Please pray for Matthew

He is sick :-(.
Has has a headache, sore throat, huge lymph nodes and sick to his stomach. Poor lamb.
I just went to check on him and found him asleep on the bathroom floor :-(. He's been feeling nauseous on and off the last two days and has been hanging out next to the toilet a lot :-(.
Poor thing. We are taking him to the pediatrician tomorrow. We suspect he has mono.
Please pray for him if you remember. Thank you.

Ever had one of those days?

Lily's reaction to seeing that Aaron was sitting on my lap.

Slice of Life

I have to admit that Aaron has been getting pretty left at the wayside sometimes :-(. Being number 3 of 4, poor guy doesn't get a lot of activities or time that is designated just for *him.* When Matthew (and even Nathan - though less) was his age, I had us signed up for Mommy and me music classes and an art class for him, etc. Aaron usually gets to be in tow while we shuttle his older brothers around. Sigh. He is pretty introverted so it is not as if he is *wanting* to do any classes, but I sometimes wonder if I am not encouraging him to go out of his comfort zone by default.

Anyway, I have been spending more time with him recently with some preschooly fun stuff we have been doing at home.

Some reading and writing readiness.

He has been working on writing and identifying numbers. Here is a cool playdough activity that helps kids learn their numbers.

I really want to focus more on Aaron. He just eats it up when I spend quality time with him. It's been hard for him these past 6 months - contending with a new sibling, being bumped from the baby position in the family, having two older brothers who seemingly are capable to do so much more than him. He has been really vying for attention. He really needs some TLC. I am trying to carve out more time for just him.

Lily has been getting into playdough, too. Though honestly, this girl has such a short attention span! She can do playdough *maybe* for 5 minutes, then it is off to find something else to do. Or if I am not ready to switch activities yet, she will proceed to throw the playdough and then become boneless and wail. No photo of that today!

Oh, but this girl is also so sweet. Here she is right next to me after we woke up from our group nap.

And she does like helping me bake. Her favorite thing is sitting on the counter and helping me whisk. When she whisks she gets batter all over the place. Fun, but messy. If I try to make things less messy then things are a lot less fun for her. . . and then as a matter of course, for me as well because again I have to deal with a boneless heap of screaming toddler while trying to finish our baking project. Trust me, I have tried it before. Here we are baking pumpkin bars.

Yes, we are working on having Lily learn to wait and be patient. It is not going too well right now :-(. I think part of it is a communication problem mixed with a very low frustration tolerance from Lily.

After baking we went to Serra Park. Lily insisted that she walk the dog.

The boys ran.

I brought the pumpkin bars to snack on.

And I love this picture of Phil. He looks so noble!

I love these photo filter apps on my iPhone. They make everything look so beautiful and fun, don't they? These little slices of time make all the chaos and mess of daily life seem to fade into the background :-).

Toga Party

Matthew and Nathan have been taking Latin this year. Their class is being taught by a dear friend's husband who also happens to be a high school teacher. The kids call him "Grammaticus." For the last session of the year - they had a toga party! We made some togas with muslin and safety pins.

The kids decorated, and we ate Togo's sandwiches. Get it, Togo - toga?

They had a recital. Each student had a quote in Latin to memorize, translate, and to present a short biography on the author of the quote.

Group photo! Woohoo! We all had lots of fun with Latin this year. The boys also learned a lot. Even though Latin is a "dead" language - it is so helpful for understanding word origins, meanings and roots.

You can see that Lily got into the spirit of things with her toga as well!

We have had many activities ending already for this year. I feel relieved to be honest with you, with this gradual clearing of my plate. Phew - it feels good to lessen the responsibilities each week as summer approaches! Matthew took his standardized tests nearly a month ago (STAR testing) which is required of him since we are using a charter school's independent study program as our homeschooling "umbrella." So in a way (don't tell the kids), I am kind of in summer mode already - longing for the beach and looser schedules!

