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Powered by LifeTypeScreenshot of a video call on Thursday:
Friday's procedures went well. They got plenty of marrow for their tests. The endoscopy showed the esophagus healthy. The sigmoidoscopy showed her colon quite inflamed. The surgeon could not tell the cause, but was confident that the pathologist would be able to. She woke up fine, though with some cardiac irregularities that settled themselves.
A dear friend visited all day Saturday, and this is what Grace looked like on a video call that evening:
She was eating a bagel, laughing at her brothers, talking, playing.
They are now just waiting for the colon biopsy results. There's some conflict of advice between GI and nutrition. Hopefully, with results there will be a clear path for what to do with her diet.
The rest of us went to an On Belay family activity day on Saturday, which was nice. It's been a good program for the kids these last several months. www.on-belay.org
However, Faith was in pain by lunch and could not participate in the high-climbing activities. She was really bummed about that.
Sorry about the orientation, I can't fix it on my phone.
Today is our 23rd wedding anniversary. Plenty of ups and downs for our family in those years!
In honor of the end of World War I one hundred years ago today, I post a picture of Joy hugging the tree that was planted in memory of her great-great-granduncle Harry Faulk.
See my mom's Armistice Day post for a few more details of my family's involvment in the war.
I am posting my backlog of pocket notes. Sometimes details are sparse.
6/29/16 - Noah's party, kids building brick fort, all the kids at the party working together. Yellow jackets
end of June, Nathaniel stepping up stairs, holding rail or wall
7/7-7/10 - Balloon Festival, hosting Richard, Jeff, Becky. Rain, parking
7/7 - Jeremiah calls grizzly bears, "jiggly bears"
7/16 - Jeremiah, "If Nathaniel is gonna die, you call NINE ONE ONE!!! before he dies."
7/19 - Joy, "72 hours! That's tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow."
7/24 - Jeremiah, when he saw Faith and Joy putting on shoes for church, "*I* want special shoes!"
Or: How This Mom Started Playing Minecraft
They say that a good way to show love is to take an interset in what the other person is interested in, even if you wouldn't care about it on your own.
I'm a busy mom and wife of an entrepreneur, right? I don't have time for video games. I have a house to clean, school to teach, dinners to make, diapers to change, invoices to prepare, bills to pay, laundry to wash ... blah, blah, blah.
But one day, my little Joy asked me to try Minecraft. All my kids love it. They play nearly every day, they collaborate, they watch each other, they coach and help each other. I have already put in the effort to be interested in their creations. But there is only so far you can go with intelligent questions without jumping in yourself.
I started in creative and peaceful. Joy and Faith taught me some things, and my generated world was interesting to explore.
Then Jonathan asked me to try survival and coached me through the steps. (Though I still insisted on peaceful at first.)
It has been fun to play around and discover things, build a house to my own liking, raise a rainbow flock of sheep, etc.
My questions now come from experience. Jonathan remarked, "It's so fun that you are actually interested in Minecraft now!" How to connect to your pre-teen? Maybe try Minecraft.
On vacation, I let them and myself do extra. We discovered the collaboration of multiplayer over wifi. We can be a team. I also see the different personalities of my children coming out. Each one approaches the game differently. Jonathan works for speed and efficiency, mining carefully in the right places. Noah thinks mining is mind-numbingly boring and avoids it when he can, preferring to get his treasure by killing monsters. Faith is matter-of-fact, cautious and deliberate. Joy makes beautiful, patterned structures. Jeremiah likes digging and building, digging and building, digging and building (and he is getting more deliberate, too.)
I also discovered the phenomenon that some other part of my brain works on real-life problems while I play. In a conversation with my sister, she remarked that I had been doing a lot of thinking. I replied that I thought I was just doing a lot of Minecraft. But she's convinced they're related. And that gives me a deeper appreciation for Jon's game playing as well.
In Minecraft, my kids are the teachers (even my five-year-old: "Mom... your inventory is full, that's why you can't pick that up.") I am the one learning, making novice mistakes, disregarding wise advice to my peril, and taking advice to my advantage. This is fun for them and it's fun for me. I'm glad I decided to take the plunge.
