Ouch!

What happens when a baby falls out a window?



Answer...


Awful isn't it? Wouldn't you feel terrible if you were this baby's mother? We've been using windows to cool our house during this nice in-between time of heater and AC. The window has a window seat, and Ashley doesn't play there very often. So I didn't even think of it when she was playing there Thursday, while I was a few feet away in the kitchen. I could hear her talking and babbling, then all of a sudden it was distant crying and screaming. She had pushed through the screen while leaning on it. I made a mad dash outside to rescue her.

This was the next day.


So much for the cute pictures of the previous post, eh? We're very, very grateful that it wasn't worse than it is. Heavens knows it could have been! But she has rebounded well and acts her normal, happy self. She's just a fright to look at. And every time someone asks "what happened?" I have to feel guilty all over again telling them, "Yes, my child fell out the window."

Now I'm praying it will all heal nicely without scars we can post cute pictures again!

Ashley Cuteness

Don't you just want to eat her up? One of the blessings of being a "stay-at-home" mom is I get to kiss her cheeks all day long.

April Newsletter

Tennessee Tidbits

Bryan went on a trip to China at the end of the month. He spent a day giving an 8-hour lecture on statistics as part of a workshop sponsored by the Chinese CDC and another day listening to lectures. The other 3 days he was able to spend as a tourist. He visited the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Summer Palace, the Ming Tombs, and the Great Wall. He also ate lots of weird Chinese food. It was a great trip – China was pretty spectacular. But thankfully, he has no more out-of-country trips planned for the rest of the year.

Gifts for the kids from China:



We’ve been enjoying the mild Spring weather, until it started raining. Lately it’s felt like we’re back in Seattle. The kids have fun playing hide & seek and freeze tag outside with neighbors and riding bikes and tricyles on the driveway. We can now do short family bike rides with Sienna on her own bike and the other two in the bike trailer, although Ashley screams like she’s dying whenever she’s wearing the helmet. We had a friend from Seattle visit and together hiked the Harpeth River Narrows, a nearby State Recreation area. In April we also went to a Sounds game (local baseball team), visited the zoo, and did an Easter egg hunt in the front yard. Even when it’s raining the kids like to play in puddles and with the umbrella, which is now hanging on to only three spokes. Ashley thinks its great fun to splash in the water under the downspout then lick her fingers. Gross.













The kids are enjoying soccer, although two games and a practice have been canceled due to weather. Coach Bryan hasn’t minded too much. Both Colby and Sienna like to stay on the outskirts of the pack chasing the ball. They also like to practice in the front yard with Dad and the neighbors, using buckets to mark the goals. It’s cute to see them give each other hugs after a goal.





Kristen has been busy planting flowers, and enjoys working in our pretty perennial garden. She spent many hours giving our hedges a much needed haircut, and even got a big haircut herself.

Bryan found a friend who likes working on cars… yippee! A few weeks ago they tried to fix a squealing belt in our car. They didn’t finish the project and it only made it worse, giving an ear-splitting loud squeal enough to wake the neighborhood at 7 am. It turned heads in parking lots and Kristen was embarrassed to drive it. They finally got together again and got it fixed… hooray!

That’s about all! (Here's more pictures from April)
Love, Bryan, Kristen, Sienna, Colby & Ashley

Bryan's Trip to Beijing

I got to spend a week in China at the end of April, participating in a workshop sponsored by the Chinese CDC. Here are a few pictures from the trip.

Here I am in Tiananmen Square, looking towards the Forbidden City. There were some notorious riots here 20 years ago. There is a huge picture of Mao Zedong, the founder of the Chinese Communist Party back in the 40s hanging on the wall, and Mao's refrigerated body is on display in a large memorial building on the square. (I didn't get to go inside the building.) I went back to my hotel and tried googling Tiananmen Square, but I couldn't open any of the websites -- they've been censored by the government.




This is me and my helpful friend, Dr. Yie, inside the Forbidden City. China's emperors lived here from the 1400s to the early 1900s.





The Great Wall is about an hour or so north of Beijing. Here are a few pictures. I've never seen more tourists in my life -- most of them were Chinese.








The next two pictures are from the Summer Palace. This was the countryside retreat of the emperors. It's spectacular, with beautiful gardens, a large lake, and lots of fancy buildings. The first picture is of "The Long Corridor," which is a pretty walkway paralleling a lake for almost 1 kilometer. The second picture is looking up towards the Tower of the Buddhist Incense.








