Updated Kiddo Stats

This past Monday, we went to the new pediatrician for our annual check-up! :-) I'm apprehensive with new doctors since I got blindsided by Megan's new doctor a year ago. Just in case, I wrote down her height and weights for the past few visits to take with me if the doctor had any concerns about Megan's size.

Anyway, the office staff was amazing as soon as we walked in. I thought they were nice when I went in to drop off their shot records and thought the same thing when I went in again, even as they were handing me a clipboard with a ton of new patient paperwork to fill out. Whenever a nurse came out to call back the next kid, they'd wave at other kids and greet them by name. I don't know that they'll ever know my kids by name, since we only show up once a year. I love having relatively healthy kids (knock on wood)

The nurse we met with was all smiles and chit chat, with both me and the girls. Even with Cadence crying as soon as she stepped behind the door and realized we were in a doctor's office, the nurse managed to put her at ease and convince her it would be cool to get weighed and measured and even made getting her blood pressure and hearing checked fun! Pretty amazing if you ask me, since Cadence is pretty stubborn and is more likely to freak out if a stranger touches her.

Technically, it was Megan's appointment, but I think the nurse was on auto-pilot since most of the time they do schedule both kids for the same appointment (my life will be so much easier in the future...). Since this was our first visit, though, the doctor wanted them separate so she could focus on the kid in question.

The pediatrician herself was... brisk. Not rude, just very straightforward. She wasn't going to chit chat with me about random topics, though she was very easy to talk to and I'm sure I could get a good dialogue going with her on any concerns I had (I had none).

Megan, of course, freaked out once the actual exam began, mostly when I laid her on the table. Cadence got upset over that, but luckily she was able to stand right next to me on a step stool and actually see that Megan was okay and that helped her calm down. The doctor wanted to double check Megan's iron levels to be sure the anemia was gone (it was!) and then Megan got the flu vaccine. No shot required for that, at least, they did the nasal spray one. Overall, it wasn't as terrible of an experience as Megan made it seem.

Anyway, updated stats for those that are curious:

Megan-

Height: 34" (previously 31.5")

Weight: 23.5lbs (previously 20.5lbs)

*50th percentile for height, 10th percentile for weight (she's gone up a bit on the weight chart!)

Cadence-

Height: 37.25" (previously 34.25")

Weight: 30lbs (previously 25.7lbs)

*25-50th percentile for both (she's finally evening out, lol)

Next Monday will be fun. Cadence is going to get the flu vaccine AND a shot for chickenpox.

Anyway, don't know that many of my readers will care, but I like having these things written down for my own reference in the future. Deal with it. :-P

A quiet birthday party

With James's crazy work schedule, the girls' birthday was a quiet family affair, which, in my book, is 200% okay. Wednesday night, on Megan's birthday, we let them open their individual presents, since we bought two smaller presents and one larger one. Cadence was ecstatic when she saw what we brought downstairs and Megan picked up on that excitement.Cadence LOVES this doll. She hasn't let it leave her side at all since she got it, except when we ask her to leave it in the car to go into the store.
Megan took little coaxing to rip into the paper once she saw her sister do the same thing minutes before.
She wasn't quite as excited about her present as Cadence was, but she loves it nonetheless. She tried to take half the pieces to bed with her that night and I had to sneak most of them out or risk losing them before she'd had the thing a whole day!
Sunday afternoon (today), we did the rest of their birthday. Taking an idea from Aunt Erin, we decided to let them decorate their own birthday cake. I did just the bare minimum and let them go crazy. Here's the before:
The girls loved it! They were crazy for it. Sprinkles, m&ms, sugar letters, colored sugar. Every little kid's dream. I'm surprised most of it actually ended up on the cake and not in their mouths (though Megan helped herself to some).
The finished product. Looks appetizing, no?

Once James brought down the big present, the girls went nuts, bouncing around him excitedly until he finally put it down and let them rip into it.

Needless to say, they love it. We also bought some large coloring pictures from Toy Story and the Disney Princesses so they had some fun pictures to color with their new easel.

Gotta love the mess that is their playroom, lol. But a messy playroom is a sign of kids that are having a good time, right? :-)

My 3 Year Old

You know, I still call Cadence a toddler. All the "early childhood" stuff says the "preschool" stage starts around 2 and I've been denying it all year. Now that she's three, I suppose I can't deny it much longer.

