***UPDATE***

Saturday the 17th is completely booked. I still have two slots available at the red barn, but if there's enough interest, I will open up another date for a photo shoot in Las Colinas.

long overdue

This is a little project I've been working on since we got back from our family reunion in July. It's a collage of every single person that was at the reunion, I think 78 people. I've yet to put a pic of me in there so that's why there is one empty spot. Man, I hope I didn't forget anyone.



So what do you think?

meet patrick

Say hi to Patrick. Patrick was a boy in Abby's class last year, and one of her favorite friends. This year he moved up to kindergarten so Abby doesn't get to play with him anymore. But that hasn't stopped her from pretending he's here. I guess you could call him an imaginary friend.

This friendship started last week, so I'm not sure if Patrick is here to stay or not. Some days he's around a lot, other days he's not here at all. On this particular day we went to the park and she played with him the whole time, helping him up ladders, holding him like a baby, swinging him, and making me pick him up when he fell off the jungle gym.




I mean, look at that face! It's like he's really there!

what are you thinking, little girl?

and now...

Abby has the croup too. Woo hoo!

At least she takes being sick better than Carter does.

mr. cling

Mr. Carter has the croup. He's mostly over it, but still has a runny nose and cough. You would think that he was dying the way he's been acting though. He won't let me go! He's always been a clingy boy, but ever since this weekend he has been more like this:

Yeah, its sweet and all, but he's wearing me out. Today he fell asleep on my shoulder as I was making a huge batch of pumpkin muffins and cooking dinner at the same time. I couldn't put him down because he already freaked out once today when I tried to put him to bed. You should have seen me filling the muffin cups, putting them in the oven and boiling potatos all with a sleeping two-year-old on my shoulder.

Probably not very safe, but a mom's gotta do what a mom's gotta do!

inquiring minds

It's been a while since I've put up a poll, so I thought I would put up a new one. I really want to know what you think about this topic!

keepin' it real

Recently I've had a whole new mess of hair grow in, and now its about two inches long. It's curlier than my hair has ever been before, and if I don't do anything to it, THIS is what it looks like. It's driving me crazy. This picture was taken in my 10:30pm glory, but it's not much better any other time of the day. My hair is changing, and it's really weird.

I hope it grows fast, cause the Richard Simmons look is not my thing.

Abby's ABR

I keep forgetting to post this. Abby had her ABR on Friday and these are the results.



As you can see, the data she got isn't as bad as the booth test results, which is good. But this machine has a 15 decible margin of error, so it could be as bad as what we got in the booth. We are going to do more testing in the booth to get a better idea of how she is responding with her hearing aid and without, and then we'll go from there.

rain water

It was more than she could take. Abby sat at the dinner table and stared out at the almost overflowing swimming pool and announced that she was going swimming. Ignoring my protests, she hopped out of her chair and took off towards her room in search of a swimsuit.

Carter took off after her, and I surrendered. Abby and Carter have been like tornados the last few days, destroying everything in their paths, and it was obvious that they needed to get some major wiggles out. The swimming pool had been emptied before the weekend, but the continuous rain these past few days had filled the pool to almost full. I figured 70 degree weather and a pool full of rain water wouldn't hurt too much so I let them play. They lasted only 20 minutes, but they had some crazy fun.

mantle

We redecorated our mantle this weekend. After painting the mirror first and ugly brown and then black, I decided to go bold and put a silver leaf finish on it. I think it looks kinda cool. Most of the decorations we've purchased at various Ross stores over the months, and the candle sticks are from Tuesday Morning. What do you think? I will gladly take constructive criticism, cuz I'm really bad at mantle decorating.

carter and grandma

A couple of weeks ago my mom treated the grandkids to putt-putt. We all started off good, but by the second hole me and my sisters had ditched our putters and focused on herding the kids and keeping the balls from flying. My mom, however, wanted to play for reals. She hung behind with Carter and they both took it a little slower than the rest. It was so cute watching them play together.

better

We're doing better around here.

Abby had a really good day at school today. As we speak, she is in my room playing pretent school and laughing and giggling. A total 180 from last week. Although I think her hearing loss hasn't changed, she seems to have adjusted to it and is back to her normal happy self.

As for me, I am better too. I consider myself a pretty happy person, but last week was a really low point for me. I appreciate all your thoughts and prayers for our family. We are so grateful to have such caring people on our side.

On a different note, I don't think there are enough pictures of me and the kids. I really don't like being on the other side of the camera, but I would hate for my kids ten years down the road ask me why there aren't any pictures of me with them. So the other day we were playing in the back yard and I got out my camera and attempted a shot. This is the outcome. But I mean, isn't this picture so true to life?

loss

Sunday night I noticed something was not right with Abby's hearing. She was not repeating back the things I said during prayers that night, which she always does so well. Monday I talked to her teacher and asked her how Abby did during school that day, and she said that Abby was slow to respond and often had a glazed over look about her (which she does when she's tired, overstimulated, and I guess can't hear.) At home she has been emotional and non-conversational, and replaced well known words in her vocabulary with syllables like Kuh, Kae, Kah. Knowing that her CI does not make her hear perfectly overnight, we had a horrible feeling that she must have lost hearing in her right ear, her good ear, which she relies on so much. I called that day and set up a booth test with the audilogist for Thursday.

Tuesday and Wednesday were the same, and Wednesday afternoon we went to speech therapy. We always start each session with the LING 6 and Abby did okay with her HA and CI both on. But when we took off her CI and tried again, we got NO RESPONSE from her. Not even an acknowledgement that she heard anything. The speech therapist (whom I LOVE) and I realized at that point that she wasn't benefitting from her hearing aid at all anymore. Then she started telling me all the positive things about this situation. She already has a CI in place, so she can hear SOME things, she has had exposure to a lot of sound in her life, and she's been able to develop a good foundation for speech and hearing before she lost all her hearing. When she said that, I put my head in my hands and started sobbing. Abby and the therapist were both staring at me, and all I could do was cry, and mourn the loss of her hearing yet AGAIN.

Yesterday we went to the audiologist and did a hearing test in the sound booth. Abby is pretty good at these tests, so we feel that the results are somewhat accurate. We will do an ABR on Sept. 11th to confirm these results. But here they are:



The audi was able to bump up her hearing aid, and we also adjusted her CI MAp to she is able to hear better, but its obviously not the same as it used to be.

We also got to talk to the our ENT and if the ABR shows these same results, he would like to start talking about another cochlear implant. I'm not so sure I'm ready to go through that so quickly.