Outdoor playtime

These pictures are not from today, but are about a week or so old. Today it was really warm and nice, but we didn't have any time to go outside. It was so much homework for Cassie and I had to help her as much as I could with the presentation that is due on Friday, but rough draft had to be turned in completely tomorrow. It's so much homework, but more about that and what else is going on in school in it's own post.

Oh no - what did I do?????

Here it looks really cute I think!

Yesterday, I had to cut off some of Isabella's hair. I don't know if I would call it her very first haircut, but her hair was getting into her eyes all the time, and she doesn't let the hairclips, hairbands etc stay in for more than 5 minutes. It's been bothering her too, as she kept pulling it away from her face and eyes all the time.

I really wanted to take her to a hairdresser, but Chris thought that I probably could just try myself, as if it did get too messed up, we could always take her to one afterwards. Well, she did very good, I did make her hair wet in the front before I cut it and it looked ok.

When it dried - it went up another inch over her brows!! Now I feel really bad, messing up her hair. She was happy though looking at herself in the mirror noticing right away what had been done. "Petty" she said, touching it!

How come it looks so much shorter when she tilts her head back a little bit??! I hope her hair grows as fast as mine, then it won't look bad for too long!

NOT the look I was going for...

Daw...Mamma....Daaaaaw!

In these pictures Isabella was still ill from her RSV virus 

and her eyes were watering a lot when she was coughing

Isabella has developed a burning interest for drawing! Hardly finished breakfast, she'll stand in front of the shelf where crayons and coloring books are stored pointing and calling for me.

"Mamma, Daw. Daw, Daw - Daaaaaaaaaaw mamma!!!"

It has become a nice daily routine, and as it's a quiet game, it's appreciated as Chris then can sleep easier coming off the night shift. Well, quiet until big brother Benjamin wants to draw aswell and the fighting about the crayons starts....it doesn't matter if they have the same amount, the same colors, the same size crayons...they ALWAYS want the crayon that the other one is holding.

Here Benjamin is concentrating on his masterpiece.

Hats made by...

In the beginning of the year, our very first package arrived from Sweden. A package with such a surprise on the inside. Our sweet friends Lotta and Hans with their beautiful children Vera and Truls sent a Christmas card AND a these wonderful hats. Soo cool and there were even a third one for Cassandra in the package, somehow that one didn't make the picture that day, will have to add that later. But very sweet too, pink with owls on it and she loved it!

What's so special about these hats is that Lotta MADE them - all on her own!! I had seen masterpieces of hers before that she made for her children and also dresses, jackets, pants and yes you name it! I wish that I had the patience as a child to learn to sew. And to learn to sew a lot of different things. My mother is great behind the sewing machine, but somehow it just never rubbed off on me...

The kids love the hats Lotta, Isabella didn't even want to take hers off inside, Ben kept it on for the pictures, but Isabella really wanted to leave it on! Luckily for us, we did have some days that were a little bit to the chilly side, especially as the kids were sick and were recovering a thinner hat was just what we needed! Thank you so much again- it's very much appreciated that you took the time to make these for our kids when you are busy at home with two on your own!

Lotta with her beautiful children! 

Hope you don't mind me borrowing your picture from FB, I didn't have one on my own as we haven't been able to meet since summer 2009, when Vera was just a baby.

First day in school

Forgot to take a picture in all the excitement in the morning 

- but here is when she came home after her very first day at her new school.

Cassandra started her new school Sunrise Elementary on January 9th, after a long break. She was super excited to start, to meet new friends and to be back in school. She said the first morning at home at breakfast that she had butterflies in her stomach and that some of them made it out on her stomach (print of her shirt).

Chris came home from night shift around 7am, and we drove Cassandra to school the first day. As we didn't even know what teacher or where her classroom were going to be, plus that we didn't even get a tour of the school when we were there for signing her up before Christmas break.

The little ones were a bit cranky and Chris was tired, so he stayed with them in the car, which made it easier for me to focus on Cassandra and talk to the front staff to find out what teacher and classroom, meeting the principal for a short hello (after asking to see him) and then we were on our own. No one showed us around the school, we had to find our way to the classroom on our own.

