Halloween 2014!

I think all of my kids will be out of preschool by the time I find the right camera settings to use in the gym for their Halloween parade.  "/  This year I decided to try to give my new flash a try....  meh...  mixed results.  I know I'm not great with it when I use it for anything but bouncing it off the ceiling, which isn't an option in a gym.  And I completely forgot to put my diffuser on it, which might have helped some.  I spent a lot of time correcting red eye in Lightroom this evening.  "/  The one thing I'm starting to like about using the flash, though, is the little white spots it puts in people's eyes.  It used to bug me, but now I think it makes them sparkle and look more alive!

Josh's family always jokes that the little girls in the family are all future Yam Queens (small town thing)...I think Anna's got her parade wave down!  

Wallace...he actually got to walk in the parade 2 days in a row!  Can you believe this is the same kid that cried the entire first week of school???

So, I know everyone's been talking about how many Elsa's there were for Halloween this year...but it really was comical how many were in this parade!  I decided to take a photo of each one!

You'd think their teachers would have at least separated them in their lines...  ;)

We can't forget about the Anna's!  Love the ear muffs one!

I'd fully intended to get some pics of the kids earlier in the week so I wouldn't be all stressed out trying to get them on Halloween day between work and trick-or-treating....yeah...that never happened.  So I was a frantic mess trying to get them all to cooperate.  

I must have stressed the kids out too....they were a bit robotic at first.  "/  And Wallace still won't take a picture with his sisters.  I've decided if all I can do is catch him in the back of the frame then so be it.

Oh yeah....nothing's slowing this girl down!

Once I put that thing on her head Meredith refused to smile at all!  I guess she was in character.  So fierce!

How cute is Tinker Bell!!!  Anna didn't let her casts slow her down much as we went door to door.  Thankfully Wallace was slowing us down a bit.  I'd catch her kind of looking like a race walker since she can't really run right now.  She'd be all hunched over at the waist just trying to pick up speed.  "/  She didn't complain about it though!

Wallace really got in to trick-or-treating!  He was so adorable.  You can just barely understand it when he says "trick or treat!"  I think Halloween is probably going to end up being his favorite holiday.  He won't eat much, but he will eat sweets!  He was so wired last night, and he ended up eating Hershey bars for breakfast this morning.  

New Casts! Yay!

This photo pretty much sums up the day....it was good and bad...

Today Anna got her new set of casts, and everything I thought would suck didn't, and everything I thought she'd like was not so great...

We started the day off by waking up late (6:00AM!) and leisurely making our way to Granny's house to drop off Meredith and Wallace.  Then I decided to get some shots of Anna in her old casts before we left to get them replaced.

The last week with this set really started to suck.  They smelled horrible, and on Friday around 5:00 I noticed that one of them was hurting Anna and causing her to limp.  Great...can't really do much at that point.

But, with that said, she's really been a trooper.  She made a pretty good couch potato most of the weekend, and that seemed to help some.  

Our first stop was the orthotics measurement appointment.  The sign out front said orthotics and prosthesis, and as we walked up I had a moment of panic that they might have prostheses just sort of out in the open, used as educational tools or decorations...I figured that would completely freak Anna out.  Thankfully, I'm an idiot...this was not the case at all.  

This is the selection of orthotics that she got to choose from.  With some help she decided on light pink with stars.

So, I didn't have time to google it, and I'm still not entirely sure how there wasn't blood flying everywhere when they cut these things off! 

I'd assumed Anna would be totally cool with the whole cast removal process since she'd handled it fine the first time they cut one off at the ortho, but she was hysterical for the first minute of it.  She was pretty much a ball of tears for this entire appointment.  :(  I'd figured she would really enjoy it (casts coming off....picking out the color and pattern she wanted for the orthotics), but good grief...I was wrong wrong wrong....

I didn't anticipate this!  And neither did she apparently.  Seeing the sores really bothered her.  And her skin was pretty sensitive too.  

We had a little time to wash her feet, which was traumatic because of the sores and the skin sensitivity, and then we got started on the molds for the orthotics.  

Once again...not what I was expecting.  When they said molds, I was thinking it'd be some sort of foamy stuff like what they use to make molds of your teeth.  I'm all thinking...soft foamy stuff...she'll think this is awesome!  I really should have researched this more before we went.  It was ANOTHER cast!

At least the removal process was a little different.  She still cried because it hurt where her sores were when he got close to the top of her foot.  I'm sure this guy felt like a heel (no pun intended).  :(

He taped her casts back on so we could keep her feet at 90 until her casting appointment in the afternoon.  She almost seemed relieved to have the casts back on.  We rewarded her with some Freebirds!  

Anna got very in to the foil art!

For the next couple of hours Anna and I licked our wounds and tried to get over the horribleness that was the orthotics appointment.  We had a little retail therapy at Sam Moons!  

When they took the casts off again, she was back to being fixated on the sores....

