On the Eve of Kindergarten...

...Someone is super excited!

Today started out great for Elizabeth, because yesterday she let me pull out her (second) loose tooth and so last night the tooth fairy came.

And all the rest of the day she has been sooooo excited to go to school tomorrow.

I'm not sure I'm quite as excited as she is(my baby! *sniff*), I'm actually feeling just a touch overwhelmed. David and I both took tomorrow off to be there to drop her off and pick her up from her first day, and to spend the morning with just Lilli (which doesn't happen very often), so that's good, but for some reason I'm all nervous that we'll over sleep or that I'll forget her lunch, or SOMETHING.

This is a big milestone though, so yay!

But also kind of blech.

Vacation: The final post, aka, the one about Mini-Golf

You probably thought you'd gotten to the end of the vacation posts. Not so, friend, not so! I just had better things to do with my Friday night. But Saturday night is a whole different ball game, especially at 11.

While we were on vacation we decided that the girls were old enough to go play mini-golf for the first time. No offense to our friends who took their 2 and 3 year-olds to play, but we actually find mini-golf kind of boring and we don't find small children with golf clubs adorable enough to wait for them to run around all over the putting area, not listen at all, whack their balls into the water hazards repeatedly, and throw a hissy if you try to move them to the next hole. A 4 year old and a 5 year old may not get the lowest score their first time holding a club, but they will follow directions and don't throw themselves down on the ground in despair if they can't get the ball in the hole right away.

Even though it was boiling hot and muggy beyond belief, they were quite cheerful the whole time.

Here's Elizabeth looking cheerful with Nana and Papa:
She was really happy about that green ball.

Here's miss Lilli:
No surprises, her ball is pink.

As the youngest member of the group, she did really well. The first hole took her a bit, but once she got it she got it. Sure, she got plenty of 4s and 5s, but she was on or under par on several holes.

And then there's Elizabeth.

Her first 4 holes were nothing special. I think she got 4s on all of them. But then we got to hole five, and I had screamed and hollered for Lilli who only took two shots and made it. And Elizabeth walked up, lined up her ball and got a hole in one. All three of us wahooed and jumped up and down, and celebrated. Then David and his parents, who were still at the last hole for the moment of triumph, caught up and Elizabeth said "I GOT A HOLE IN ONE I GOT A HOLE IN ONE I GOT A HOLE IN ONE! WATCH!!!!"

And she did it again.

Here she is after her success, apparently giving credit to the ball:

And by the way, on hole 7, she did it again.

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Sorry to leave you hanging about the MRI! I am happy to report that it was normal.

I'm actually more than happy to report that, I'm outright over joyed. It means that her issue is a pure wiring issue, and not something with a physical cause like a stroke. Or a brain tumor. So on the advice of her neurologist, we started her right up on medication last night.

So far so good!

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I also didn't mean to skip a night of Anniversary Anecdotes, but I was spending time with the subject of those anecdotes and figured that was the higher priority.

For my 20th birthday, David threw me a surprise party. At Chuck E. Cheese. Now that I have children I have kind of grown to hate Chuck (although I do love his "every game 1 token" schtick), but I loved it when I was a kid. And I still loved the thought of it when I was 20 even though it had been years. And my sweet hubby knew that I would. So he set it all up and, while he's not so great at keeping secrets, so I knew something was up, I was not expecting that AT ALL, and I was thrilled. I'm not sure that the staff was so thrilled about having a birthday party group with about twenty-five 19 and 20-year-olds, or about having to bring out the mouse to wish me a happy birthday, but it was an awesome party, and I'm kind of bummed I didn't repeat it for my 30th. But, as I mentioned, C.E.C's isn't quite as much fun as it used to be.

Probably because I'm following around a small person and handing her tokens instead of playing Skee Ball myself!

Vacation: Cousins

Well hello there internet!

Have you noticed that I'm stretching out my vacation for a whole extra week? It's meant to distract me from all the other craziness in my life this week, and it kind of works.

