California - day 2 (beach)

I had hoped Rose would sleep in on Sunday since we got to bed so late the night before. But instead, just like clockwork, she work at about 4:45am (the same time - 6:45 - she is typically awake at home). Since no one else was awake yet, we occupied ourselves with quiet things in the bedroom, such as a Sofia video, books, and coloring.

Eventually everyone else was awake, we all ate breakfast, we packed up our stuff, and we were off to the beach! There were so many kids involved that we had to take two vehicles - the sedan with two carseats and the minivan with three carseats.

Mitra found a good parking garage for us, and it was only about two blocks to walk to Laguna Beach.

There was a heavy "marine layer," but it was still gorgeous.

The kids were so excited to see the sand and the ocean!

We settled in for a morning / early afternoon of fun :)

After watching the "big kids" for awhile...

...Rose eventually got up the nerve to touch the water herself! Her first time touching the ocean :)

The kids had so much fun splashing and running away from the waves.

Meanwhile, we grownups took turns talking in strategic locations near the kiddos.

It was all fun and games until a HUGE wave came in, knocked Rose off balance, and she fell down. She rolled in the sand as the wave retreated, and we were both clearly terrified that she could have been swept out to sea. Luckily I was only a couple feet away and grabbed her as fast as I could. I think I'll have nightmares about that for a long time to come.

After we both dried our tears from that trauma, we stuck close to the blanket and focused on building sand castles instead.

(check out that huge wave in the background!)

After a few hours, it was time to get back to the car and head home to Mitra's for a late lunch followed by more swimming in the pool!

Rose loved climbing to the top of the water slide (turned off on this second day) and sending a little toy fish into the deep end. Then she would command one of us to fetch it for her so she could throw it again. That game never got old!

Eventually it was time for a late dinner, and then another late bedtime for us.

One episode of Daniel Tiger to get the kids wound down for bedtime.

You might have noticed that we also missed nap time again for the second day in row. Again I hoped that Rose would sleep in a little later the next morning...

California - day 1

Rose and I just had an AWESOME (albeit exhausting!) mommy-daughter vacation to California!  After months of planning, we met up with one of my college friends (Mitra) who lives with her family (husband Kais, kids Liam-5 and Clara-8mo) in the greater Los Angeles area. As luck would have it, two of our other college friends (Anna and her daughter Ellen-4, and Katie and her son Muir-3) were also able to join us!   These are the same friends that I met up with in Las Vegas (sans kiddos) in 2014. :)

It was quite a full house, and Mitra was an incredible host. I'll spoil the suspense and tell you all that we had an INCREDIBLE time!

So let's start at the beginning:  Anna and Katie arrived with their respective kids late Friday night, and Rose and I arrived Saturday mid-afternoon...

But wait! Let's actually back up a little further. Because our vacation actually started Saturday morning, since it was Rose's first time on an airplane!!

We left plenty of time to get to the airport since we had to park at my work and take the light rail to the airport. Incidentally, Rose thought the light rail was awesome!

We also left time to get lunch at the airport while watching planes come and go.

And we even left time to burn off energy before our four hour plane ride. I had expected she would want to go to the mini playground, but instead she was enamored with the moving walkways! We spent about 45 min riding back and forth, back and forth.

She was SO proud of herself when I let her do it "all alone" (i.e., 50 feet in front of me, instead of 5 feet away).

And then it was time for one last pre-plane selfie...

...and time to board!

She was SO excited to be on a plane!!! We see them flying over our house all the time, so this was a huge deal for her.  And she did great! Of course it got a little boring after four hours (although not boring enough to actually nap, as I had hoped), but she kept herself busy with her doll, coloring books, princess books, and stickers. 

She was a little nervous about landing, but even that she did great with -- as long as she was holding my hand as she watched :)

And then we were in sunny California! Rose was quiet as Mitra drove us to her house, as she generally is with new people. But once she and I were alone to unpack a little bit in the bedroom we would be using, she kept saying "I'm not wearing pants! Just shorts! And no socks!"  She was loving how warm it was. Such a mini-me :)

Given the big time change for us (everyone else was already on Pacific time), we had all agreed ahead of time that we would just hang out at Mitra's house on Saturday evening. It was no trouble at all to keep everyone happy with the big pool in the backyard!

