Teeth - coming and going

I never thought teeth would be such an important part of my life, but as of late they have been. Carter has recently grown his first two teeth, and I believe he is working on more due to his fussy behavior and anxious chewing. I'm glad he has some teeth now because I think we can start giving him more real table food instead of the pureed food you buy at the store. I did, however, attempt to give him something other than the babyfood, and found he is not quite ready for it. He apparently has Taylor's gag reflex, so I'm going to move slowly into the larger food area in order to avoid having to re-feed him too much. (Taylor threw up everything with any bumps in it.) Anyway, he looks really cute with his two bottom teeth.

On the other end of the kid group, teeth are falling out right and left. Ashley has lost her second top middle tooth, leaving the most adorable gap in her smile. She also lost another tooth on the bottom. Then, the other day Taylor came up and said he lost a tooth. I didn't even know it was loose, and apparently he didn't either??? Or so he says. Yesterday he came home with another tooth out. Crazy kid. Anyway, the tooth fairy has become a regular visitor at our house. Poor Emily and Parker keep pulling on their teeth hoping to lose one so they can get money too.
Unfortunately for them it may be a few years yet. (At least we hope so)

Medicine - bad or good

This week has been a bit rough as far as health goes. It started with Ashley getting sick Sunday morning with fever/stomach ache/head ache (sure sign of strep for Ashley). Of course Monday was a holiday so no doctors were available, and even though Ashley acted like she had strep and had been exposed to it, the doctor wouldn't just give me medicine. Luckily our friend is a pediatrician, and he was willing to do a strep test and give her medicine. She was able to go to school on Tuesday - yeah! Well, Monday night Emily started running a fever also, so of course Tuesday brought with it a trip to the doctor. They did a strep culture, and she too had strep. I knew it was only a matter of time before Parker got sick, but I never realized how short of time it would be. As we were walking out of the doctor's office Parker started crying about hurting. By the time we got home he was running a temp of 101. Luckily, the doctor didn't make me bring him in for a culture too. They said once two kids in a family have strep, they will treat the others if they get sick. Amoxicillin is a wonderful thing, at least for Ashley and Emily. They got better right a way and were able to go to school. (much to Emily's chagrin) Parker, however, got worse - crying constantly that his mouth hurt. He also started getting red dots and blisters in his mouth. At first I thought, "we can't have hand-foot-mouth disease too", but then I realized that it might be the medicine. As I re-read the bottle of the medicine given to Parker, I realized that the doctor called in the amoxicillin even though he is allergic to it. Poor kid. We have stopped the Amox, and have given him an antihistimine. He'll hopefully get a new antibiotic tomorrow. I had wondered if he really was allergic to amoxicillin, but apparently he is. Good to know.

First day of real preschool.

Emily started preschool for real today. We did a parent run preschool with some friends last year which worked out well, but most of the kids went to kindergarten so we had to try something different. Emily is going to the same preschool as Taylor and Ashley did, so I thought she'd feel right at home since she's been there a lot. I was just a bit wrong. We went to the open house yesterday for her to get used to the classroom and to see where she'd put her backpack. She was a little shy, but seemed to have fun playing with the toys. Well, as we got ready to go this morning Emily decided she didn't want to go. She refused to put on her socks and shoes, she then refused to get in the car, and finally she refused to get out of the car. After peeling her out of the van and walking into the school with her screaming at the top of her lungs (Parker was crying too because I couldn't hold his hand while carrying Carter and pulling Emily along - great fun!) she still wouldn't go into the classroom to participate. I offered to stay a few minutes, only to discover that staying only made it worse. Finally, the teacher just took her from me while she was screaming so I could leave. Talk about feeling bad about leaving your kid at preschool. If I hadn't been through similar things with Taylor I would have been in tears. I did call 15 minutes later to see if she'd calmed down and she had. When I picked her up she was all smiles and had enjoyed the day. Hopefully the next time will be a little easier. (No picture available due to dead battery. I don't think it would have been pretty anyway.)

Feast or Famine

Well, I just finished changing my fifth poopy diaper for the morning! Phew. Sorry for the potty language, but it's a big part of my life lately. Anyway, hopefully Carter's little system will regulate itself soon. It's either nothing for the day, or it's a diaper change every hour. We are also hoping to potty train Parker soon, I just have to get the courage to attempt it. Anyway, that is not exactly what I got on here to write. I was actually going to put a picture of the peaches Jeff and I canned at about 11 pm Friday night, but low and behold the battery of our camera is dead and refuses to be recharged. We are pretty proud of the peaches though. The bottles are so pretty that we hate to open any of them to eat. I guess we'll just let them sit on the shelf for awhile and look pretty. I've been trying to organize our food storage lately so we can kind of see what we have and what we need. It's actually been kind of fun. I guess I need to put camera batteries on the list of needs though. Anyway, that's about it for my life right now. Oh, I did just finish the last book of the Twilight series. Excellent. It's probably good I'm done with them though, because I didn't get anything done this past week.

One last thing. Check out this blog http://seriouslysoblessed.blogspot.com . It's hilarious.