Anyway, tonight's vacation topic, Cousins:

The girls have exactly one cousin (I am an only child, and David has only one sister who has only one child), and his name is Kai. He is 10 months older than Elizabeth, and although the kids haven't spent much time together for cousins (he was born in Australia, lived there until he was 3 or so, and now lives in North Carolina), they are really fond of each other. He is not always the best example in my opinion, but the girls think he is amazing.

No really, I listened to Elizabeth say several times (in a very dreamy voice I might add), "Kaaaaaai, you're amaaaaaazing."

Anyway, here's some cousin pics for you.

Elizabeth and Kai with Gary Maurer, the magician whose show they were in:
Oh yeah, and Kai is crazy tall. Elizabeth is tall for her age, but Kai has both 10 months and practically 10 inches on her. He's got a super tall dad that he takes after.


Digging a hole:

Cousins hard at work:

Cousins in the bath:
I am a total party pooper and made everybody wear their swimsuits. My girls are not naturally modest, they like to be naked and they are completely uninhibited, but I do draw the line at being naked with their almost 7 year old cousin. Gotta draw the line somewhere after all.

And then I'm giving you three of the "officially posed" cousin pictures.

First, Lilli looks adoringly at Kai:

Second, nice smiles on everybody:
Did you see how much my girls look like Kai? To everybody who says Lilli looks like me, here's your proof that she gets her face just as much from David's side of the family.

Aaaaand, cousin hug! It kind of looks like it hurts:
I'm glad they got to visit!

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Next on my agenda, EEG and MRI updates.

We didn't get the best news this morning, Elizabeth's EEG was abnormal.

I was pretty much expecting that, so it wasn't a shock, but of course I was still hoping it would be normal. Of course if it was normal there would have been some other explanation for her "episodes", and that could have been worse. Now her neurologist thinks that the fainting might not have been just fainting after all, and might be related to what he is now definitely considering a seizure. He actually wants her to start medication pretty much immediately. David and I still have some talking to do, but I think we'll go for it. It's a very safe medication, they main side effect is that it can alter a child's mood, but I'd rather have a cranky non-seizing Elizabeth, then a happy Elizabeth who has a seizure that causes her to walk out into traffic or something. I'll have to give you more updates as I get them. The neurologist told me a lot of things, and I took notes, but they're pretty much a blur at the moment as it has been a really long day.

So, the MRI.

I think I was more nervous than she was about the IV stick. They had the obligatory child life specialist (Caroline this time) come in to talk to her about her "medicine straw", only this time they gave her a little "straw", a length of tubing, and a syringe and let her squirt all the nurses (and David and I) with water. Oh yeah and she got to take that apparatus home. Grrrrrreat. But she loved that. And she got to watch Sponge Bob, which is not on her approved list here at home, so she was actually in 7th heaven for a while, at least while the numbing patches were doing their thing. Because the ER had such a hard time getting in the IV, the sedation team put patches on both her wrist and inner arm in case one spot didn't work, and these were heavy duty patches that actually seemed to help this time. Oh, she screamed plenty (as my mom and I clutched each other off in the corner and daddy held her hand), but her nurse (Rachel! High five for awesome Rachels!) got the IV in on the first try. When Elizabeth was all hooked up I asked Nurse Rachel if she accepted hugs from strangers and hugged her without waiting for a reply. Totally invaded her personal space. Hah! But she didn't seem to mind.

Anyway, Elizabeth, even while screaming, had held her arm still, and I had told her if she did she could squirt me with her syringe thingy IN MY FACE. So I made good on that, and she was delighted. Shortly afterwards they hooked up the sedative and moved her bed down to the MRI unit. She was practically out by the time we got there, and it didn't take long after we arrived before she was completely sedated. David had to go back to work, but my mom waited with me. The pediatric intensivist who was leading the sedation team came to talk to me a couple times, and the time went by pretty quickly. They ended up giving her an additional sedative because the original one puts you to actual sleep, like nighttime sleep, and it turns out that she tics in her sleep. And also talks. And also moves around a lot. So she needed to be deeper under than they originally thought. But she did great, her vital signs stayed perfect the whole time, they got all the pictures of her brain they needed, and although she's in bed now she hasn't seemed to have had any problems with after effects of the sedatives other than being really sleepy and having a bit of a stomach ache (a side effect of the second sedative). The doctor said that although he isn't a radiologist he sees a lot of MRIs and there did not appear to be any kind of large mass in her brain, so that's a good thing. I have to say that the way he was phrasing things did lead me to believe that there might be small abnormalities with this scan too, so I'm looking forward to talking to Elizabeth's neurologist again tomorrow.

