August update

We have been enduring the awful Texas summer heat the last few months! I still don't know why we live here when we both hate the heat so much!

We have been creative in finding activities that don't require too much outside time, which is hard since both our kids LOVE the outdoors. It is so hard when it is 80 degrees at 7am and 100 degrees by noon. All that to say we have stayed creatively busy!

 

One of the kids favorite indoor summer activites is to play in each others cribs. It is so funny. Some days they will play in Amber's crib and other days they play in Nathan's. This entertains them for over 45 minutes! They both laugh until Nathan gets a little too rough with sister, then we call it quits.

 

 We were invited to Nathan's friend, Davin, (Da-do is what Nathan calls him) birthday party. The kids had so much fun painting and playing with bubbles. I had not been brave enough as of yet to let Nathan paint, so I was curious to see how he would do with it and what he would do with paint. He really liked it! He was kind of a neat freak about it. He did not like getting it on his hands or body, unlike Davin, who was covered!! He loved picking out different colors and mixing them together. He stayed interested in it for about 20ish minutes. He also had fun "painting" on Davin!

 "I'm supposed to paint my friend's back right?"

 Sister's favorite part was the bubbles! The girl loves watching and pointing at bubbles! Another fun indoor activity.

 

Last weekend I took the kids down to Houston to visit my Grandparents. Dan had to work, so I drove with my mom. We had a nice visit, as usual! I Love going to Houston. There is just something calming and memory invoking about visiting and spending time with my grandparents! They are such amazing people and have played such an important role in my life, I try to visit as much as possible! The kids love them too! Nathan started saying "pop" for my grandpa this visit! Nathan loves older men.

We went swimming a few times at the neighbors pool, and surprisingly Nathan did not want to get into water. Amber loved it, she is a little swimmer girl!

 

 We went ot P.F.Changs after church and Amber tasted her first baby back rib!!

 

 
 Amber was sharing her carrot with Tracy. The kids love the dogs and have never been afraid of them, which I am so thankful. We also went to the park and fed some baby ducks and turtles. They were all so hungry. One duck was eating bread out of Amber's hand and off her leg. She was laughing, it was so cute. OF course I didn't get a picture.

 

 
One of Nathan's favorite things to do at gram and Pop's is to take a bath in their jet tub! He could spend all evening in there playing with the jets and bubbles! The kids are doing better about tolerating the car drive back nd forth from Houston. Amber still gets a little fussy after a few hours, but overall the do pretty good!

 

 We went to Lowes the other day and they both were having so much fun together in the cart. Amber was just holding on to her brother's leg the whole time...SO CUTE!!

We had another speech evaluation for Nathan this past week. He is already receiving services from ECI which is the state funded program and it is well.....state funded. They do a good job but we wanted a second opinion on his "diagnosis" and we were concerned they wer not being aggressive enough in his therapy. We had him evaluated at the Callier Communication Center. The speech Therapist there told us he does not have Apraxia, which was our concern, and that is a huge blessing. She said he just has speech delay and would benefit from aggressive speech therapy. By aggressive, she said 2 times as week would be sufficient. Unfortunately insurance will not cover the therapy so it will be an out of pocket expense..Yikes! Yes, it will be an expense we did not anticipate but we feel it is worth it. Nathan is making so much progress each day, we want to help in any way we can.

I would say he has really started to say more words in the past 2 weeks. He parrots the last word of a sentence quite regularly and attempts a ton of words now. He is still leaving the ending off most words but we know what he is trying to say.

I can't believe he is 2 1/2 already. He continues to be a sweet boy. He is a pretty compliant child and we don't have too many discipline issues with him. He still gets time-out for taking toys from sister or telling us no (with attitude). HE is still more of a passive child. HE has started "jumping" recently and still LOVES music. He calms very easily with certain music, which is a blessing when I get stressed from his whining. I just put on that music and he will just sit and listen to it or pick a book and flip through it while listening to his music.

HE is starting to "play" with Amber and they are taking more interest in each other, which has been great fun to watch. He trys to get her to chase him! They laugh at each other more now too!

I will post an 11 month post about Amber soon. I am a little behind. It is hard to find the time to blog between taking care of kids, the house, working, working out and being a wife. I never realized how much juggling I would have to do!