Just An Update

Grace shows a lot of promise on the violin. Brianna presses forward with all her violin lessons!

Missy is off with Steve to Children's for the night for a sleep study. She normally uses a C-pap, but with the cold winter weather and the dryness and the face mask all combined her skin was breaking down and we had to take her off of it for a few weeks. Well, sleep kind of went out the door. Not right away, but now she can be found at all hours of the night playing... Once she has a sleep apnea episode sleep is over. for all of us.

I'm a rather weird sleeper myself. I use a blue light in the morning and from what I have been learning I should use it in the afternoon also to get past the 3 AM awakening.

At 3 AM this morning Steve walked in the door from picking up the pastor and his daughter at the airport. They have returned from Africa. They brought Brianna's computer with them. Steve plugged it in and immediately it did the iMac chime and started charging. Of course, that was the end of sleep for me. I gingerly opened the computer .... and it was on. It is completely fine. Not a thing wrong with it. It seems the low voltage power over there caused her troubles. Hers was not the only Macbook having a problem.... anyway, we hope to send it back to her with another family. Now that she knows what the problem was she can look for ways to avoid it.

Vanessa watched a C-section in her clinicals at the hospital today. She was pretty excited. It was her last day on the OB rotation.

Christina's math teacher canceled class so Steve and I picked her up early and we went skiing. It was so warm the snow was melting. I'm not as skilled as Christina or Steve, but I am improving each time I go. We skied hard and took more challenging runs then I have been used to so I am sore. Usually I spend the majority of my time on chair one and managed one or two challenging runs in a day, but today we only skied the easy run once and spent the rest of the time on chair 2 which goes to the top.  When it was time to leave Christina found friends to ski with and she stayed a few more hours. It's good for her to ski away the weight of college.

I put Missy's hearing aid on the dresser yesterday. Today I made an appointment with Children's Hospital to get it looked at because it's not staying on consistently. When I went to get it off the dresser it was gone. We searched the house high and low, under beds, in drawers, toy boxes, every room of the house.... I kept praying that I'd find that $3 thousand dollar bit of plastic. Finally, Steve had to get Missy to Children's without it. When I went to pick up the foster kiddos I got down on Pieter's level and asked if he had seen a little purple thing on my dresser. His eyes lighted up. Oh yes, he had. I asked him where it was, " On your bed!!" and sure enough...  We had looked around the bed, under the bed, in the headboard, everywhere but ON the bed. Next time ask the kids before wasting too much time. I guess we'll mail it in. So thankful it is found.

Missy has not had any major incidents since the stairs thing on Tuesday. Just thankful.

Pieter is really, really making some strides in wanting to do things for himself. When he came he expected to be dressed and undressed and everything had to be done in a certain order and way. It was very rigid and he expected a LOT!! Now he is getting up in the morning, throwing his pull-up out, using the toilet and getting dressed  before coming out to breakfast  - without being asked or reminded. He is learning to make his bed and take his dirty clothes down to the laundry and learning to put his seat-belt on himself. He's NOT ever planning on telling anyone when he needs to use the toilet. I have to put him there over and over all day to make sure he stays clean. He rarely wets anymore, but he's pretty laissez-faire about the other part of it. If I praise him for doing a good job dressing, or tidying up he tries all the harder to please me. That is so different from the twins - they don't seem to notice or thrive on praise, but I'm trying to dish out more of it. I'm trying to ignore the button pushing - unless it interferes with someone else's peace. I'm using time out  a lot. James hasn't needed it. Oscar isn't feeling well, or something. He's crabby today.

I bought lavender oil capsules after learning how wonderful they are for anxiety. I bought them for James... then I found out it's not to be used with boys in his age range... well, I quite accidentally found out that lavender capsules works well for migraines.  At least, it has helped the one migraine I have had since I bought them - as effectively as Advil would have. YES! Missy is trying them out for a calmer spirit. We'll let you know how that works out :-)