And now excuse me. I have to go shear a yellow sheep.
6/17 - Nathaniel gets three molars at once. upper left, lower left, lower right. The upper right made its appearance 6/22.
6/21 - Haircut day for some. (It's pretty hard to get everyone in one day.) I cut Noah's hair, and some of Jeremiah's (he got impatient and I decided it was better to stop than to get myself impatient.) Faith asked if she could help me with Joy's hair. She did a very careful job. I had her start on the bangs conservatively and when it was a nice, even job, I let her do the next centimeter. After that, she trimmed the rest of Joy's hair - to that perfect length that really sets off Joy's adorable face - right above shoulder length. I really only had minimal fixing up to do. So then she asked if she could to mine! This one was one hundred percent Faith, nobody needed to do any fixing up. I had not had a haircut since just before Joy was born (that makes it five and a half years!). I love my new haircut! It is much more manageable, but still long, just about 4-6 inches shorter.
6/24 - Jeremiah and Joy came upstairs with tape all over their faces and fingers. Jeremiah explained, "Armor! We goin' battling!"
6/1 - Nathaniel was playing with the nebulizer, dripped some of the leftover liquid, said, "Uh, oh." Then he walked to the bathroom, opened the cabinet, got out a hand towel, came back into the bedroom and wiped up his spill.
6/2 - I asked Nathaniel to put the toy cars away and he did it right away!
6/3 - Noah lost his first molar - lower left.
6/4 - Nathaniel got on the rocking moose all by himself.
6/6 - Jonathan, "Anything that's meant for school isn't as cool as something that isn't."
6/7 - Jeremiah, with finger movements, "Open the steeple, see all the guys!"
6/8 - Joy, "Hold your horses, Jeremiah!" Jeremiah, "Where my horses?!?"
Joy pronounces her friend Naomi's name as "Wyoming." (We're working on it, but it's still more like "Nyoming".)
4/26 - Jeremiah, after his first bowl of non-sugar cereal, asked for some sugar cereal.Only two pieces fell out of the box when I shook it, and he said, "Not two. I said'some', like this..." holding up several fingers.
4/29 - Jeremiah can tie knots. He tied the laces of my slippers together!
5/15 - Jeremiah and I went to the fire station to see the trucks for his special time. He recognized the five on the side (in 59) and said, "It has five on it, maybe Joy went on it." (Because she's five.)
5/15 - Jeremiah asked me, "My children in my belly, Mom?"
5/22 - Jeremiah was trying to tell me about a time when only he, Faith, and Joy were in the house, and some "people not our friends" came to our house. As I probed to get more information about this, I started to realize it must have been a dream. This was confirmed when his reply to where the rest of us were was, "Dad, you, Nanel died." But it took quite a while to convince him it wasn't real.
5/25 - Jeremiah, looking at my cousin tshirt, asking whose hand is whose. Then he asked about the coat of arms, and he said, pointing to each quadrant, "This is Grandma's house, Grandma's book, Grandma's song, Grandma's tree."
5/26 - Everyone went to St.Mary's parking lot for a bike ride. Jeremiah can go fast on his no-pedal bike now. It is actually a bit scary because I need to raise the seat for him. His arms go in a nice cross-pattern with his running legs, but it makes his steering crazy!
5/26 - Jeremiah said, "We love sun. So fun, so sparkly."
5/26 - Noah said, "I wonder if Billy will be called Bill. I hope not. Bill is so much more boring-er."
5/26 - Joy cheerfully cleaned up the table after dinner mostly by herself and ran the dishwasher.
5/28 - Jeremiah, using shovels and trucks in the sandbox at the camping place, with sheer joy, "Hi, Faith! I workin' in dirt!"
4/3 - I said to Jeremiah, "Your shoes are on the wrong feet, sweetie." He replied, "I not 'sweetie'. Joy is 'sweetie'."
4/10 - Joy and I spent a grueling but satisfactory three hours earning our yellow and orange belts, respectively.
4/14 - Jeremiah, "It will be so so so fun if I get lots of drums toys for Christmas." [Note from Mom: maybe not so fun for me.]