But Josh was quick to sidetrack her and spun her around in the doctor's chair a few times.  Really seemed to be effective.  No tears for the entire appointment!

We got a new cast technician.  This guy was awesome!  

He was super careful to get her extra cushioning so the sores can heal and she won't develop any more.  This was like an art form.  He was so careful about everything.  Took forever, but I think it was worth it.

She went with pink!

They're a bit bulkier this time.  The new casts are 5 degrees past neutral, so theoretically they should force her to strike heel first and lengthen her heel cord even more.  

It took FOREVER!

We got new boots!

And homegirl got another special treat on the way home.  :)  

So, like I said...everything I thought she'd like she hated, but then she wasn't upset at all to get the new casts!  We ended up having a pretty nice day together.  :)

Toe-Walking Update and then some...

Well...Anna's had her casts on for almost 3 weeks now, and holy wow a 4-year old can destroy some casts!

They are so dirty and stinky!  Her doctor only changes them out after 3 weeks, so she'll get some new ones next Tuesday!  I've just about got her talked into matching them to her Halloween costume, so we'll see if she still thinks that's a cool idea next week.

Really praying they give her a new set of boots too!  One of the straps looks like it's about to completely come off.  

She's almost stopped complaining about the casts.  Every now and then she'll play too much and then I guess her legs swell a little and they bother her.  But she's been very pleased with all of the attention her casts get her.  She seemed to accept them on the 3rd day when I took her to the grocery store, and she noticed all of the people looking at her.  She commented to me about it, and the complaining died down considerably after that.

I was a little bummed when I noticed her attempting to walk on her toes during week 2.  She actually said to me with a sigh..."Mommy...I just like to walk on my toes..."  I'm not sure if that's what caused this or not, but she's managed to crack both of her casts around her toes.  "/  I called the doctor on Monday and was assured that as long as the casts are still solid around her ankles then she's still good to go, but it's a little alarming to see that she managed to break these things!  They are super hard!  

Seriously determined to walk on her toes.  On a side note..how cute are all the little kid signatures!  :)

She can get herself into a run, a funny run, but it's a run.  She struggled in the first week with things like climbing into the truck and up on the bar stools, but she's got all of that figured out now.  Honestly, the hardest thing about all of this is her baths.  Homegirl probably weighs 45 pounds, and I have to lower her into the tub and then pick her back up out of it...that's a real workout!  

Meanwhile...Little Miss Meredith appears to have developed some sort of food intolerances...maybe...  This stuff is a bit difficult to pinpoint.  It's given me a whole new appreciation for people with food allergies.  After 2 weeks of me going completely dairy free (not easy for a dairy-lover) she ended up breaking out in hives all over her body yesterday!  Talk about scary!  So, I ran her into the doctor and today we ended up at the allergist.  They did a panel for food allergies, and then left the room for 15 minutes.  I've never seen one of these tests done before, only heard about them.  My Mom and I sat there staring at all of the red bumps totally freaking out and not knowing what any of it meant!  Looked like she had 14 raging mosquito bites on her back.  The nurse came back in, looked a bit alarmed, and started measuring them.  She ended up getting the doctor and together they deduced that Meredith must have ridiculously sensitive skin.  She even reacted to the saline control!  That is apparently not normal.  The doctor is fairly certain she's not allergic to everything....so, she goes in for blood work tomorrow.  The mystery continues...  Fortunately, she hasn't seemed fazed by any of this.  She's remained super happy and gaining weight, so I'll just keep praying that she's just a really stubborn eater with a very sensitive system.  

Have you ever met a toe walker?

I have!  Her name is Anna.  And the day I've been dreading for over a year became a reality yesterday...  We've started her treatment.  

Anna has walked up on her tip toes since she first started pulling up on our furniture.  We weren't too worried about it at first, but then it just persisted. I guess no one's really sure what came first, the shortened heel cord or the toe walking, but we first took her to the orthopedic last summer when we got back from Alaska.  Although I cried through the entire appointment, he really set our minds at ease about it.  Pretty much told us that in his opinion we wouldn't get much out of physical therapy, and we would just be wasting our breath and frustrating Anna if we constantly hounded her to walk on her heels.  He said he preferred to treat kids at the age of 4 and to do it over the winter since it gets so hot here.  So...15 months later...here we are.

I realized last week that in every picture I take of Anna, she's down on her heels, which is just amazing, because in reality she's up on her toes probably 90% of the time.  She'll rest on her heels, but she's started this splay-foot thing now.  If we ask her to walk on her heels her posture gets weird and her feet get farther and farther apart with every step.  I guess her heel cord is just getting shorter and shorter.  And just recently she's started complaining of leg pain.  I think we're actually starting her treatment just in time.  I feel like we're going into this with fairly realistic expectations.  I thought the chances of long-term success would be about 50%; her doctor seemed to think that number should be closer to 70%.  He offered up the heel cord lengthening surgery again to get the odds up around 95%, but we've declined that for now.  

