name)-so no more antibiotics, just rest and breathing treatments as needed. We came home around 7pm Sunday-almost 24 hour ordeal. She is home from school today, and doing a little better. Cole is a little better too. BJ and I started feeling sick yesterday, and we both feel worse today. I think we both have the same thing. Brooke is upset with Alyssa because she "made her sick", and because Alyssa doesn't cover her mouth when she coughs. Germ spreading lessons from a 7 year old-always cover your mouth when you cough. More germ spreading lessons from me-wash your hands to get rid of germs. Together they might keep you or someone else from getting sick:) I have to work on de-germing my house over the next few days-Lysol and Clorox wipes are my friends!

Alyssa and Her Hives

Well, after taking Alyssa to the doctor last week and getting antibiotics in her by Thursday night, I thought she was on the road to recovery. I had to work both Saturday and Sunday, so I was happy that she would be getting BETTER by then. Wrong! Saturday just before I was leaving for work I noticed that she was COVERED in red splotchy hives from head to toe. I called and left the doctor on-call a message and waited for him to call back. He called in a prescription for a steroid and said it was probably a virus, not a reaction to the antibiotics. So I went to work, leaving BJ to deal with the aftermath. Alyssa ended up getting a fever on top of everything. He went to Walgreens to get the steroids, and then made another trip because our Tylenol AND Motrin had both expired in the fall (shows how often we actually need to use them!) He tried to give Alyssa medicine to make her "itchies" stop and her fever go away. She decided that medicine didn't taste good, gagged and threw up four times. Poor BJ! Needless to say I got phone calls for help. He finally convinced her to keep the medicine down by bribing her with a sucker. She is sleeping when I get home. Sunday morning she wakes up with even more hives than before-almost a solid red on some parts! I try to get all the medicine in her before I leave this time, but she still spits out the steroids. We both have to work and BJ's parents come over to try to handle everything. BJ's mom gave Alyssa an oatmeal bath to help with the itching. It did help her forget the itching (yeah Grandma!). She woke up 4 times between 1am and 3am this morning, crying and itching. The hives don't really go away much, so this morning I took her to the doctor again. From the urine culture sent to the lab, they have determined that the infection she has is resistant to the antibiotics she is on, so he changes that (hopefully she is not allergic to it since 5% of kids who are allergic to penicillin like she is, are also allergic to this one). They give her a SHOT to get rid of the hives, and tell me to hold off on the new medicine a day until the hives go away, just in case she breaks out from the medicine. Alyssa cries at the office, and then everytime I say the word shot for the next 4 hours. Then she tells me whenever she gets a chance the rest of the day that she doesn't like shots and doesn't want to go back to the doctor. What will she say when we go next Friday for her 5 year checkup? Good news-no more breathing treatments because her lungs sound good!