Oh yeah, her hospital booty? A stuffed bear, a stuffed snoopy, a bouncy ball from the "prize tower", the syringe and tubing thingy, apple juice, teddy grahams, and her name bracelet. She was a happy girl. And she got the movie she has been asking for for the last 6 months (Thomas the Tank Engine Misty Island Rescue) from me. There was a happy girl on my couch tonight eating popsicles (clear liquid) and watching her movie while cuddling her new friends.

Love that big girl of mine!

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Do you mind if I mostly skip my Anniversary Anecdote tonight? I'm wiped. I will say though, that David is an awesome daddy. He did what he had to do today to be there for Elizabeth when they put her to sleep, even though he thought he wasn't going to be able to leave work. I know it's pretty much a general good daddy thing to be willing to walk through fire, drop anything, throw yourself in front of a bullet for your kid, but he would, and I love that about him.

Vacation: Sisters

You know what's sad? I took around 300 pictures on vacation last week, and I took exactly 4 of the girls together.

These four:

The girls outside Nana and Papa's church:

The girls in the pool:


The girls at the top of the Harbour Town Lighthouse:

The girls by the stuffed bear they wanted to stand next to:

That's it. What kind of mama am I?

I know that part of the trouble here is that we have a man-to-man parenting style. David is usually with Elizabeth and I'm usually with Lilli. I don't know how we'd switch to zone defense if we ever had a third child, because we're used to this. That's how we put them to bed, that's how we wash them in the bath, that's how we get them in and out of their car seats when we're all together. So we divide up the children when we're exploring, and even though we switch I usually just focused on one kid at a time. So it makes sense, but I'm still kind of grumpy about the lack of sister pictures.

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Anyway, in other news I have an EEG update! Elizabeth's EEG was this morning and while we don't know the results yet, the procedure was fabulous and didn't stress her out (or me either actually) at all. We went in the room, the technician had her lay down on the table and turned on the Cat in the Hat. She measured and marked Elizabeth's head up with a red crayon, then attached a whole lot of electrodes with paste stuff, and then wrapped the whole top of her head in gauze. This was a "sleep-deprived" scan, so we had to keep her up until midnight last night and get her up at 4 this morning. So she wasn't the only one who was feeling sleep-deprived. They needed her to fall asleep on the table so they slowly dimmed the lights and had her blow for three straight minutes on a pinwheel. That was actually funny because she was so sleepy that as she blew the pinwheel would get closer and closer to her mouth, it would touch her and she would startle and start blowing more fiercely on the pinwheel, and then start to doze off again. Wish I'd brought my camera that's for sure. They observed her for a good 25 to 30 minutes (I fully admit that David and I had a bit of a snooze in the dark and quiet), and then roused her enough that she could react to the strobe they started flashing in her face. We got up and got to see her brain reacting to the lights. I don't know if her reactions were good or bad, but it was fascinating to see the lines going crazy. After that she got to get up, and got to take home the pinwheel, a slinky, and stickers, and since she'd had a bit of a nap she was super cheerful.

I'm a bit nervous about tomorrow though, because tomorrow she has her MRI and she will need to be sedated for that, and when we were in the emergency room with her last May she had a HORRIFIC experience getting an IV in. They couldn't get the needle in her tiny vein and I lost count of the number of times they poked her. And the screaming. I might never get that out of my head. Immediately afterwards she was totally cheerful like nothing had happened, but I was a little bit scarred by that, so I'm really worried it won't go well tomorrow. The IV part I mean. That's the only part I'm worried about. If I should be worried about the rest of it don't tell me. Anyway, supposedly the sedation team who will be working on her tomorrow does nothing but children so they are used to tiny veins, and I hope that's right. Or I might be forced to raise my voice at someone.