Thankfully Kais took this one photo of all of us in the hot tub, because we never managed to get everyone in the same frame again after this!

After dinner it was a late bedtime for us! (7pm local was 9pm for us!)  I hoped Rose would sleep in a little the next morning...

California dreamin'

This girl loves Disney princesses:

This is what we had to get done this week:

Rose got the appropriate tattoos in place:

We said goodbye to Daddy:

Rose can write her name now!!!!!!

 And now it's time!!!!

(thanks for the e-card, Dad!)

RIP, Joan

this week takes the cake

It's gotta be a full moon, right?

1. Mac has a corneal ulcer.  It started in December, we've been trying to treat it through our vet for the past few weeks, and now we're waiting to see the veterinary ophthalmologist on Tuesday.

2. Earlier this week Mike wasn't sleeping well and had some daytime episodes of very high pulse and blood pressure. This worries me.

3. On Tuesday I had a tough meeting at work due to an ongoing coworker issue.

4. On Wednesday I had an even worse meeting with said coworker. (At least my boss is very supportive of me through all this, but it's still really hard!!)

5. On Wednesday I found out that my mom had a bad fall, but my dad just told in his typically joking way. Working in rehab, my mind immediately went to all the terrible causes and sequelae of falls. Thankfully, I seem to have been catastrophizing and she really does "only" have the fattest lip I've ever seen on anyone ever. (I'll spare her the indignity of posting the picture here.)

6. On Wednesday Mike found out that his sister was in the hospital, but didn't know why. Several frantic emails between family members later, we found out that she has pancreatitis due to gall stones. I visited her in the hospital last night (Friday) - she is still having trouble with pain control, and still unable to even drink anything (much less eat anything). Sounds like she'll be in the hospital at least a couple more days.

7.  In late November my beloved mentor/friend/former boss at TEP (Joan Caillier) went on hospice. She posted her last caring bridge update in late December. In mid-January her sister posted another update, and I told Mike that I doubted she would live through the end of the month. Then on 1/20 her sister posted again and I thought her end might be very near. She died late that night, and I found out first thing on Thurs morning.  I wrote a long tribute to her in my journal, but my heart still has an aching hole knowing that she is actually gone.

The last two nights I've crashed at 8pm and slept horribly. I finally just got up this morning at 4:30am since I wasn't rested anyway. I'm hoping to get the work done now that I need to do this weekend, so then I can finally just concentrate on taking care of myself. This week has been a doozy! I'm ready for some TLC for myself once I get these last five notes written for work...

Speech Therapy

I don't know if this is standard in every state, but MN requires all kids to undergo an "early childhood screening" before they start kindergarten. The idea is that it's easier to treat problems (autism, hearing problems, intellectual disability, etc.) if you catch them early.  Some school districts start the screening at age 3, although our district starts at 3.5 - which was back in October for Rose. It was also back in October that we had Rose's biannual school conferences. Overall her teachers gave her glowing praise (my favorite was when they commented on her exceptional emotional development!), but they did raise some concern about her articulation abilities. Now, I've often had a hard time understanding Rose, but I had no basis of comparison and figured all parents must struggle to understand their toddlers/preschoolers, amIright?  So to hear an experienced teacher express concern suddenly brought MY anxiety level to a whole new level! It was officially time to panic.

So I got Rose in for her early childhood screening as quickly as I could, which was Nov 12th. For the most part, she was a rock star! She passed the hearing screen, the visual screen, the gross motor test, the cognitive screen, the social screen...everything except the articulation screening. Huh.

Next (Dec 1) we got referred to the district's early childhood speech therapist, who completed a much more comprehensive evaluation of her articulation, as well as getting more details about Rose's history (social, medical, etc.). She didn't score the test as she went, but I could tell it wasn't going great - particularly when the speech therapist (whose job it is to understand little kids) had to ask me to "interpret" a couple things Rose said. Needless to say, I nearly breaking out in hives by the time the results finally came back.

But Rose, I should mention, loved all this testing! She got to spend some extra time on the test days with me and got to "show off" to these new adults. She had a blast!

