Let's start. Christmas was wonderful. We all gathered at my parents house and my sister-in-law Melinda made it out of snow-bound London in time to join us. Caden received more toys than any child has any right to expect and was thrilled to open all of them. This time he really seemed to get into it. He did have to be reminded to continue to open presents rather than play with each present immediately.
In January, Chris started a new position within HEB that gives him a Monday-Friday job with normal hours. It has been wonderful having weekends and evenings together as a family. The first two weekends he had off we did absolutely nothing. Now, we have every weekend planned between now and the middle of May. Very, very different for us. I started my crazy space unit with my students and we have been studying space in every area of academia. We created a Martian community in order to insure our understanding of communities and then they built them. We did that last Friday. It was the most exciting day. My capacity was reached by about 2:30pm but it resulted in excellent projects only third-graders could produce. Sorry..jumping a little ahead of myself. The end of January saw Chris and I changing the guest room into Caden's big boy room. This is still a work in progress as some decorations have not yet been set up. We painted the room in two different shades of blue and but wood chair rail up the entire way around. We installed wood crown moulding and baseboards, all stained by me and installed by Chris. He has his new bed with its space themed bedding and his space night light, moon, turtle that shines stars on the ceiling, and glow in the dark stars on the ceiling. We have a poster of the planets that we need to hang up, a lamp of the moon and stars to hang over his, and the solar system on his ceiling. His room is the most expensive room in the house. It is beautiful. We got rid of the giant guest bed and put a very nice futon in Caden's old room and moved the book shelves in there. The result is that Caden can go into his room and play without any worry of hurting anything that is not his. He loves sleeping in his bed and we have not had any problems with it. He runs in there and asks to go bed. He has had some occasional bouts of sleep walking we think and does get up occasionally in the middle of the night to ask for more milk. It is so nice that bed time is not a struggle.
February 11th was Caden's 2nd birthday. I took the day off to take him for his two-year check up. He was in the 25% in height and 50% in weight. His doctor said that he is due a growth spell because he always flip flops in percentages. She was very impressed with his language abilities and said that he is very advanced in them for his age especially considering his earlier delay. He is still a very good eater. He eats everything but he doesn't eat with regularity. He will eat some days and very little other days. She said it was very normal for a child his age. She also agreed with his ENT though that we should probably have his tonsils removed. We took Caden to Chuck E. Cheese for his birthday. He had a blast. He just rode the rides more than anything else but he really seemed to enjoy it. We had intended to have a family party but it continually fell through for every weekend. We have seen family periodically so that Caden can have little celebrations throughout. So the next visit to the ENT we discussed that and sinus surgery. So it was decided that Caden would have both and a CT scan of his sinuses was scheduled to check what it looked like inside. The results of that were that his sinus are very small and very packed full of yucky stuff. Major surgery is out because his sinuses are so small that no one can get in there and even minor surgery might prove difficult. He is still going to try and insert a small balloon in each sinus and see if he can stretch them out. The end of February saw me at a training about how to teach research methods and a horrible stomach virus.
March has been an interesting month so far. Caden has continued to speak more clearly and in complete sentences. He has a very good sense of humor but it reminds me of his Uncle Richard. He makes odd little jokes. I love it when he tells me Silly Mommy. He also is into telling on people. It is always, "Daddy did it, Mommy did it, Starbuck did it, and today the "Chair did it." Can't say that I don't blame him for blaming the chair. Inanimate objects have always jumped out and hurt me. He has also blamed his dad for losing the moon. That was a funny night. Last week was a crazy week. Third graders the week before spring break are a crazy bunch. I was thankful that I had planned the building of their Martian communities for that Friday. They are huge. I had three groups of 6 students each. It was interesting watch them each work together. Two of the groups worked together very well, you could see it by the fluidity of their design and just hearing and watching their conversations. One group continually disagreed and I had to several of those disagreements. One group laid everything out ahead of time before they painted and glued any of it and discussed each part of it. They were able to tell me the function and reason why they had each thing. They had one thing that really impressed me. They had a rocket that carried the people and separate rocket that carried the freight. It was interesting that they understood the difference. They also had a house for dogs to protect them from any hazards and a house for the snakes to protect them from rats. I don't know where they got that idea but it made me laugh. The other group showed an intuitive grasp of physics. They had used a box to make a hotel and could not make it stand up, so they glued two smaller boxes to the back of it to counter balance it. I was extremely impressed by that. They also had a beach but realized that they would need a separate "clean water" supply and built that as well. I was very very impressed. Although I had to vacate my room almost immediately after school because the smell of tempra paint was overwhelming. We are going to display them for a couple of weeks in the library. They are going to work up a presentation about their knowledge of Mars and their communities when we get back from spring break.
Yesterday was the Rally to Save Texas Schools in front of the capitol. It was wonderful. Chris and Caden went and our friend Marco from College Station did as well. If you are unaware of what is going the state is expecting a huge budget shortfall for education and is planning to cut many services to our schools as well as numerous teacher positions. It is a grave disservice to our students. They deserve more from us than larger classroom sizes with even less materials and resources than we do currently. The march was an inspiration for me and it renewed my belief in what I am called to do is right. We are asking that government use the Rainy Day Fund to support education and to accept the millions of dollars of federal government funding that Rick Perry continues to refuse to sign. I will step off my bandwagon for now but until I receive my contract at the end of the month I am unsure as to whether or not I have a job next year. So it is a little stressful.
This Monday, Caden, Chris and I are going back to Dell Children's Hospital. Caden will have his tonsils out and sinus surgery (however much can be done there.). We will be staying the night but we are glad that it is just one night. There had initially been discussion of several nights and a pic line put in to continue to give iv antibiotics for several weeks. So our plan for spring break is Monday at the hospital and the rest of the week at home trying to keep a very active 2 year old calm and quiet. It should be interesting.
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