When we came there, the teacher Mrs. Chavez had just arrived and she had no idea that a new student were supposed to begin in her class that day. No desk, no books, no welcome package - nothing. Very disappointing right there and then, but still she seemed nice and we had our hopes up. I only got to talk to her a few minutes, as we still needed to find out where the cafeteria was for Cassandra where she'll eat breakfast and lunch, and where they line up outside. We also had to find out where her bus stopped and where she would get on in the afternoon, as she would take the bus home the first day.

Very much to take in and little time, as school didn't even open until 8am and classes starts at 8.30am. I felt uneasy to leave her there, she looked so vulnerable and I just wanted to cuddle her up and take her straight back home, but I put on a brave face and gave her a big hug and a big smile and wished her all the best for the first day. Cassie put on a smile and after another hug I had to leave and walk out. I was walking on pins and needles until she came home that afternoon to find out how she was, how her day was and I so hoped for her to come home with a big smile!

 They were fighting for the best spot to see Cassie come around the corner. 

Notice the beautiful hats the kids are wearing - more about them later!!

Around 4pm she finally came around the corner - me and the little ones had been waiting and waiting for a long time - and she DID have a smile on her face! I was so relieved and she had had a great day, even if it was scary and that she felt a bit lost here and there.

She had a lot of homework already the first day, and little did we know that that was only more coming...

The next morning, Cassie felt confident enough to take the school bus for the very first time. She was very excited about the bus, she has always thought that would be fun, and was disappointed in all the other schools that she's gone too, that we either lived too close to the school or that they didn't even have a bus system and that you would have to drive your child to school. Here though, she'll take the bus every day!

I had called the bus transportation office to find out the time the bus was picking up and dropping off and to confirm the bus stop that the neighbor kids had told us about. We were early, and at 7.45am the bus came. It was a chilly morning, but nice to be out meeting the sunrise. Benjamin and Isabella thought it was very exciting to get out in the stroller this early, and especially Benjamin thought it was fun when the bus came. But it was not fun for to say good bye to Cassie. Both were crying, Cassie looked a little nervous, but still filled with excitement. I was so very proud of her, by big girl! It's not easy to start a new school and certainly not jumping into a class when half the school year is already over. My brave wonderful girl!!

On the bus she goes..

Come with us on a walk around the neighborhood!

I thought that I'd take you along for a walk around our neighborhood! One day, Cassie took her bike and I took the little ones in the stroller and we walked around all the streets here in our neighborhood in Mountain View.

Most houses around here have walls as fences in the backyards. Some are higher than others. Doesn't make a nice look from the outside, but is practical from the inside. No kids or pets can escape and hopefully it will keep most uninvited guests out of the yards. With uninvited guests I mean, bugs, scorpions, snakes, bobcats (not that common but still in the suburbs they come in closer to the houses for food and shelter) and other things you don't want to share your yard with.

Some houses are built like a bunker. Some are nicer than others, but all houses are brown/beige or sand color! Nothing out of the ordinary and it all blends in with the desert landscape. This house had a very nice front yard. Cactus and palm trees and blue skies - yes we are in Arizona!

Many yards here front as back are covered in stones, bigger or smaller gravel, sand or some just plain dirt. As it's dry year around pretty much, it's not that easy (and or cheap) to maintain a good grass lawn. A sprinkler system is a must, and we still have to figure out how many of ours actually works, as it seems to be very uneven in our backyard with how the grass is growing.

 Red gravel

 Grey gravel

But also some grass - here even in the front yard!

 Our neighbor has sand, and we have gravel with some weeds/grass here and there. 

Not the nicest front yard, but it can always be worked on!

Some big boots to fill...

 Some big boots to fill.....

...and even if they would grow into the boots one day - the title they can still never grow into..

Puzzles and new routines

As Chris started to work nights in the beginning of January, the routines around the house if different. It's not easy to keep the little ones occupied so that he can sleep during the day. I should probably clarify his work schedule here. He works nights, but he leaves the house at 2.30pm. At 3pm they exercise together in his shift. Then after their workout, shower, change and eat, they start working at 6pm, but the turnover is at 5.30pm.

Then he works until 6am the next morning and he is most mornings home here around 6.30-7am. Then he goes to bed pretty much right away, just when everyone else is waking up and Cassandra is getting ready for school. Benjamin and Isabella normally wakes up around 7-7.30am.