And it was only a day or two later that we "finally" got the results: Rose's scores officially qualified her for speech therapy services, so we needed to schedule an IEP (individualized education program) meeting to formalize the plan for special ed.

Gulp.

Yep, my daughter needs special ed.

And clearly I was having a reaction to it - an emotional reaction.

After much reflection, talking with friends, a few unexpected tears, and a couple long sessions of journaling, I think I've come to understand where my emotions were coming from, some of which were quite a surprise to the logical part of my brain! But after much hard work, I got to a place of understanding with myself and could more fully support Rose. (I'd be happy to tell any of you, my loyal blog readers, all the details in person some time. It just feels too personal to type it all out here!)

We had her first official IEP on 12/8/15. The short story is that Rose's standard score on the Goldman Fristoe Test of Articulation was 69. The test has a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, which means that scores of less than 70 are required to qualify for special ed. So, in a way, it was a good thing that she just squeaked in! This means that she is eligible for special ed for as long as she needs it throughout school, even as her articulation improves. And since her score isn't super low, she should improve pretty quickly! The optimistic side would be "graduating" in a year to 18 months, but realistically she might still need some help in kindergarten - we'll see.

But the other crazy part of the story is that Mike and I were both a bit frantic trying to figure out how we would get her to speech therapy each week since we both work. And that's when we found out that the school district would pay for her to take a special bus from daycare to the "big kid school" every week for speech class!!! (I am so grateful to pay taxes in order to make services like this possible for us and for others!)

So Rose had her first official speech class on Jan 5. Since it was the first one, I followed her in my car (I wasn't allowed on the bus) and joined her for the first half of the class. That week she was one of four kids total, with three little boys about her age or a little older. The class seemed great, and she seemed to be having a good time!

And now we've also started with weekly homework! (I thought we wouldn't have to deal with that until grade school!) The good news is that it's pretty easy and fun. The first two weeks we just had to repeat a bunch of syllable (ickee, ackee, uckee, okee, achy) and then Rose got to color something - the first week she got to color a stripe on a zebra each time she said the sounds, and the second week she got to color a kite each time she said the sounds:

She especially loves the coloring! She isn't always excited to start the homework (mostly she'd rather play Candyland - bane of my existence - instead), but once we get going I have to convince her to stop after about 15-20min (we're supposed to only have 5min practice sessions at most!). My little overachiever daughter.  ;)

So we did two weeks of the K sound, and now we're moving on to the G sound. And Mike and I are trying to enunciate even better  -- do we both mumble??  Although we did get lots of reassurance that there is no research to date identifying any specific causes for why some kids need speech therapy and some kids don't. But apparently there is at least some genetic component, and since Mike needed speech as a kid, that could be part of it.

That's the big news from the home front! But I will leave you with two photos to make up for this otherwise incredibly text-heavy blog post:

Candyland with Grandma Roles!

Rose loves art projects!

Have a great week! Hope you're staying warm out there.

Merry Christmas (part 3)

Since Christmas fell on a Friday this year, that meant we had a whole weekend left to celebrate, even after the holiday itself was over! Saturday the 26th was slated for Mike's mom's side of the family this year. We woke up early (as usual) and Rose promptly put on her new princess dress again - because what else would you wear in order to bake a cake, right?!?

While we waited for the "breakfast cake" (our contribution to the family potluck breakfast) to bake, we worked on some art projects.  Rose especially loved this mermaid mosaic!

We also shoveled the ~2 inches of snow we got, and then finally woke up Mike around 9am (!). And then we were off to Trula's!

We got to see Baby Eleanor (and her parents):

And Rose got to play with all her Rohde cousins:

While we adults talked, snacked, and drank mimosas. :)

Aunt Sara brought a fun art project for the kids to work on:

The finished product!

We opened presents:

Rose practiced "twirling":

And we all just basically looked photogenic :)

photobomb!

Rose received a set of princess dolls from Grandma Roles and Grandpa Fly that all the cousins fell in love with:

After all the festivities, it was finally time for nap. Some of the adults visited other family, then we all met up again for the big Fleischhacker Family Christmas party. I was totally overwhelmed so only got a couple photos:

As you can tell by Rose's expression here, it was getting to be past her bedtime by this point!

It was a whirlwind day, but I cherished every minute of it.  Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!