Within Five Minutes

Bella used the Bjorn to hold her baby...

 Sophia got Gabrielle to laugh while looking at her American girl doll.

Tobin showed his muscles

And Sophia had a turn with the Bjorn carrier

I have not been keeping up with blogging so much. I finally grabbed the camera one day and snapped these shots because everyone was into something. Life is keeping up with me and it is fun, though still filled with sleepless nights. Gabrielle has our cold finally and TWO teeth coming in!

Tobin just had his third birthday (coming up) and Water Splashing Festival is upon us!

Making Butter

 shaking the jar

look it is getting thicker!

We are loving 'The Phonics Road'. Sophia is on Level 2, Bella on Level 1, I may review it in another post. With Level 2, there is a Literary study that uses 'Little House in the Big Woods' for the year to read and study the English language. Sophia had read most of it on her own already but we re-started it and are doing a lot of writing/dictation and Grammar learning with it. She is flying through it, but we do stop to do some fun activities recommended. This week we 'churned' our own butter with whipping cream, 3 marbles, a plastic jar, and lots of shaking. After it was done David salted it (it was our Saturday project so Daddy got involved), and then we put it in some molds in the fridge. It taste-tested delicious!

Ballerinas and More Sickness

We have finally looked at a calendar. Our family has been sick in some way since Jan. 1. At first it was the viral hacking cough, then a few stomach viruses, now even worse colds with ear infections. And, the man who came to help us navigate our new oven brought his daughter over this morning while he worked (this is common).  She was playing with Tobin while I took the girls to ballet class, she ended up throwing up twice at our house (the day prior he had been at our friends house who had the stomach bug all week). So, I am predicting another round of a stomach virus this week.

BUT we are hanging in and still plugging along. Meanwhile we signed the girls up for a new ballet class. We hesitated a little because here most parents/teachers don't really put their kids in classes 'for fun'. And even though it is hard work, they are having fun and doing well. It didn't hurt that during one of the sicknesses prior to the class even starting we watched the entire video of the Russian Ballet's rendition of  'The Nutcracker'.

 Getting ready for class, their shoes are in their bags!

The teacher laid out the rules at the trial class, hair up, ballet shoes, no touching mirrors, etc. The following week it was basically a private class with a total of three students. This week there were more, it is a very young class.

 Here she is helping Sophia warm-up a bit.

This is great for their posture!

 There was this two-year-old (it really is for 4-12 y.o.) who really did not sit still and just wanted to play the whole time, though she was decked out in a great tutu and shoes, she was adorable!

Gabrielle at Six Months

March 17

This girl makes everyone smile. She laughs and giggles, coos, eats, sleeps, and starts all over.
The day before her six month birthday I changed her schedule up, making her drop her third nap, stretching time between feedings, and getting into a good groove. She adjusted like a champ!

Here is what she is doing these days:

• taking 2 naps
• sleeping through the night well
• nursing 5x/day
• can roll but doesn't do it a lot
• she is such a content and happy baby
• engaging everyone and knows people now

This is what she eats (all homemade except the cereal):

• bananas
• avocado
• prunes
• pears
• papaya
• rice cereal
• sweet potatoes

 She has been able to take a bottle  a little better. I will probably wait to wean her until we get to the U.S., at over 8 months old. We will see!

 Here is her schedule:
7:00/7:30, wake up/nurse
8:00: Breakfast (rice cereal with added home-made baby food)
9:00-11:00 morning nap (she doesn't always sleep this long but she doesn't wake up crying so she stays in bed until 11:00!
11:00: nurse
12:00 lunch
1:00-3:00 nap (sometimes it takes her time to go to sleep at this hour and she sometimes sleeps past 3, but once again, she stays in bed 2 hours)
3:00 nurse
5:00 dinner
7:00 nurse and bed (she is really sleepy so I start her bedtime routine around 6:30 p.m.
10:00 p.m. dream feeding. (I may drop this soon, but want to keep up my milk so I am not sure)

Sorry I have no stats, we will weigh and measure her soon! She is growing well though, I can tell.
Gabrielle is such a joy and blessing to our family.

Married 11 years

For our anniversary (March 15th), we did an 'all day date'. We hired TWO helpers to come all day. One would have done fine but we wanted everyone to be at ease. I also came back home every 3 hours to nurse (ugh, I know). The last feeding they tried a bottle but she did not take it well. Since then I have kept trying to get her used to a bottle because I may wean soon, but she still is not doing well with it!

Back to our date, we went out on the town to a 'town center', took books, a movie, ate lunch at KFC and dinner was sushi and noodles. Dessert was a local thing we love that is way too hard to explain, Paoluda. It has coconut milk, purple sweet rice, coconut, ice, other gelatin things in it and pieces of sweet bread that gets put in the liquid. Sounds gross, it is yum.

