What We've Been up To

As you can imagine, life in our household these days has been different and it has taken quite a bit of adjustment to get used to.  Adding a newborn to an already hectic life has required us to figure out new (and often creative) ways to get done what we need to keep things as normal as possible.  We've also been trying to figure out some of the challenges Colin has faced since starting Kindergarten this year.  This alone has me spending a LOT of time on the computer researching ideas and creating tools to use to help with these challenges.  I've been neglecting some other areas so that I can spend more time finding, reading, and watching resources that will help with this.  In all honesty, I have had a bit of a hard time over the past few weeks with all of it BUT I am really grateful for a lot of the support that I have received.  I KNOW that this is just another phase of life to transition through but as you all know, sometimes that's easier "said than done". 

 

October has been pretty nice overall so we have been trying to take advantage of getting outside knowing that in just a short bit of time, this will permanently change.  The kids have really enjoyed some trips to one of the newer playgrounds in town.  Unfortunately, we haven't made it to any of Chris' games in awhile because either the weather has been bad or the games have been at night when it has been chillier. 

 

Being an extremely schedule oriented person, I am anxiously waiting for Cody's to be worked out. While is he is ONLY coming up on 2 months (and I know that is relatively early still), I am greatly looking forward to the day that he sleeps through the night.  We have been extremely lucky so far because he really only gets up once and then goes right back to sleep afterwards so we are headed in the right direction.  Overall, he is a really good baby but he does prefer to be moving most of the time. 

 

We had a lot of fun getting ready for Halloween and then once Halloween got here.  We went pumpkin picking with our good friends and then painted pumpkins. 

 

 

Both Colin and Kailey had parades at school this year and for the first time (since I am home on maternity leave), I was able to go and watch Colin.  Colin waved the first time around but then when he saw me the second time, he was a little mopey/near tears because he wanted to come over by me. 

 

(Kailey was crying in this picture because our neighbor was dressed as Elsa and then went back into her house.  Kailey "wanted Elsa back!".)

We did do some trick or treating this year which ended up being fun now that Colin is in our neighborhood school because we ran into and met a lot of the people that we never knew were actually in our neighborhood.  The downside is that Colin has a little bit of a hard time with houses that are overly decorated or have dogs and he spent a good amount of time needed to be consoled or talked into going up to a house.  Kailey was beyond excited and couldn't wait to run up to the next house. 

Other than that, we have just been taking each day as it comes.  Colin decided to draw on his face with red marker the other day (thank goodness it was washable marker). 

We've also been working really hard at incorporating academics into our days in as much of a fun way as possible. 

 

 

 

 

In order to help with Colin's difficulty with transitions lately, I decided to try a visual schedule at home.  I've been wanting to do this for a long time but finally got it started.  I hope to build a little library of cards inside the binder we are using so that we can walk Colin through parts of his day with minimal difficulties.  I am hoping we can then maybe help to implement this at school so that it helps with his transitions there as well.  Below is an example of how it's used (we only have two cards on there for this video). 



 

 

 

 

And finally, a video just for fun :)