Since the pool is finally in working order again, we decided to try to let Anna swim as much as possible this past week before we started the treatment.

She's such a fish!  She can swim without these floaties, but she found them in the swim closet and wanted to wear them.  I was so worried they'd slip off and leave her dangling with one arm up out of the water and the rest of her body submerged, but they are actually very tight on her arms.  

Look at that blue pool!

Since I cried through her initial appointment over a year ago, I've been super concerned that I would just do it again and totally start this whole process off on the wrong note...I managed to hold it together.  I think that was due to the fact that I randomly got a horrible eye infection yesterday!  I was super distracted by it the whole time.  It just kept getting worse and worse throughout the day.  I am super duper blind, so I feel like the last resort is to take my contacts out.  I took that lens out around 11:00 am, which means I had no depth perception for the rest of the day.  It was miserable, and it didn't help!  My eye managed to swell just about shut while we were at the doctor's office.  I know everyone was noticing it, but people are so polite...no one wanted to ask.  So embarrassing.  Anyway, after Anna's appointment, I ended up going to a clinic for it...talk about a late night.  

Back to Anna!  Her treatment will consist of 6 weeks of serial casting and probably 6 months in AFOs, which are just orthotic braces to retrain her on how to walk once the casts come off.  The thought of binding up your kid's feet in casts is pretty horrible.  They warned us it would probably be a tough weekend.  

I've been trying to prep her for these for a couple of weeks now.  Showed her some pictures of kids with casts online, talked about how fun it would be for people to sign them....

They go almost to her knees.  

She goes back and forth frequently between liking them and hating them.  We've already had some tears and a pretty good freak out about not being able to swim. "Can you take them off Mommy!!!!"  I've heard that about a hundred times this morning.  :(

She has some sweet walking boots.  The fact that she can "walk" in the casts is the only thing that makes this process palatable for me.  I was a little annoyed that these boots weren't a more fashionable black, but Anna doesn't seem to mind the blue.

She feel asleep as soon as Josh got her home last night, and woke up around 11:00pm.  I could hear her coming from the other side of the house  She won't be sneaking up on anyone for the next 6 weeks.  "/

I've never had a cast before, but I've always harbored a fear of them just because of the process of getting them off.  Well...they had to re-do one of her casts while we were there, so Anna's already been through the saw process and didn't even flinch!  

Visitors!

This weekend my bestie Jen came in from Alaska!!!  I'm still a bit miffed that she moved there last year!  Even though we text nearly daily, it's hard not to miss someone when you only see them maybe once a year.  

I haven't seen her since she was 12 weeks pregnant with this little guy!

She had told me how big Henry was many times, but hearing it and seeing it are 2 different things!  I should have gotten some shots of him and Meredith together, but it just didn't happen.  Instead, Jen and I ditched all the kids with our Mom's and went shopping!!!  She's one of the few people that I feel completely comfortable shopping with.  I'm a die-hard clearance shopper, and that can take some time and be super irritating for someone who's not.  Josh will humor me and let me hang out in the clearance section for maybe 5-10 minutes when he goes shopping with me, but I can see it driving him crazy.  We usually do a big back to work clothes shopping trip after I have each baby, but in all the craziness that was going on with us when I returned to work this time around, we never did it.  "/  Needless to say...I was in dire need of some new clothes.

So this was the first time I got to go to the giant outlet mall and just shop until I was done without any kids.  It was amazing!  It also made for some great quality time with Jen!  

So, it seems that with our friends that have moved to Alaska, when they come back to Texas for a trip it's a whirlwind adventure where they try to see as many people as possible.  I'm glad I was one of Jen's first stops before she gets all worn out.  :)

My sister Sarah came to town this weekend too!  We were popular!  Josh has been working hard to get the pool back into good shape before everyone came.  It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough that all of the girls and Wallace got to go swimming!  It was freezing!!  A couple of them came out with blue lips all shivering.  I think this might be the last weekend for swimming in the pool until next summer.  :(

We've decided that Meredith looks a LOT like my sister.  Which makes complete sense...since Sarah has a little one that looks just like me!  

Meredith got a walker!  Anna and Wallace never had one...it took a few nights before they'd just let her play in it without them standing in front of her playing with all of the buttons and stuff on the front of it.

Ha!  Seriously?  They've all gotten to use the awesome jumpy my Mom got Anna when she was little, but I guess this is just new and exciting.  It's really funny to watch Meredith walk it around.  She gets pretty pissed when she finds herself caught up against something or stuck in a corner, but other than that, I think it was a smart buy!

It's so exciting when they sit and do something calmly together!  And it's rare enough that it warrants some photos!

They saw me and started posing.

Look who did her tripod for me again!  She actually worked on it extensively while Henry was here.  Guess she was trying to show off or something.  :)

She is just so ready to take off and crawl!  She kind of does this get up on all 4's and then sort of swan dive down to make forward progress.  Then she'll roll around to change directions and stuff.

And she likes to make uber cute faces!