This was a great day to have uninterrupted conversation and just hang out!
We have had a fabulous 11 years. Marriage just keeps getting better.
And I know I  say it a lot, this man that I married is my hero. A giant in my eyes in his Spiritual walk, his knowledge of all things, his PATIENCE, his desire to do the RIGHT thing even when it is hard, his work ethic, his parenting. Our life has brought new challenges and joys over the years and he has led us through them well!

Bella's 'Text' and The Neighbor's Pig

These pics were in between sicknesses. Even Gabrielle was sick with a 102 fever, but she took it better than I did and did not fuss much, she is a happy baby! Bella loves talking and playing with her always.

 Bella is actually reading this book for real...

 Gabrielle wants to hear more...

She has rolled a few times but not much.

When Sophia was sick I texted a doctor friend that lives in town. I use an App called Dragon dictation to help me text, it is awesome (like Siri, but my phone is too old for that). Bella heard everything I said which was something like this: "Sophia is on day two of not eating or drinking anything...when she does she throws it up, at what point should we consider going to the hospital for IV fluids?"

Bella then took a piece of cardboard and started writing on it as if it were a text, this is what she wrote: 

"me I men Sophia is sik she is not eden for a fu das cooj u fix her ugnl Don" 

Translation: "me, I mean Sophia, is sick, she is not eaten for a few days could you fix her uncle Don?"

Bella actually has pretty good hand writing for a not yet five-year-old so it was clearly written, I loved it!

And our latest sick one.....

In this pic she was well, with dress-up dress and Indian bangles on her arms while she ate her breakfast. She is way past the bib stage but since she was in a nice dress and eating maple syrup she wore a bib! Bella has missed more days of school than she has attended so far this semester. Her teacher called and asked if all three teachers could come visit. It was almost 8 p.m. (bed time for kiddos) but I said sure. They were so sweet to come visit, I was very surprised by the whole thing. Bella was so excited too, she mainly wants to go back to school to 'eat their noodles', and though she acted shy she loves her teachers.

And since the last post ended with an animal reference, I cannot fail to mention that our neighbors two doors down killed and cooked a pig in their front yard yesterday. Yes they did. No, we do not live in a village or near a farm. We live in the city. We heard the squeals, wondered at the noise, to which our helper immediately said what it was (she does live in a village that slaughters pigs regularly). I told David that there should be some kind of rule about that....he laughed at me. Our grandpa right next door, who tends flowers and vegetables all day long is also raising chickens and ducklings in their front yard. The kids love to see the little ducks (they are kind of cute). We did not go sight see the killing of the neighbor's pig, I just couldn't take it after we had just cleaned up the dead rat. I have my limits.

Sickness and the Rat at the Door.

I know it is March 10th and maybe the groundhog saw his shadow, I have no idea, our winter weather left us, and sickness ensued. And kept on, and keeps on keeping on. The other day David said: "it feels like we are living Groundhog's day (the movie)".

I won't detail it, just to say that this has been our longest run in a long while and we have debated hospitalization of Sophia for IV fluids but she made a turn for the better and now Bella. She finally was able to keep some water and juice and a little bread in her today, but she is very weak, we are still on 'watch and see' with her.

All this came after a very subtle but pivotal point in our marriage. A simple talk. A courageous talk David had with me pointing out things that needed to change for our family to thrive, something we were clearly not doing two, three, even four months ago. Honestly most of it had to do with my sin tendencies, and had he brought this up three months ago I would have despaired. But God's graciousness had already been melting my heart and prodding me in so many ways that I was ready to hear with hope the reality of the impact of various tendencies of mine. Though I cried, all I could do was say, yes, yes, I see, you are right, oh my, and yes I want more for our marriage and more for our family life. We started putting practicalities to what the 'more' meant in terms of friendship and hope and trust and parenting skills. And because I was already  knowing and seeing the 'RE-LAX' and TRUST increase in my life, this was difficult but perfect.

And then everyone got sick and it hasn't let up. We look at each other after a sleepless night or wiping the throw up off the floor and David says: 'thorns and thistles, baby', and we laugh. Life is not meant to be smooth. I mention how we had been doing well and seeing fruit from our discussion and he says, yes it is all 'resistance' to what the Father wants to do. It is always hard to define the 'why' of hard times and sometimes not necessary, but my take was, that maybe He is seeing if we will WALK our TALK.   And by His Spirit we are. It is one GOOD mess we are living.

There is so much more to this discussion, obviously, but that it is how things are flowing these days in the Coker home.

And yes, a cat left a dead rat on our back door step, maggots, flies and all.