Lots of Firsts!

Ok, so it has been a LONG time since I have regularly blogged. Life has been awfully busy here! Alex has had a lot of firsts over the past few weeks:

• First steps!  She has been cruising around the furniture for quite a while now, and then started trying to switch from the couch to the love seat.  She would take a stumbling step or two, but a few nights ago, she bravely struck out on her own and took 4 steps from Mommy to Daddy!  She loves standing in the middle of the room without holding on to anything (she is very proud of herself!), but still prefers to crawl to actually get anywhere.  We're pretty sure she'll be running within a few weeks!
• First words!  She has been saying Mama and Dada for months, and occasionally she'll throw out another word in context, but we haven't been sure if it was intentional or not.  But now she has started to say "cat" very clearly whenever she sees Phoebe, usually accompanied by a finger point at her.  Last night, she said, "YUM" at dinner.  She very definitely understands a lot more language than she can speak.  She knows where her nose is, she knows NO, baba (bottle), bath, Christian, Sammie, Mommy, Daddy, up, down, go get 'em and all done (which she usually communicates by throwing her remaining food on the floor), among others.
• First stomach flu :-(  Sammie brought it home from school last week, and Alex got hit pretty hard over the weekend.  Poor thing didn't know what was happening, but she was a trooper.
• First surgery -- her ear tube insertion was successful and she recovered quickly without complication.  We had her post-op appointment this week, and the doctor said she looks great.  She has to wear ear plugs while swimming until the tubes fall out (about 2 years), but otherwise life goes on as usual.

In other news, Christian goes in for his neuropsych testing next week to see if he has a learning disability.  However, he is improving by leaps and bounds in school, and his teacher is impressed.  He started Reading Recovery last week, which is an intense 16-week program of 30-minutes a day one-on-one with a reading teacher.  Only 4 students qualify for this program per semester, so we are really lucky that he got in.  His teacher expects that this will make an enormous difference in his reading ability.  He is an eager learner, but has a definite lack of confidence in reading because he has been convinced that he can't learn to read.

Samantha is eagerly awaiting kindergarten (she starts in the fall), and asks me nearly daily if she can start TODAY.  Both of the kids will go to a new elementary school next year, and it will be nice that they can catch the bus right outside of our new home.  Only 1 daycare dropoff location!  (I do 3 right now.)  The new school is the same school that Christian's BFF goes to.  These boys have been in daycare together since they were 3 months old, and they are both so excited to be in school together next year!
We have not yet broken ground on the new house, but we are making progress.  We finalized all of our design choices last week and signed on the dotted line.  There was a random hold-up earlier this week because they needed to know where we wanted a particular electrical outlet to be placed.  Really?!  You're going to push out our excavation because of an electrical outlet?  Neither Jeff nor I remembered purchasing an extra outlet (they are $150 each!), but they insisted that we had it in the budget and they couldn't move forward until we told them where it should be placed.  So we put it in the mudroom, and they're going to send us an email with the excavation date.

Our current home is not on the market yet, but it will be soon.  Our realtor comes out tomorrow to give us recommendations on any last minute modifications that we should make, and also to recommend a list price.  The City needs to come do a Point of Sale Inspection before we are allowed to list it, also.  I'm hoping it will be on the MLS within a week.

So, that's the overview of our lives right now.  I'll try to be better about posting here so that you don't have to read a novel next time!

-Jen