4/15 - Noah, "I am King Excalibur, and my sword is Arthur!"
4/15 - We were just about to leave to go to some friends' house for dinner when Faith came runnung inside, "Mom! Nathaniel's bleeding!" I grabbed a kleenex and ran down the side porch stairs. There is blood all over his shirt, pants, shoes, and the sidewalk. After a quick check from toes on up, I discovered that the cut is in between his eyes (a little higher and to his left than Jeremiah's similar cut.) I clamped on the kleenex, scooped him up and brought him to the kitchen sink. By that time, Daddy had been alerted also and he came to the kitchen to check it out. When I took the kleenex off, it had already stopped bleeding, and we could tell that, though significant, it was not as bad as Jeremiah's had been and we figured it probably did not need stitches. After we took off his clothes and cleaned up the blood, Jon applied a butterfly closure with a couple of regular bandaids on top. Nathaniel was really good about the whole thing. Only 15 minutes later than we meant to be, we went to our friends' house for dinner. The wound did ooze blood that evening, but it was fine in the morning. He has amazingly not been picking at it. I hope that continues even as it starts to itch. We don't even know exactly how it happened. The kids were playing in the driveway and no one actually saw him fall, or what he fell on.
4/16 - Jeremiah counted to seven correctly on his own.
4/16 - I have been doing knee pushups ever since starting karate. This year, I made a goal of doing ten pushups every day in February as a kickstart to the habit of daily pushups. After my karate test, I figured I could up the count to 20 a day. But, partly due to Jon's encouragement, I gave full pushups a try. On Friday, I did it! Ten full pushups! And again yesterday, and I'll do it again today. Very exciting and motivating. Proof that a little can grow with consistent work!
Joy can tie her shoes! She got some sparkly Hello Kitty shoes on her birthday shopping trip with Grammy, and it only took a couple of weeks for her to get it consistently. She's still slower than the rest of us, but she no longer needs help.
3/4 - "It's like somebody chewing on a guitar string lengthwise." Jonathan was commenting on a squeaky artichoke.
3/11 - Faith lost lower left 2nd incisor. (R one was a couple of days earlier)
3/12 - Nathaniel was interested in the potty and went a couple of times. I have not been consistent helping him be on it, though.
Jeremiah sings "Butterfly Amazing Grace" and asks me to, also. I didn't know what he meant when he first asked me, so I just sang "butterfly amazing grace" to the tune of amazing grace, over and over, and he liked it.
3/13 - NPD "here ya go" giving Jeremiah a piece of paper. (sounds like hah-ya-doh)
3/15 - Joy can wink both eyes.
3/22 - Jeremiah asked for "some of those green berries." He meant grapes.
3/22 - We were talking about how pencils keep disappearing from our house. Noah said, "The Greeks would say the pencil gods were mad at us."
3/23 - Nathaniel can run.
3/30 - Overheard, Joy explaining to Jeremiah, "'Obstacles' means 'stuff in your way'."
3/31 - Nathaniel pointed to a raisin and said, "Ray-rih". Jonathan asked, to be sure he heard right, "You want raisins?" Nathaniel replied, "Yeah." And he also said "more" later.
On Saturday, March 26th, Jonathan, Faith, Joy and I participated in our first karate tournament. The whole family rose bright and early so we could drive the two hours and 15 minutes to Standish, Maine. This tournament is relatively small, with only about five dojos participating. Each division had two to eight participants, with an average of about four (though I didn't do the math.)
Faith's division, 5-7 year old purple belts, was first. There were six other kids competing with her, including her friend Evelyn from our own dojo. In the sparring category, she lost her first match, so that one ended pretty quickly. But when it came time for forms, that is when her practice and hard work shone. She was confident and crisp in her movements. She remembered everything and performed smoothly. She was first to go, and for whatever reason, they allow the first person to go again if he wishes, so she did it again after all the other kids had gone. She told me later that she almost told them that she had already had her turn, and then realized by how they said it that they knew she had gone already, so she just did it. It was so fun to watch her. And then the judges, not her partial mother, awarded her first place! Evelyn got second place. (More)