Julia Update

I heard back from the doctor a couple days before Christmas concerning Julia's weight loss. He says that she's eating the appropriate amount of solids based on her food log. The next step was to see how much fluid she's getting. I took her in yesterday to do a pre-feeding and post-feeding weighing. Apparently the problem is that she's not getting enough milk. Now we have to supplement with formula. It's not breaking my heart quite as much as I thought it would. I guess the whole situation with Chloe as a baby makes this easier. However, I've been trying for two days now to get Julia to take a bottle or a sippy cup, and she wants nothing to do with it! And now she's even decreasing the amount of solids she wants. Very frustrating!! I'm not quite sure what this will all mean in the near future if she continues to refuse drinking. Hopefully she'll take the formula very quickly.

Christmas Celebration

I hope that you are all enjoying this blessed Christmas season. Our family had a wonderful week. The girls and I went to the early Christmas Eve service. While Kevin was at the second service I fed Julia and let Chloe watch the Muppets version of A Christmas Carol while I got pizza dough ready. We were planning on a late supper (8:00 by the time Kevin got home) because we had to leave for the early service at 4:30. That was too early to be eating supper. I thought pizza would be a great idea. I got all of the ingredients in the bread machine and let it do all the work for me. When Kevin got home it was time to assemble the pizza. I opened the bread machine to find that none of the ingredients were even mixed together! It had been making all the right noises, so I thought it was fine. So much for the pizza idea. We had a supper of cheese and crackers, popcorn, chips, bananas, and cookies. Chloe loved it! We opened our presents while we ate. The girls were so much fun to watch. Julia thought unwrapping was the greatest thing ever. If she didn’t have a gift to open, she would crawl to the pile of wrapping paper on the floor and rearrange it as if she were unwrapping the floor!

Christmas morning we went to the earlier service again (this time it was the other church). Chloe enjoyed her special breakfast of cinnamon rolls and chocolate milk. It’s tradition in my family to eat Christmas cookies for breakfast that morning, but I never got around to making any this year. While Kevin was at the second service I packed for our trip. The girls enjoyed playing with new toys. We packed a simple lunch to eat in the car and hit the road around 1:30. That evening was spent visiting with my mom and dad and starting a game of Rail Baron after the girls went to bed.

The next morning my brother and sister-in-law came over, and everybody opened gifts. It was lots of fun to watch the girls open presents again and to see what everybody received. After opening we ate lunch, visited some more, and played our new -- Blokus. That was a hit! It was played a number of times while we were there. The remainder of Friday and Saturday were spent in the typical fashion -- visiting, playing lots of games, eating, etc. The trip was too short (a mere 51 hours), but we are very glad to have spent time with family. Now all the excitement is dying down, and we are trying to get back into our normal routines.

I will post some fun entries later giving a few more details of our Christmas, hopefully with some pictures. I didn’t really take any pictures because I was busy with Julia much of the time, and my mom was taking quite a few. She put all of the pictures on a CD for me before I left, but my computer is saying it’s a corrupt disk. That means I can’t share anything until I somehow get those copies. Stay tuned.

Since we are still celebrating the birth of our Savior I will once again say… Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

I thought today I'd do something simple and share a few photos from our home (and family photos at the churches). Hope you enjoy!

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!! May you all have a very blessed and merry Christmas.

Simple Fun

Who says these girls need new toys for Christmas? They have all kinds of fun with practically nothing!

Chloe has been walking around the house lately using her hand as a cell phone. The conversations are hilarious! If you ask her who she's talking to, it's always Julia.

Here she shows off her speaker phone option. It's quite the sight to see her walking around the house talking to her hand.

And just what makes Julia happy?

Packaging paper taken from a number of boxes we've received lately! Put her in the middle of this pile, and she's in baby heaven.

Sick

There's just something about this time of year that leaves my family sick. Last year Kevin had some kind of bug that left him on the couch for most of Christmas. In many of our pictures from the day, you can see him lying on the couch in the background. This year the girls have miserable colds. Chloe's seems to be primarily in her chest. Her cough sounds awful. Poor girl, I can't give her any medicine without talking to our doctor first. Julia's cold is being displayed from her nose. Trying to clean a nine-month-old's crusty nose is not an easy job! Then I hear these lovely words from Kevin this morning, "You seem to be the only one who's not sick in this house. Let's try to keep it that way." What are my chances?