So if Chris should get at least 7 hours of sleep, he sleeps until 1.30-2pm, then gets up, gets dressed and makes his lunchbox ready for work. That's it, then he leaves at 2.30pm. So there is NO family time what so ever when he is working nights. This will go on for another month or two and then hopefully he'll be on day shift. 6am-6pm that would normally be. Just considering that they now exercise every day for so long together, when would they then do it? Before shift, in the middle of the night or after shift at night? I guess that we'll just have to wait and see how it'll turn out. Hopefully we'd be able to have more family time together that way.

If he's working weekend, he should get off work Sunday morning, sleep shorter during the Sunday and then go to bed at night to wake up normal again for Monday. That he had to do this week as he was supposed to be off work on Monday and Tuesday, but had to change day/night around to go to classes all Monday and again on Tuesday. Then he stayed up as long as he could at night to start to turn day/night around again, but still was tired so he had to sleep. Then to be able to stay up again the following night, he slept in and woke up after lunch to have an hour or so with the kids before he had to take off for work. This is just crazy, we don't see anything of him, and now he gets off shift tomorrow morning, he'll rest for a little bit, then we have to go and take care of the taxes, and then he is off this weekend. Most of Friday he will sleep though. Hopefully he'll be able to turn around the day/night so that we get to see some of him this weekend and maybe do something together.

Benjamin and Isabella both loves puzzles, and it's a great game to play to keep quiet while daddy is sleeping - as long as they don't start fighting over the same puzzle that is..

Finally got this little boy to sleep....

This is one of the humidifiers that we have in the kids bedroom. We turned it on at bedtime and it would stay on all night, cooling the room with a moist cool mist, that would help for the coughing and loosening the mucus. After a while, when the coughing got better we stopped using them, as it does makes it very misty in the rooms and due to the fact that we don't have a water softener system installed yet, we're using the tap water for this, which turned out not to be ideal. The lime residue would cover the furniture and toys in their rooms with a thin white layer in the mornings. 

According to the doctor this wouldn't be harmful for the kids but I don't think that their wooden furniture would stay to healthy with this on all the time..

Breathing treatment and the loooong road to recovery

 

A week after New Years Eve, we finally got an appointment with a pediatrician here in town. It wasn't the easiest to find one fast and I called many offices and they were closed the first week in January and our appointment couldn't wait. As we were new patients, we had to first get a pediatrician assigned to the kids from the base. They have doctors on base, but for pediatrics, you can choose one out in town, they just have to make the paperwork finished and mark it as a go.

Lots of papers and lots of ridiculous things even if they had our medical records. Things like that are just very frustrating. Especially as you have two kids that are sick and needs to be seen for a follow up appointment from the visit to the ER. Well, the experience wasn't the best. It was pretty bad actually. We were spoiled in Hutchinson with a wonderful pediatrician and a team of great nurses that knew our kids and treated us with warmth and in a family oriented matter. Here we met very rude front staff, the nurse didn't even bother to look in the papers, but seemed totally unaware why we were there..She wanted to weigh the kids on a "normal" scale with clothes and shoes and I had to tell her that no, that will not do, we want them weighed on the smaller digital scale with just diapers to be as correct as possible.

Especially with Benjamin as he is always been to the lighter side, I didn't want to get a totally off weight in his records. The nurse was cold and very unfriendly and didn't even bother to smile or be nice to the kids, which is a bad sign for a good place.

A woman came in after a while, no presentation, no nametag etc and started to ask about the same questions like we had already answered. I asked her are you the doctor or another nurse? Hello!!?? What about a normal presentation!!? Well, it turned out to be the doctor, not our assigned one, as he wasn't in the office that day, but another one that worked there aswell.

She listened to them and was sure that Benjamin had the RSV virus aswell, as they share everything as twins and that it's hard to keep things away from the other one. She didn't test him though, but just took it for granted. She thought that it would be a good idea to give them breathing treatment and prescribed that and then she was out of there.

We were very unhappy with the way the kids were seen, with the "service" given and I didn't know what to think about it. We went to pick up the machine and all the accessories and the medicine. Chris had to go back to work, and as I was so uneasy about everything that was said and done, I called up our wonderful doctor back in Hutchinson and spoke to his nurse and she consulted with him. He told us what he would have done and how he would have treated them and that gave me a little more confident in the diagnoses as I do trust his judgement and his knowledge.

