Saturday, September 20, 2014

Julia on Laughing Gas


Julia had her first cavity at her last doctors appointment. They said she has been brushing well, but she needs to do better on flossing. It's true, we all need to do better on flossing.

So this week we went back to get the cavity filled. They gave her some laughing gas so she wouldn't be as nervous. Turns out Julia on laughing gas is the same as Julia normally, but just with more arm and leg waving. She was chatting it up with everyone, but that is how she is normally. Her speech was a little slower than usual, but the main difference with the laughing gas was she just liked to move her arms and legs all over the place and was just very loose.

It worked though, she hardly even noticed they were working on her mouth between watching the kids movie on the ceiling and breathing the laughing gas.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

House Pictures

A few pictures of moving into the new house.

Camden being a Dodger super fan
Living in a house of boxes
As we were unpacking the toys, they were the first to get unpacked.
Getting our first peek at our stuff on the moving van after it got delivered.
Camden tries out crawling on the new floors.
Robert and his dad installing for in our bedroom.
Julia deems the new floors danceable.
Before photo of the living room.
Rainbow picture from our new house.

ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

Our family was nominated to participate in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge by my cousin Katrina's family. We had fun doing it as a family to raise awareness to a disease that, admittedly, is rare but for that very reason should have awareness raised about it. I wanted to share our challenge video here as well so we can remember our experience. Almost everyone knows the challenge by now, but indulge me a little here since in ten years when we come back and read this we may have all forgotten. The challenge is to dump a bucket of ice water on your head, then nominate others to do the same. Complete the challenge within 24 hours of when you were nominated or donate $100 to the ALS Association (or other ALS asociataed organization) We decided to do the challenge and donate $10 to ALS. A little about ALS from from www.alsa.org

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as "Lou Gehrig's Disease," is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. Motor neurons reach from the brain to the spinal cord and from the spinal cord to the muscles throughout the body. The progressive degeneration of the motor neurons in ALS eventually leads to their death. When the motor neurons die, the ability of the brain to initiate and control muscle movement is lost. With voluntary muscle action progressively affected, patients in the later stages of the disease may become totally paralyzed.
A-myo-trophic comes from the Greek language. "A" means no or negative. "Myo" refers to muscle, and "Trophic" means nourishment–"No muscle nourishment." When a muscle has no nourishment, it "atrophies" or wastes away. "Lateral" identifies the areas in a person's spinal cord where portions of the nerve cells that signal and control the muscles are located. As this area degenerates it leads to scarring or hardening ("sclerosis") in the region. 
As motor neurons degenerate, they can no longer send impulses to the muscle fibers that normally result in muscle movement. Early symptoms of ALS often include increasing muscle weakness, especially involving the arms and legs, speech, swallowing or breathing. When muscles no longer receive the messages from the motor neurons that they require to function, the muscles begin to atrophy (become smaller). Limbs begin to look "thinner" as muscle tissue atrophies. 
I feel like you should watch this four times to catch everyone's reaction when they get dunked.

1. Micah's expression when he goes from thinking this is really fun to realizing what it really feels like to get dumped with cold water. We actually filled his cup up with warm water, but either Micah or Camden dumped it out and, as you can see in the video, I filled it up last second with cold water. He was a champ though, just looked a little shocked.

2. Julia had seen a lot of other ice bucket challenges so she was excited to get in on the action as well. She insisted on doing it in her swim suit and doesn't even look cold at first. We realized the coldest part is sitting in your freezing wet clothes until you can change.

3. Robert filled up the buckets and filled mine up a little less than his, but not less enough! I picked up my bucket, but couldn't lift it over my head. So I stop mid way, then see everyone else has dunked themselves and I better just do what I can. Therefore I cheated a little because my hair never gets soaked because I couldn't lift my bucket high enough.

4. Robert doesn't even look fazed. It IS cold water, we did have ice in it, but most of it melted while we were setting up. Also, note that Camden really wanted to participate and was mad he was left out. Afterward he crawled over to where we did it and got wet anyway, and I didn't bring any extra clothes for him (we did this at our new house, but we weren't moved in yet so I had to plan ahead and bring extra clothes for everyone). He went home (to Saratoga Springs) wearing no pants and an extra shirt of Micah's.




Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Cam-Man's Walking

Also last week Camden started letting himself go more so we can now say he is walking. He turned 11 months on Saturday, which means he beat out his two older siblings who started walking at 11 1/2 months and 12 1/2 months.

Monday, September 08, 2014

We've Moved

Blogger mobile doesn't do pictures and I rarely get onto an actual computer anymore, except to blog. It would make things a whole lot easier for me if the mobile app could actually do something besides text. So anyway, we moved into our new home in Draper this weekend, but since I have no computer that is not in a box a picture-less post will have to do. Otherwise weeks will go by and I will never blog about.

We "moved in" on Friday, but we are still not done remodeling, so we are moved in as far as living in a house with no usable kitchen and half of our stuff in the garage is moved in. It was nice to see all of our stuff after 7 months after it had been in storage. I was afraid the worse would happen and we would have water damage, or half our stuff was broken, or have a big ant infestation or whatever else can go wrong when you move and leave stuff in storage. But so far everything looks good.

The kids think it's Christmas in September because they got all their toys back. We packed up soon after Christmas so a lot of the toys they got for Christmas they never got to play with very much. Julia was playing with a barbie yesterday that I didn't even remember her getting, but she said she got it for Christmas. Micah doesn't even really remember his old toys since 7 months is so long for a 30 month old. All his toys seem new to him. (Ex. "We have a Thomas train! " We've had it for years, Julia got it for Christmas before he was born.)

Right now we are pretty much living in the basement while the main floor gets finished with the remodel. Robert is busy with work right now (September tax season) so he doesn't have a lot of time to work on it. Hopefully we'll have a working kitchen soon, then move on to the bedrooms (master, Micah's and Camden's.) Julia's room is in the basement so she is the only lucky one who gets to sleep in her real bed. Living room is getting finished last since it is the lowest priority for functional living. So, come visit us!.... in a month.... or next year...