Green With a White Stripe (Green ONE)

On the last Friday of last month, Matthew and Nathan tested in taekwondo for their green belt with a white stripe. The white strips denotes a second level green belt.

I could not be more proud - because they are *good* and I am not bragging :-).

The testing procedure involves them doing their forms, their kicking combinations, their self defense maneuvers and their sparring combinations in front of a panel of instructors. At the end, they get called up one by one for a critique - what was commendable, and then something to grow on. It is nerve wracking for them, but a really great experience, I think.

They have learned so much from martial arts. For Matthew, it has helped him be more assertive and aggressive (in a good way). You all know how cautious he can be. The students all have to sound off in class ("Yes, sir!" or "No, sir!" whenever the instructor gives them instructions) which helps them learn respect and how important it is to RESPOND when people talk to them. For Nathan (who can be a bit of a loose cannon sometimes) it has helped him be more self-controlled. Each time they test for the next belt - it is cumulative. Matthew and Nathan have had to memorize numerous forms (each having at least 20 movements) and other combinations. It is amazing how much they can remember! This type of cumulative testing also emphasizes how you always need to have a solid foundation even when you go on to learn new things.

They seriously are awesome. I admire how strong, sharp, and poised they look when they do martial arts.

Vasona Park - Family Outing

Dave took the day off on Good Friday, and we got to go on a family outing! One of the best parts of living in the Bay Area is all of the beautiful places nearby. Vasona Park is a very pretty park that has a lake, and a bike trail that is flat and miles long. Perfect for kids and families.

We had such great time! And the weather was as if we had ordered it - sunny, clear, and neither warm nor cool. Perfect. Aaron and Lily rode in a trailer that Dave pulled, and Matt and Nene rode their own bikes. It's been a while since I got to go on a bike ride - very fun and cannot wait to go again!

Afterwards we went to Quizno's for some sandwiches. You can see Lily thinks that her brother literally is all that and a bag of chips :-).

Cleft 101

Before we met Lily, I had never seen a cleft palate. I had seen many cleft lips before from Smile Train advertisements and from numerous referral photos on Chinese adoption sites. I want to share with you and document what an open palate looks like:

Ok - this is not the best photo. And forgive the amount of boogies that are in poor Lily's nose! But I think you can see the cleft in the roof of her mouth. She wasn't terribly cooperative as you can imagine for the taking of this photograph. This was back in October of 2011, shortly after she came home. If I could have gotten a better shot, you would be able to look up into her cleft and see her nasal bone. Lily had a bilateral complete cleft palate - that means that there were two clefts in her upper lip, gumline, and hard palate - and the two clefts fuse into one large cleft when it hits the soft palate. That is what you can see here - the one large cleft towards the back of her mouth.

Here is a photo of her from about a week ago. As you can see (more or less), the palate is repaired - looks like one piece - and it is. Dr. H did a three flap palatoplasty to close up her cleft.

Again, forgive the boogies! I promise she doesn't always have a runny nose!

And I wanted to show her cleft gumline. You can't see it when her mouth is closed, or even when Lily smiles because her top teeth do not show when she smiles. I think this is pretty typical of cleft affected children in the early years after lip repair - the lip is just very tight and does not have a lot of "give."

So. . . Lily's gumline is cleft on two sides. You can see here how her top middle teeth and gums are kind of on an "island." There is a cleft (gap) on either side, kind of where your canines would be. Her top jaw is essentially in three pieces.

When she is 8 or 9, Lily will undergo a surgery that will graft bone into those gaps to reconstruct the gumline. They time this surgery with the emergence of her permanent teeth in that area. When it is all done (the bone graft surgery and lots of orthodontia) - her gumline will look more or less like a typical person's - one piece with straight teeth going all the way across. I am documenting this now because I know that someday I will forget what her gumline looked like. I am already forgetting what her cleft palate looked like!

In order to get these last two pictures, we had to persuade Lily to open her mouth by having all of the brothers get their mouths photographed. Here are some of those photos hee hee.

Silly brothers! But it worked :-).