Isaac: He who Laughs

I happened to stumble across some old videos of Isaac when he was a baby. And I was just struck at how he's changed over his short lifetime. One thing has been consistent, though...and that is his wonderful laugh. I LOVE that his name means "laughter" or "he who laughs" as it is SO fitting. So I decided to do a little montage of clips of him laughing. Get ready to smile big time...and maybe even laugh a little yourself! :)

All about Isaac...

I seriously love this kid. It always amazes me how much one little guy can drive me to the edge of insanity one moment and then make my heart do flips within me the next. Here's a couple stories to show you what I'm talking about...

A few weeks ago, from another room, I heard the kiddos giggling together and thought, "Oh how nice...they are playing so well together." I soon keyed in to the laughter and noticed that it was more of a we're-doing-something-we-shouldn't-be-doing kind of laugh. :) I came around the corner and was horrified to find this:

I didn't know whether to laugh or scream. It was a MESS. But the good news is that soot is pretty easy to wash with soap and water. :) I smiled but let Isaac know that it was indeed a bad choice.

Then we come to last night. I hear lots of giggling coming from upstairs as daddy is getting Isaac ready for bed. Then I hear Isaac yell, "Mommy, look...we're sister mary's!" I come around the corner and look up the stairs to find this adorableness happening:

SO. Fun. And it's moments like this that make it all SO worth it. :)

All about Naomi...

Seriously love this little lady. She may be small, but boy does she love a lot! She gives GREAT hugs. And can have a little attitude from time to time. She enjoys doing this squealing/screaming thing that absolutely drives us all bonkers. But then you look at those sweet, big, blue eyes, and can't help but smile. Just check them out...

They get me every time. And another thing about Naomi: you will not likely find her without her beloved baby. She has to have it with her all. the. time. We have not let her take it to bed with her (except on a few occasions), as we found that it just keeps her awake longer as she plays with the baby. We've also tried not allowing her to hold the baby while eating. This one is hit and miss, and really just depends on how big of a fit she throws to win the fight. Haha! I will admit that sometimes it's just easier to let her keep the sacred baby in her arms as she eats, rather than listening to a screaming toddler throughout dinner. :) Pick your battles, right? :) Here are just a couple of pics of Naomi with her baby...

The other thing that this little lady is obsessed with is climbing up onto our kitchen table. And it drives me crazy. She gets consistent discipline EVERY time she does it too. Sometimes she'll turn around right after getting disciplined and do it again and again. Sometimes she sits on the table, other times I'll look over to see her standing up, and sometimes she just lays down up there. Here's an example of that...

All in all, she's a sweetheart, though. I love her to pieces and hope with everything I have that she doesn't end up being more strong-willed that her older brother! :)

Behavior Breakthrough...

Just a short one for now...

So we've been having more and more break-throughs with Isaac's behavior lately. He can still be challenging at times, don't get me wrong. But as each day goes by, I feel like something is actually starting to "click" for him. For example...today at lunch, for some odd reason, he thought it would be funny to conk me in the nose with his dirty fork. I was not ready for it and it actually hurt me. I reacted more harshly than I'd like to admit, exclaiming that that was NOT a good choice and that we don't hit. He laughed and continued acting out of control, so I had him go sit in time-out for 3 minutes. He walked, teary-eyed to the bench and sat there quietly. When the timer went off, I told him he could come back to join us for lunch. He walked right up to me, gave me a hug, and UNPROMPTED (this is huge), he said, "I'm sorry for hitting you with my fork, mommy." And I could tell he totally meant it! Wow! Something we're doing just MIGHT be working!! :) I thanked him for apologizing and let him know that I forgave him. The rest of lunch went wonderfully.

I have some new photos and stories to tell, but it's getting late and this tired mama needs her sleep! :) More later...hopefully sooner than later! ;)

Some of OUR homeschool activities...

I have been meaning to put up these photos of our playroom...or classroom. I love the environment in there...at least right after I get around to organizing all of the materials. The paint color in the room is what came with the house and we've just never gotten around to changing it. So rather than painting the walls, we just decided to decorate with brightly colored accessories. :) Anyway...here it is:

A couple of activities...

We made J's out of buttons. Isaac enjoyed this, but really preferred to just hold and play with the little buttons. I found myself growing frustrated with this, but need to learn to allow him to have more freedom with his choices in activities.


And this is one that I just made really quickly. Isaac is still really struggling with his numbers. He's so verbal and in-tune with people's feelings and the world around him, yet still cannot count correctly. He does sometimes, when he wants to. But most of the time, if you ask him "how many?" he'll answer with something along the lines of "three, four, six, nine, fourteen..." Just rambles off a bunch of random numbers. So I developed this activity for him to get better with his numbers. He didn't get it AT ALL. And actually showed NO interest in the actual activity. Again, he just wanted to carry around the pieces. :) But after reading a wonderful blog post (in my previous post), I am no longer going to push him in this area. I will continue counting things with him, but I'm not going to stress about it anymore. He's just not into numbers right now...no big deal. :)


The kiddos LOVE playing with fresh coffee beans. They enjoy playing with it like sand...scooping, pouring, sorting, etc. And the best part is that it smells SO lovely (I got a french vanilla roast). :) Here's a couple of Naomi doing her coffee bean "work" on the activity table...




And just a random one of Naomi wearing a bow made by one of our good friends. :)

Last week we also made peanut butter playdough, and enjoyed that as a snack for a couple of days! I also made some scent jars for Isaac to work with. He loved that activity. I was surprised that he was able to correctly identify five out of the six scents. Very fun!

This just KICKED my butt!

