Preschool

Tara, your text requesting some pics of our family motivated me to open up our blog page for the second time in like 7 months. Wow!
We'll do a preschool theme...and a couple other posts.
We've started a preschool where I stay and help run learning stations and siblings come too. It's so fun! Nathan loves it as much as Caitlyn and it's great for him to already be getting the preschool structure and doing the crafts and projects.
There's a theme for every day and last week one of the days was "backwards, inside out, mixed up day". So we wore our clothes backwards and inside out, etc. The art project for the art station was "upside down coloring" so the mom at the art station taped the coloring pages to the underside of the table and the kids colored laying on a mat on the floor.

p.s. Tanya, I don't know if those cowboy boots were originally Joey's or Kylan's, but Nathan insists on wearing them everywhere we go. :-)

Today during goodbye circle time the kids did tapping sticks to a song, which my kids love. I decided to whip out my camera and take a video because Nathan was following the instructions really well and I thought it was especially cute that he really closed his eyes the whole time when Teacher Marina said to for that part.

What happens when...

you allow your child to play in the water at Seaworld on a chilly San Diego evening in May even though you didn't bring extra clothes into the park?

He ends up looking like Yoda in your jacket while you walk out to the car to look for something else he can wear.

Thumb Sucker

Benjamin is a thumb sucker! They say every family gets at least one, and it looks like he's our one! I know I should try and prevent it, but it's so darn cute!

Natey's B-day

My little baby Nathan (who suddenly seemed huge once we brought Benjamin home) turned two!
He got a little learning center thingie (which our friends who were moving actually gave us and we hid it til his birthday -- when they're 2 you can still take advantage of the fact that pretty much anything is cool and exciting and they don't know or care that it's a hand-me-down, right?).

For his cake he picked out chocolate cupcakes...and wanted to eat them for breakfast. And why not? 

Happy Birthday, my sweet baby Natey!

The Birth of Baby Number Three

Yes, it's been 7 weeks, but better late than never right?
Benjamin Daniel Disparte.
The receptionist at his pediatrician's office said, "That's a good strong name."
6 lbs, 10 oz, 19 1/2 inches.
Perfect.
Benjamin's birth was pretty much the birth of my dreams. After having safe, smooth and positive births at a hospital and a birth center inside a hospital (ok, actually in the car and the ER on the second one), I felt good about giving birth at a free-standing Birth Center this time, Best Start Birth Center here in San Diego.
The few things about the first two births that I hoped to have happen differently this time around went perfectly. It was such a peaceful, calm atmosphere to labor and birth in. I LOVED giving birth at a Birth Center.
We went home four hours after he was born and got a great night's sleep with no nurses or doctors coming in and out.
Life with three kids has been, to my overwhelming relief, genuinely happy and pretty smooth! (As a side note, I found that leaving the computer off almost all the time is a major contributing factor to family and home life being smooth and happy; hence the 7-week-late post about Benjamin's arrival.)
Benjamin is a super smiley, happy baby and I am a waaaay more laid-back, calm, and relaxed mom than I was with one and even two, without sacrificing the level of orderliness that I like to have at home.
Caitlyn and Nathan looooooove the baby.
Life is good.

Benjamin, we are so incredibly happy you are here!

First Haircuts

Before:

 Notice the lovely little rat tail shining in the sun. :)

After:

I had heard so many horror stories about little kid haircuts that I put off cutting his hair for a loooong time. We did several bang trims and I did cut off his little rat tail while he was in the bath one night, but we didn't bust out the clippers until a couple weeks ago.
And guess what! It was a smooth and pleasant experience for all involved! Quinn just took him in the bathroom and said, "Sit down on the bench Natey." He sat down on the bench and held still the whole time while Quinn buzzed his little locks off with the clippers. Nice and easy. Woohoo!

Next up -- Before:

 Oh my!

After:

Funny that Cait's first haircut wasn't until she was three, but she just never had enough hair to cut until then! She had a serious baby mullet, poor thing. I actually cut her hair after giving her a bath on the night that Nathan broken his arm (the first arm). Nathan had finally cried himself to sleep in Quinn's arms and I was so stressed and upset about it that I think I just needed something to occupy myself so I pulled out the scissors and gave Caitlyn a haircut. She's due for another one sometime soon. Me too for that matter....

All Better

This is kind of old news now, but I wanted to put these pictures in just so I have them somewhere more permanent than my camera.

The week before Halloween I was standing at the stove cooking dinner when I heard a thud behind me. I turned out to discover that Nathan had climbed up on a step stool and then proceeded to fall off. Apparently he put his hands out to catch himself because he started to scream and hold onto his right wrist, which immediately swelled up and turned red -- clearly not the usual fall-down-and-get-right-back-up-and-go-play. Luckily, a friend in our ward happens to be a physicians assistant at the only hand clinic in the area and he told us to bring Nathan right over and he would have a look. He confirmed that Nathan's wrist was broken and happened to have the materials on hand to make a splint just Nathan's size to stabilize it until we could take him to our doctor the next morning.
The x-rays showed that both bones in his forearm were broken at the wrist -- poor little guy! So Dr. Holmes (Oh, how we love Dr. Holmes!) put a cast on and all was well.
But wait! The store doesn't end there! Almost exactly two weeks later while I was gone getting my hair cut, Quinn was cooking dinner and the kids were sitting on chairs in the dining room watching Doc McStuffins on Quinn's laptop. Quinn looked over just in time to see Nathan stand up on his chair, inexplicably put one leg over the arm, and topple off the side. Again: scream, grab other wrist. This time Quinn went ahead and just took him to urgent care, and sure enough his left wrist was broken and they put it in a splint.
The next morning, back at Dr. Holmes' office as he was putting a cast on Nathan's other arm, he said, "It's a good thing I know and love you guys and I don't have to call CPS. You're probably lucky that the urgent care staff didn't call CPS. I had a patient who was holding her baby and accidentally fell down the stairs with him and broke his femur. When they took him to the ER the Dr. called CPS because he thought she was lying about the fall and that it was really a case of child abuse, so they took the baby away from her and it took her almost a year to get him back." Um....freak me out!!!
So here is Nathan with both his little arms in casts.

Luckily, kids heal super fast and he was able to get both casts off after just a few weeks, which made bath time, meal time, and play time a LOT easier. On the other hand, the second he got those babies off he was looking for new things to climb up on, as you can see from the picture.

So I'm learning -- boys (at least my Nathan) are a little more reckless than girls (at least my Caitlyn, who was always pretty careful even though she loved to play and run and jump and climb as much as the next kid). And now I'm paranoid because I'm so worried that he's going to embark on some new adventure that will result in another broken bone, and this time someone's going to call CPS for sure and he'll be taken away from me for a year!!!

Ah, parenthood.