I ate without using a fork, spoon, or knife for over 5 days. Some of the food was very interesting, to say the least: chicken feet, chicken heads, coagulated blood soup, pig ears, lots of seaweed,... I didn't know what I was eating most of the time. I typically enjoyed the food, although I got a little tired of eating Chinese food for breakfast.



If you're interested, more pictures are here.

Colby Speak

Colby learned the Alphabet song forever ago. And sometime in the last year he learned to identify all the upper-case letters (with some mix-ups now and then). So yesterday we were doing some activities with card stock letters on the table, and one of them was to put them all in order. He did pretty well, singing the alphabet song repeatedly up to the letter he was on. Until he got to "L". He was actually holding the "L" in his hand, but kept looking around the table. Finally he looked at me with a perplexed face and asked "LMNO?" He couldn't find the letter that corresponded with the "LMNO" of the Alphabet song.

If you think about it, that is an awful lot of letters to cram into two beats.

Lately Colby has also been singing made-up songs with "the BYU" thrown in periodically. I don't know where he gets it from. Bryan and I are both BYU alumni, and have a few t-shirts. But we're not fanatics (like a certain sister and brother-in-law). And we never call it "THE BYU". And we never watch BYU sports. We did, however, sing what we remembered of the BYU fight song a couple weeks ago, which ends with a rousing "Gooooooo Cougars!"

Yesterday in the car Colby was singing one of his made-up "the BYU" songs. I hadn't heard him tack on the ending before, but this time he did: "Goooooooo Kroger!"

For those of you not from this area, Kroger is a national grocery store.

And they give free kids cookies, so "Gooooooooo Kroger!" is actually a pretty fitting exclamation for Colby.

Birthday Photo Shoot

The challenge: Get the 5 year old and 3 year old to give their genuine, adorable smiles, instead of cheesy fake ones, and get the 1 year old to sit still for 3 seconds. It's hard enough with individual poses. Getting all three to cooperate at the same time was impossible.

Success? Limited. These are the best ones (small grainy images from the Sears website). If you want to see the the rest of them go here.

While we were trying to pick out the pictures that we wanted, we took turns viewing them and watching after Ashley. At one point we both got involved, and Ashley disappeared. She was nowhere in the studio. This was at Sears, and after fanning out to search for her (including the portrait people), we finally found her playing in the shoe section. She can escape in an instant! A few moments more and she could have made it to the general mall area.

Birthday fun

Spring is the time for birthdays around here. This year it seemed to last forever.

First came Ashley's, Feb 26 (one year old).



Next we had a joint birthday party for all three kids while Grandma and Grandpa were here. (I'm helping Ashley with her candle corner.)



Sienna had some friends over for a zoo-themed birthday party (Mar 22, 5 years old).



And finally Colby had his 3rd birthday on Mar 29. (I groaned when he picked red for the color of his race car cake. It's impossible to get red from white frosting!)



We have a few birthday traditions I thought I'd share.

-Handprint birthday tablecloth: each kid has a different color of fabric paint. We have a white tablecloth that we put their handprint on every birthday, with their age written on top. We keep it on the table during birthday season (with a sheet of plastic over it so it stays white)

-Fun cakes: I have fun trying to make different shaped cakes. We take a picture every year and slip it under the plastic on the birthday tablecloth.

-Measuring: There is a wall in our laundry room where we measure the kids on their birthday and half-birthday

-"Their song": Sienna and Colby each have "their song" that we make sure to sing or dance to on their birthday. Sienna's is "Brown Eyed Girl" and Colby's is "In the Jungle". We haven't picked one for Ashley yet.

-Spanking machine: A carryover tradition from when I grew up. The kids crawl through a tunnel of legs as people give them their spankings.

-I recently thought of another one that I haven't implemented yet. Asking a short survey every birthday, to see how it changes as they age. Things like "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and "What is your favorite toy or favorite thing to play?" and adding maybe a sentence or two about significant national or world events that happened that year.

What birthday traditions do you have?

Sienna likes to make to-do lists for the "play day" (Saturday). Usually it has a work side (dictated by Daddy) and a play side. Bryan took a work trip to Portugal and after long airport delays he returned early on a Monday morning, so took the day off from work. This was the day we were going to celebrate Colby's birthday. Since Daddy was home from work it was automatically a "play day". But this time Sienna's list had a birthday side and a play side.

Birthday side: Sing happy birthday, Have the birthday, Blow the cake, Eat the cake, Put the handprint, Measure Colby
Play side: Color, Slumber party, Paint, Play princess, Have fun making a tent (out of blankets and chairs), Have graham crackers and milk (a favorite snack shared with Daddy), Party! Party! Party!



For more birthday fun and pictures from March:

Mar 2009