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And on a happier topic, ready for today's Anniversary Anecdote?

David's and my first official date (we had been dating for a bit by then even though he'd never actually asked me out- that might be tomorrow's A.A. although he hates that story- but we'd never actually gone Someplace Specific and Semi-Date-like) was at Johnny Rocket's. 12.5 years ago it was still kind of a novelty, at least in Columbus, Ohio, and it was super close to the movie theater. Perfect! After grilled cheese, fries, ketchup smiley faces and milkshakes, the waiters got up to dance like they did every half hour or so, and David got up to dance with them. As he serenaded me with a ketchup bottle microphone to (randomly) "New York, New York", that's the moment I first started thinking long term about us.

You hear a lot about balance in a relationship. A messy person and a clean person balance each other. A frugal person and a spendthrift can balance each other. But you can't have a silly person with a non-silly person. The non-silly person would just not understand the weird things a silly person does, and the silly person would always feel self-conscious about what they're doing. I burst into song constantly, and they often aren't real songs, they're just whatever I want to say to whatever tune is in my head. I will dance in the grocery store with the girls if the Muzak is playing something good (I can't tap dance, but I enjoy pretending I can). I am kind of obsessed with cook books, My Little Pony, and American Girl (only two of which are respectable obsessions for a grownup).

David is just as weird and silly as I can be. We have discovered, for instance, that a frightening number of the expressions we use on a VERY FREQUENT BASIS come from the movie "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me". When I randomly sing something at David, he sings back. He knows how to do a super dramatic movie almost-kiss with me, the kind from the 30s or so when the couple looks passionately at each other, swoops in real fast and just presses their cheeks together as they look towards the (non-existent in our case) camera (you might have to see us in action to get what I'm talking about). He will Merengue (not sure I spelled that right, just go with it) with me anywhere.

We know perfectly well we will embarrass the girls one day and we are kind of looking forward to hamming it up and seeing just how far ahead of us they are going to want to walk.

Vacation: Elizabeth

Tonight was Elizabeth's Kindergarten Meet and Greet (sob! School starts Monday!), so tonight's vacation post is about her.

She also had a blast on vacation. She spent a lot of time playing with Nana's Lincoln Logs up in the bonus room. Not sure why we don't have Lincoln Logs at our house, but we don't, and they provided endless entertainment:

Here she is at Market Street Cafe, which is one of my favorite places to eat on the Island. David and the girls like it just fine, but I'm the one who loves it because they make the best Chicken Souvlaki I've ever had, and I try Chicken Souvlaki anywhere I am that has it. Perfectly juicy chicken cooked perfectly with the peppers and onions, just the right amount of lettuce, tomatoes, and tzatziki sauce, wrapped in the perfect slightly crisp pita. DELICIOUS. Anyway, Elizabeth had pizza, but she looks almost as happy as I was:

And here she is basking. This was right before she met a giant Golden Retriever named Darwin that she fell in love with, so she had a really good day.

She also got to get good and soaked playing in a fountain. What kid doesn't like that? Oh right, Lilli, who refused to get her clothes wet and sat on a bench in a grump. Kids.

More pizza! Giuseppe's has a fun kids' menu though.

We saw a magic show that was part of the tourist season entertainment (Gary Maurer, "South Carolina Magician of the Year"), and Elizabeth and her cousin, Kai got to be in the show. Here she is introducing herself and telling where she was from. She was pretty cute up there.

At the beach. She was blissfully happy. She discovered boogie boarding and was pretty devastated when her newly acquired board had to be left at Nana's when there wasn't room in the trunk to bring it home.

At Harbour Town. I don't have a scanned in picture, but I thought this was kind of nice because I have a picture of myself in these very chairs that was taken on my honeymoon (which, in case I wasn't clear, happened on Hilton Head).

Being cute while watching the Smurfs. The original Smurfs, not the weird new movie.