I can't believe I've been a mom for three years already. At the same time, I'm surprised she's not 5! How does that happen? Can you believe three years ago, this was my life (by the way, that blanket is TINY and whenever I see this picture and look at the tiny blanket, which is currently used in the playroom for their dolls, I am stunned at how tiny she must have been):

And now that sweet little girl has grown into the rambunctious ball of energy that I absolutely adore. She tries my patience a dozen times an hour and some days it feels like I spend more time saying "Cadence, no!" and chasing her away from whatever she got into that she knows she's not supposed to be in, than doing anything else. She's a stubborn little turd and most of the time I love her for it, but a lot of the time I just wish she was a little less stubborn.

She's crazy smart, though. I say that all the time, but I mean it. She's known her letters for close to a year now. She recognizes her numbers 0-10 and all her colors. She memorizes things so easily. The other day I was floored when I heard her reciting the opening few minutes of a Dora the Explorer episode (we watched the same one over and over at her request). Her imagination is flourishing. She'd take a ribbon halfway up our stairs and pretend it was Rapunzel's hair as she quoted the scene between Rapunzel and Mother Gothel (when Rapunzel's pulling her up while Flynn's stuck in the closet). She puts her doll on Taz's back and pretends Taz is a horse.

She loves books. Loves loves loves them. She has three memorized. She picked up one of my books and began flipping through it while reciting "The Very Busy Spider". She knows all the songs I sing at bedtime, but refuses to do much more than watch me make a fool of myself. But if we're stuck in the car for awhile, she'll entertain her sister with the same songs. She even knows most of "I am a Child of God", which should serve her well in primary in only 7 more Sundays (6 if you don't count Stake Conference this weekend!).

Cadence's greatest skill is as an artist, though. I already bragged about her drawing a person in August, complete with hair, feet, eyes and nose all in the right spot. She's recently expanded into cats, though the only difference is they have whiskers instead of hair. She's practicing coloring specific things, though she doesn't do well at keeping it in the lines she will have a condensed spot of color over what she intended to color. She's trying to write her letters, but I've confiscated most of her coloring items so she's limited in how much she can practice right now.

She's extremely independent and always has been, which is probably why I sometimes feel like I don't parent her as much as I should be. I always forget how much she does know. At least twice a week, I am stunned by something she says or does because I have no clue where she learned it.

She LOVES the outdoors and she LOVES water. So suffice it to say, the girl is crazy for rain. Luckily, Houston is pretty warm even when it rains so I can let her go play in it and not worry too much about her catch a cold. She recently discovered umbrellas and thinks life is just about perfect now.

I can't wait to watch her grow over the next year. She's been talking for the past year but I think she'll really get into it soon and we'll have all sorts of fun little conversations to go through together. It's going to be amazing at least as amazing as the past three years have been and I cannot WAIT.

My second 2 year old

She's two! My other baby's two years old today. I've been calling her a two year old for convenience sake for a few months now. It's just so much easier to say "She's two" when people ask. I suppose "a little over a year and a half" would work, but it's such a mouthful.

Only two years ago, I went in and endured one of the most terrifying 5 minutes of my life (currently tied for first with our car accident 3 weeks before that and the night in the hospital that followed), listening to the doctor explain I would need an emergency c-section and listening to them call for resuscitation equipment as they were putting me under. But this sweet little girl was 100% okay when I woke up, except for a tiny nick on her head from the doctor's scalpel.

And now, two years later, here we are. She's the sweetest little girl on the planet. She'll smile just because you ask her and has the most adorable "I'm cute, gotta love me" grin that wrinkles her nose and squinches her eyes whenever she gets caught doing something. She has the same wispy curls as her sister at this age, and the similarities between the two are as plentiful as their differences. Without her sister egging her on, Megan is sweet and quiet and perfectly happy to just talk to you and entertain herself. If she could spend all day snuggling on my lap this girl would be perfectly content and I find myself more than happy to oblige most days. But, she's far from bullied by her sister. If Cadence does something she doesn't like, she's very good at making it known and will try her darnedest to take care of it herself (though sometimes mommy has to jump in because big sister is taller and faster).

She's just as smart as her sister, though her strengths are in other areas. As talented as Cadence was with songs at this age, Megan outdoes her. She loves singing songs with me, though she's picked up on her sister's habit of telling me "no" when I try to sing any time other than bedtime. She's trying so hard to learn her numbers, letters and colors, but she's trying to master them all at once so she gets them garbled a lot. She has all the words in her head, she just hasn't quite put them with the right symbols yet. My little over achiever.

