Busy! Busy! Busy!

We are less than 2 weeks away from Christmas and we are getting very busy around here. Abby has one more week of school before they break for the holidays and David has appointments with doctors plus Pam is doing several things for Abby's school this week. Heap on that some final shopping for Christmas (mostly by me) and getting the gifts wrapped and squeezing in time to get the Christmas cards out; there's an awful lot going on.

Abby has been learning about life in the Colonial days and we are finding that she is having an easy time with mathematics as well. We are pleased at how well she is doing at school. She also got to go to a birthday party this past weekend, so there's a lot of good going on in Abby's life right now.

We had a funny thing happen the other night. Most evenings, Abby will go to bed and then read for a while before she goes to sleep. She calls out to Pam when she begins and again when she stops reading so Pam can account for how long she spends reading. (Something we do for her school. She is rewarded for time spent reading outside of school.) Well, the other night, Abby started reading and fell silent. After a while, Pam and I started looking at each other wondering if Abby had fallen asleep reading. Pam checked on her and discovered that Abby had fallen asleep in bed with a book in her hands. I slipped in and took this picture of her:



David is giving us a lot of joy as well. He is really coming alive with his verbal skills now. He talks a lot when he is around us. He still clams up around other people and strangers, but that's just David. He has a real shy side in public. David is expanding his vocabulary with lots of new words every day. He counts, he fills in words on some simple songs and he loves to demonstrate what he knows and really enjoys getting praised for saying the right thing. He still has an obsession with the word, "vacuum." He uses that word any time he doesn't know what to call something and he occasionally says the word without any obvious reason. We know he is afraid of vacuums and he knows where we keep ours and makes sure we know that he knows. We hope he will grow tired of saying "vacuum" soon.

David had a blood test last week in preparation for a visit with his kidney doctor next week. We still don't have a clear idea of what we may be in for with his kidneys in the future, but he has not been getting worse. We hope next week's visit will continue to show that he is running steady and not slipping backwards on us as he grows. We still give him medication for his blood pressure and he may be on that for the rest of his life. If that is the worst we have to worry about for his future, we will be very grateful. David also has an appointment with his dentist later this week. We're hoping to get some help with some discoloration problems in his teeth due to some of the strong medicines he was on during and following his hospitalization in 2007.

I just finished a week of being on call with my employer. Thankfully, it was an easy week -- which is more than I can say about some of the Christmas decorating I have been trying to do. We put some new Christmas displays out in our front yard and our windy weather has destroyed nearly everything. I blame part of it on the wind, but most of it is just cheaply made stuff. The metal welds have been breaking open and the displays come crashing down. I have been busy trying to rig up fixes for everything and I finally managed to get everything back up by this afternoon, but they are not going to survive much more of this wind, so I hope the weather calms down soon. At least the indoor decorating we have done is holding up very nicely.

Next year, I'm going to have to completely rethink how we decorate the outdoors. I'm not satisfied with how things went this year and vow to do better in 2009.


Merry Christmas!