Annnnnd, finally, at Aunt Chilada's on our last day. She was super happy to discover that she could get ice cream for simply coloring in the logo. Coloring and ice cream are two of her most favorite things ever.
It was chocolate.

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Ready for another David story here in the Month Before the Big One Zero?

I thought I'd just tell you that the first time we held hands was during the Ohio State v. Michigan game. We weren't dating yet, just kind of flirting around, and it was VERY COLD at the game, and there was only one blanket, sooooooo...there was just a bit of snuggling. And some tentative hand holding. And now I have made it sound that we acted like a couple of five-year-olds. Good grief.

But of course it turned out just fine.

It also happens that we (OSU) won the game, so of course everybody rushed the field (they also rioted whether we won or lost. Cars a-burning on 15th avenue!), and then promptly got tear gassed. But not us, because we were too busy cuddling. Saved from swollen eyes by awkward giggly lovey stuff!

Vacation: Lilli

After much (ok, not really that much) internal debate about how I planned to post my vacation pictures, I decided to do them by subject instead of in order. Since Lilli had her preschool open house tonight and I'm feeling all gushy again about her growing up, she gets to go first.

Here's the big girl happy to be at Nana and Papa's house:

We clearly need to visit them more often because the last time we were there, Lilli looked like this:

Now she's all mature and stuff:

Not too grown up though, at the beach she preferred to spend her time in the tidal pools instead of the waves:

She loved every second she got to spend in the pool though:

"Arrrrrrrr", says the winky pirate girl:

"GRRRRRRR" says the feisty girl in the tunnel:

She loved just hanging out in this chair at Nana's taking in her share of the cable. :

Not sure why she looks kind of bummed here, she was showing me the picture she drew of herself and Elizabeth and their cousin Kai:

There was actually so much fun on vacation that she genuinely wore herself out:
Those cheeks are just begging for smoochies.


I can't believe the summer is almost over and that I will have two kiddos in school. I've said it before and I'll keep on saying it, but WHERE DOES THE TIME GO???

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Speaking of not knowing where the time goes, can you believe that on the 25th of this month David and I will have been married for 10 years? It has gone fast. I realize that that the last 6 years have gone extra fast because of the girls, but the first four passed by in a blink too. I feel like this month we'll celebrate 10, and next month we'll be celebrating 20. Or 25. Sheesh.

Anyway, I thought for this month I might every now and then tell you some random David stories. Like tonight I thought I'd tell you the first place I met him. It was spring of 1998, I was a freshman in college, and I went with my boyfriend at the time, we'll call him B, to go to the Taylor Tower (a dorm on the OSU campus) "Coffee House", which was sort of a cross between a concert and a talent show. He and the band he was in, "Permanent Daylight" (primarily a Radiohead cover band, but with other good stuff mixed in) were performing, and the first thing I thought when I saw him play was OH MY GOOD GRAVY, WHO IS THE HOT DRUMMER????? He was introduced to me as "Guido" (long story), I couldn't stop staring at his arms (drumming does nice things to arms), and....

...and that was it.

WHAT? I was dating another guy after all!

13 years later he still has nice arms.

Home Again

My in-law's house is amazing. It's huge, it's gorgeous, it's a short jaunt to the Atlantic Ocean (it is their dream retirement home after all). The carpets are plush, the hardwood floors are as smooth as silk, the sheets are softer than air, the towels are cushy and so absorbent that they practically dry you when look at them. There are plenty of comfortable places to hang out, and there's even cable (we refuse to pay for it ourselves when we barely watch any tv, although we did enjoy it on vacation). We love Hilton Head, even at its summer season tourist peak, because of the greenness, the trees meeting overhead, the huge beach space when the tide is out, our favorite restaurants (Market Street Cafe, Aunt Childada's, the Crazy Crab, Jump and Phil's), our traditions (fudge at Coligny Plaza, Black Market Minerals, playing at the mall playground), and the fact that there is always something new to do.

But this morning we are really happy to be home. Yes, there's tile and a lower grade of carpet, our sheets are a lower thread count, the towels not as plush, we can't spend money like we're on vacation, and it's back to our usual routine, but we love it.

There's no place like home.