He said that we should try the breathing treatments and put a humidifier into their bedrooms to help keeping the air moist with cool mist to help loosen the mucus out of their lungs. The breathing medicine should help them opening everything up.

Three times a day for about a week, or as long as they were still coughing badly. Luckily the little ones did very good with the treatment. Here they are trying out the masks before to get used to them, but neither of them actually used the mask much at the treatment. They both used to bite and breathe in from the mouthpiece or just breathe in from the hose that I would hold and shake around infront of them, which has the same effect. They did great, but after a couple of days, it seemed that they would start coughing more and more instead of less, and of course it could turn for the worse when it's loosening up, but it shouldn't keep on for long. We stopped the treatment after a week, and by then especially Benjamin was doing better.

After another week, we had another appointment at the doctor with them for a second follow up. This time we made sure that we would be able to see the assigned doctor as according to the reviews online, he would be one of the best pediatricians here in town. We had both said before that if he isn't something very special we would change the doctor very fast.

Well, he was great! Just like a pediatrician should be (in my mind). He came in, introduced himself, sat down on the floor with the kids, started to talk to them in their level, made a bird sound here and there like a little whistle and asked the kids if they could see the bird? Everything to get them at ease and laugh and feel comfortable. Gave them high fives when they did good with listening to their lungs, after checking their ears etc. He read their papers, knew what was going on still wanted to hear again how everything was going etc. He took time to really listen, asked good questions and we felt very happy about how he treated the kids.

According to him, we did the right thing to stop the treatment if we felt it wasn't doing good. Sometimes it helps more, sometimes less. But by no means you should continue if you feel that they are coughing more from it. I also always felt that it was making me cough more, getting some of it in my lungs while giving them the medicine. He also thought of how Isabella still sounded (wheezing and her fast breathing) that she most likely did have a pneumonia, but that it at the time of the x-ray not yet showed up on the plates. He said that at this point there was nothing else to do as she had already got treated with antibiotics for the upper respiratory infection and for the RSV virus, and now all we could do was to wait it out. As we already knew by now, the RSV virus takes a long time and is a very harsh virus for the little ones to catch and it takes a long time until they are over it.

We also asked him about Cassandra if he thought that we should do an allergy testing on her, and after hearing about her hives, he didn't think that it was needed at this point as she did good and responded well with the Benadryl medicine. We felt very confident in this doctor, and now we are just hoping that we will be able to see him when we need for the kids. He is not always in the clinic as he also works at the hospital he informed us, so we'll see how it works out.

Isabella was at this time, around January 10th and forward, still taking a couple of steps forward and then she would take a few steps back, feeling better one day and then much worse the next. That went on for two weeks and it's actually not until this week since last weekend that she is finally doing much better and the coughing has stopped. It was a long recovery and I hope that we soon will be putting it all behind us and that they also now will get better to go back into their routines again.

After sleepless nights with mommy, they have trouble just falling asleep in the evenings and there is a lot of work sometimes to get them to sleep. Then they still wake up during the night, especially Benjamin and he then doesn't go back to sleep on his own, so I have to pick him up and walk him around so he falls back to sleep. Some nights I just take him in with me in the bedroom, and he falls back easily and cuddles up really close. As long as it's only him up, it's OK, but when Isabella was sick and would wake up all the time too, and I would have to sit with her to make sure she wouldn't throw up while coughing (which happened a lot..) it was harder to have them both in bed and that they both would sleep..

I hope that they soon will get their routines back, and that I can soon have a whole night sleep again! It was a long time ago now that I got to sleep, long before our move, as Benjamin had trouble sleeping already in September/November when he had caught the stomach bug, and after that he just didn't sleep well anymore. I don't even know how it would feel to be rested when you wake up in the mornings anymore..

We called the mask the "Duck nose".

That afternoon, they were so sweet together. No fighting about toys or anything like they always do. They were so loving and giving each other kisses and hugs, and while watching a movie they were holding and cuddling with each other. Sweet!!

LOVE x 3 !!!

This is the closest to a kissing pictuere that I have ever come! 

They always do it so fast or one of them turn away in the last second..