Megan is using sentences already, more often than single words. "No, I do it" is a popular one around here as she attempts to buckle herself or put her shoes on. Heck, the girl uses proper sentences and actually talks more than her sister does some days. She's definitely more expressive with words than Cadence ever was. And her words are still new enough she'll sit in my lap and just start naming everything she sees because knowing those words is fun to her.

It's hard, some times, to recognize Megan's achievements because she's generally mimicking Cadence and I don't realize "whoa, that's new!" But she keeps up with her three year old sister with ease. Some days, a little more than I'd like.

She wants so badly to be potty trained, but she won't use the small potty and I'm still recovering from potty training Cadence. We'll probably start soon. She already climbs onto the toilet to sit, though it involves getting onto the toilet seat on all fours and then twisting around to get her butt in the proper spot (and she's skinny enough she's almost too small for the toilet seat cushiony insert we have, lol) and she knows you have to wipe afterward and wash your hands. Heck, she's almost more potty-trained then Cadence in those aspects!

Her favorite things right now are puzzles (can't wait to give her the wood dress-up doll we got her for her birthday, she's going to LOVE it) and I wish we had more. She loves coloring (we got an art easel too, lol). She is NOT a fan of Houston's rain. She doesn't mind a nice sprinkle, but the downpours we tend to get upset her. She is very much my child in how easily she gets cold. She loves Taz and will sit on James's lap and watch youtube videos about puppies for hours on end if she could. She gives the BEST hugs ever. When I pick her up from nursery, she latches on, arms tight around my neck and even hugs me with her legs. I just adore this little girl!

Sure, I'll brag a bit

I can't believe my girls are a week away from being 2 and 3!!! I'll give a more detailed account of how amazingly smart they are on their birthdays (just like I did last year), but I wanted to write about them today anyway.

Can I just take a minute to gush about how much I absolutely adore them? I really do! They drive me up the wall and I want to bang my head against something solid multiple times throughout the day, but in the end, I love (mostly) every minute of it. Just now, I was standing in the kitchen watching them and smiling as they interacted with and learned from their current favorite Leap Frog movie (so glad Netflix has all the ones I don't have on DVD yet).

I caught Megan naming some of the letters during the ABC song and even saying some of the sounds before the song did! And Cadence is studiously practicing the animal baby and family names. See how intently they pay attention?
Megan is such a character now! It was so easy to recognize Cadence as a 2 year old because I had this tiny 1 year old to look at and think "wow, she's a lot bigger, okay, she's 2". But Megan... I can't seem to accept that Megan is really a 2 year old, no matter how big she gets, no matter how many words she has, or how much she actually ACTS like a 2 year old (believe it or not, sweet little Megan is my tantrum thrower! Cadence has fits. But Megan will find a clear spot on the carpet to throw herself down and act and look as miserable as possible). But, she's 2! She's actually 2 years old! She's not a baby any more. :-(
And if Megan's not a baby, what does that make Cadence? She's pretty much a preschooler now. She uses full sentences, knows way more than I do, and all those preschooler things. She'll be in Sunbeams in only 8 more Sundays. A Sunbeam! I taught the Sunbeams right after I got out of high school. I know what big kids those Sunbeams are and my kid's about to be one of them. Gah!
I keep thinking they should know more than they already do. But they each have their strengths and they excel in those areas. Megan can manipulate the world around her so completely it's startling. Nothing holds her back. She'll find a way around it whatever it takes. And Cadence is my little artist and talker. I caught her drawing a cat the other day. Complete with whiskers. And she talked me through the whole process once she realized I was paying attention.

:/

4-year Anniversary

Do you know how lucky I am to be married to the man I'm married to for the past 4 years? It's been an amazing journey with him and I am more in love with him than the day I married him. I am so blessed to have James in my life.

I really need to tell him that more. :-)

I don't think there's been a single day over the past 4 years that he hasn't made me laugh at least once. And he tells me he loves me every single day. I've never doubted his feelings for me, which is a blessing all on its own.

Four years strong and still not a single argument between us (yes, we disagree some times). The closest we got to one was the night we put Cadence's toddler bed together. We learned our lesson though and just didn't talk while putting Megan's together a year later.

We've had quite the journey in our 4 years together and I'm so glad he was by my side. His faith never wavered and strengthened my own in the process. When things got hard, he'd tell me "it will work out" and, lo and behold, it did. Always. Even more, when I'd let the bad things turn me into a grump, he wouldn't.

Yes, I am one lucky girl. Just so everyone knows.