Life has been very busy now that we have 3 little monsters, but they are all doing pretty well.
Charles now in his 7th week of Kindergarten and doing great!!!! He has mastered all his letters and their sounds and is now working on Sight Words and beginning reading. He loves reading!!! Last night he read me a simple story all by himself no prompting or hints. It is so great to see him progressing so well. Now we just need to get him to work on his writing. We are seeing progress in his writing and he is doing pretty good considering he NEVER wrote any letters or numbers before he started school 7 weeks ago. He still gets choked up occasionally as we drop him off, but I think it's because he doesn't want to miss out on what the girls and I are doing at home (which is usually NOTHING!) That is the Garthe in him, they don't like to miss out on ANYTHING. When Daddy asks him why he cried he usually says, "I miss mommy!" Awh breaks my heart! The other day I got a call from the school telling me that Charles was in the Nurses office and they needed me to (before they told me what the problem was I was already panicking, I could feel my blood pressure instantly rising.) Then she said he just needed a change of clothes; he fell in the muddy part of the grass and his bottom half was wet. Phew, I was re-leaved it wasn't an injury, we all know I don't do so well with those.
Madison is now on her way to being potty trained!!! Hooray!!!! When John was home with me two weeks ago he decided it would be a good time to work with her since I was a little pre-occupied with Claudia. She did ok and actually started to go on the potty, which is something she wasn't able to do before. Then on Monday (when John had gone back to work) she came to me and said, I'm going potty. So she went into the bathroom shut the door proceeded to take off all her clothes and climbed up on the potty. I sat outside not expecting ANYTHING but was pleasantly surprised when I heard her peeing. Hooray!!! She told me she had to go and did. I figured I better tackle this potty training since she is telling me she is ready. She's been doing pretty good. She doesn't do so well when Charles gets home and hasn't yet mastered not peeing when she is fully dressed, so most of the day she is naked from the waist down. But we are making progress, she tells me when she has to go and has even gone number 2 a couple of times. Now we are working on her wearing panties and keeping them dry.
Other than potty training she is a really big helper and loves her baby sister. She wakes up in the morning asking where Claudia is and always wants to see her. She is learning to be gentle and loves giving her kisses.
Claudia is doing great! She gave us a bit of a scare the 1st week of life. She had jaundice when she was born which kept us in the hospital several hours longer than I wanted to be, but they finally let us go home as long as we brought her back the next morning for some more blood work to check her jaundice levels. The night we took her home she started spitting up yellow mucusy stuff. It was nasty and sometime a lot. When we took her in to have her jaundice checked the next day I told the doctor about it and he looked at me like he had never heard of that before, I was a little worried. He said to watch it and if it gets worse then to call him. I mentioned to him that when I had an Ultra Sound around 36 weeks they noticed that her stomach was higher in her abdomen then it should have been. A neonatologist looked at the Ultra Sound images and said it should be fine and nothing more was said. I asked him if this could have something to do with her spitting up. He said is was probably fluid from being in the womb that she just hadn't gotten out yet, especially since she came out so fast she wasn't squeezed much on the way out which helps babies to get all the fluid out of their system. (Sounds nasty, but I guess it's true.) He wanted to see us again the end of the week to check her jaundice but more importantly to see if the spitting up was gone or if we needed to do an ultra sound of her tummy. So we went home hoping that her body would flush all the nasty stuff out and she would be better. That night she spit up a ton of yellow nasty stuff and then was fine after that. Once she stopped spitting up the yellow stuff she stopped pooping. She went a whole 24 hours without pooping. I started to worry so I called the nurses help line and they told me that they don't get concerned until she's gone 72 hours with no poo. I never thought I would be wishing for poo, but since we already had some concerns about her tummy I was hoping this wasn't another symptom of some bigger problem. About 3 hours after I talked to the nurse Claudia had a massive blowout diaper. There was not a spot of diaper that was NOT covered in poo. I laughed and was so excited!!!
From then on she's been great!!! She is a good eater and sleeper but likes to be in my arms almost all the time. Luckily she will sleep in her bed at night, but we are working on getting her to take naps in her bed. I know that will come with time. For now I am accepting the fact that I can't get everything done that I want to and trying to just enjoy the time I have to just sit and be with her. Because I know time will fly and she will no longer want to just be held by mommy.
That's pretty much our update. Here a a few pictures of Claudia at about 2 1/2 weeks old.