Wow. It's not too often that I come across something that really hits home for me...as in giving me a HUGE ah-ha moment. But I just read a blog that gave me some REALLY good (and much needed) perspective. It can be found here.

It's titled "what a four-year-old should know." And it might as well work for any age really. I confess that I have a tendency to push Isaac in certain things. He has always been a little advanced, verbally. And while it's been fun for us, we've also had really high expectations of him and what he *should* be able to do. Don't get me wrong...having high goals for our children is fine. But just read that article...and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Things may start looking a little (or A LOT) different around our home very soon! :)

Loving this weather...

Here we are in the middle of November in Indiana...and experiencing highs in the mid-70's. And LOVING every minute of it!! :) Isaac has developed a serious love of hiking with daddy. I snapped some photos the other day while the kiddos played outside. Yes, our backyard looks like a zoo! But it's fun! :) Here they are...

She looks SO thrilled here, doesn't she? :)



















And our beloved Mona Lisa...still going strong! :)

Another bump in the road...

This isn't the long post I have been promising (still working on it), but is a blog post from my Facebook page with other big news...

I wasn't going to share this publicly, but I need all the prayer I can get right about now. Many of you know that we experienced our third miscarriage just a few months ago. What many of you DON'T know is that it was actually a partial molar pregnancy. If you are like most people, you probably have NO CLUE what that is. Here is a good link that explains it.

Immediately following the miscarriage, I had to have a chest x-ray and then weekly blood draws until my HCG (pregnancy hormone) levels were down to zero. I've been going back for monthly blood draws to make sure that the HCG levels remain at zero for at least a year. We were also heart-broken when we were told that we were not allowed to get pregnant for an entire year.

My bloodwork this past week has indicated a rise in HCG levels. This can mean one of two things: I have become pregnant while PREVENTING, which can be bad news (possible very high-risk pregnancy), OR the molar tissue has begun to spontaneously redevelop, which will require chemotherapy for treatment. Either way is not good. I was strictly forbidden from getting pregnant for 12 months, which is why we were preventing. If we have actually gotten pregnant, it has got to be an act of God Himself, because I cannot count the number of months we have spent trying to conceive throughout our marriage...and the FIRST month of PREVENTING pregnancy, we fall pregnant? How random is THAT?!? And truly not very likely.

But the alternative of the tissue metastasizing is also highly unlikely, with less than a 10% chance of recurrence. So this is a complete mystery to us. And here I sit, in the agony of not knowing WHAT is growing within my womb. Is it truly a miracle baby? Or is it the stupid tissue spreading again? Will I need chemo? And what will that mean? What if this disease spreads to the other parts of my body? What then? Will this make it even LONGER that we'll have to wait to have more children? And why? Why? WHY?

All I keep thinking is that the Lord must have some pretty freaking amazing plans for us. If we have to continue going through this crap...these trials. He must be refining us...getting us ready for something big. And so we roll with it again. While I am tempted to feel extremely frustrated and angry with my stupid body, I can't allow myself to be overwhelmed by those things. Instead, I will choose to be filled with the Spirit of God who gives me peace that passes ALL understanding. :) I don't need to know why these things are happening. I just need to accept them and allow these circumstances to hurl me into the loving arms of my Savior. Because He, alone, is my comfort...and the very reason that I do not and will not give up.

So basically, we are in waiting mode. The doctor is frustrated with us, thinking that we were irresponsible. But we truly were not. She made it perfectly clear that it could be life-threatening to me or the baby if we were to get pregnant. Apparently if the molar tissue begins to metastasize while I'm pregnant, we would be put into a situation in which we would have to choose between saving the baby's life or mine. (Do I allow cancer to spread throughout my body during the pregnancy or do I treat it with chemo and therefore kill the baby?) How crappy of a situation would THAT be? But it is NOT guaranteed. It is rare for the tissue to metastasize anyway. But it's also rare for us to get pregnant so easily...especially while preventing.

It is a mystery. And we are trying to make sense of it all. We will begin to find out more over the next couple of weeks, with more bloodwork and eventually early ultrasounds. But in the meantime, would you join us in prayer? I honestly don't know how or what to pray at this point. Mostly for joy and peace throughout this journey, I suppose would be the best. I confess that I shy away from praying for exactly what I want (for there to be a perfectly healthy baby that will grow to full-term without ANY complications throughout the entire pregnancy). :) As one of the proverbs says, "A hope deferred makes the heart sick." And I just have such a hard time hoping for something so deep and unlikely. (We've experienced THREE pregnancy losses up to now...so I kinda know what it's like to hope for something and then lose it.)

ANYway...this has gotten long. All of this to say...would you please join us in prayer?

Love you all!
Leslie

And an update from today: according the the doctor, my numbers seem to be within a healthy range for a normal pregnancy...NOT the cancerous tissue metastasizing. To me, this was the best possible news we could have gotten. The odds are in our favor to have a perfectly healthy pregnancy and baby. But they are going to be monitoring me like crazy throughout this pregnancy....beginning with an ultrasound this Thursday. I will update after we find out what that shows. :)

Changes are coming...

I am working on a VERY long post that will outline some pretty major life changes that we're about to undergo. Will update SOON...

Happy Halloweeny!

The kiddos had a GREAT time this weekend...first at their Nana's office for some trick-or-treating, and then throughout our neighborhood. Isaac had a hard time waiting until the end before opening up his candy. Pretty funny. And Naomi has acquired a few new words: "punkin" "canny" (candy) and "come on!" SO cute!! :) She also surprised us this week with a 5-word sentence: "I unna tye it." Okay...so it's four words when I write it out so you can see how it sounded. But she said, "I want to try it." :) She's getting to be a feisty little thing! :)

Anyway...here are some photos of my little monkey and kitty...LOVE them!