Frederick close to walking!

Before we left Mississippi, Freddy had been taking a step or two in between things and then falling into whatever he was walking toward. I knew he would make his first attempt at a long distance walk at any moment and didn't want to miss it while Chris and I had a few days alone in Seattle for our 10 year anniversary present from my parents. I jokingly told my mom to tie his legs together so I wouldn't miss his first "walk." 

It was good to have 2 days to settle in at my parents house and get past jet lag (if such a thing even exists) before leaving my parents and sister to watch our kids for 3 nights and 4 days! 

Plane rides!

The moment my kids have been waiting years for arrived: they flew on an airplane! All of them have flown as infants - when they were free - but none of them have flown when they were old enough to know what was going on. They've pestered us every other week or so for the past 3 years of, "When are we going to fly on an airplane?" "And I've never ridden on a real train or helicopter or space ship!" 

We had to wake up at 2:30 in the morning to leave our house at 3:00AM to get to the airport at 5:00AM so we could make our 6:15AM flight. The kids were so excited they didn't fall asleep on the drive to the airport or on any of the flights (except Charlie dozed off for a bit on the second flight).  Yeah, it was a really really long day.  

Here the kids all are as we waited out of the way while Chris checked us in. I guess since we didn't check in online, they didn't give us the seats we signed up for when we bought the tickets. So we had some last minute stress as we tried to work it out with the nice couple next to most of our seats to switch around until we had seats all near each other and the 'lap baby' in the 1 row that the airlines allow a lapchild to be in. 

We put Frederick in charge of baggage security. He would walk from bag to bag patting them down and pushing them over. We tried to keep costs down by only checking 1 bag. So...with a personal item and a carry-on per ticket, we had 10 bags + the stroller + all our kids. It wasn't too bad. 

On the first leg from Jackson to Chicago we were in a tiny plane and the kids did great! Charlie and Gwen sat in a row by themselves. Alec had the window seat across from Chris (who was behind Charlie and Gwen) and Frederick and I sat in the row in front of Charlie and Gwen. 

We had a layover in Chicago and needed to walk across the entire airport to a different terminal to catch our next flight. It was nice chance to stretch our legs as we wandered through the airport in a single file - Chris in front with kids in two and me pushing the stroller in the back. I just LOVED seeing all my cute family walking ahead of me, wearing backpacks and pulling a carry-on suitcase. 

The second flight from Chicago to Seattle was longer and a bit harder on the kids, but they still did great. Frederick took a lot of work to entertain within the confined space, but the kids and Chris helped out some. I had gotten some cool coloring things and sticker mosaics for the kids to put in their backpacks so between that and some snacks and gum and the new environment they were so well behaved! I mean, whats a 3 and 2 hour plane ride when you're used to 29 hour car trips!?

They're good behavior seemed to be totally used up once we got picked up from the Seattle airport by my Uncle Ben. (My parents were flying in from UT later that day). I also made the mistake of letting Charlie get to sit up in the middle seat next to Frederick (he had asked so sweetly and rarely gets to chance to sit by him in a car) which meant Gwen and Alec were side by side in the back. BIG MISTAKE. They pretty much kicked, pushed, hit and screamed at each other the entire 45 min ride to University Place. It was such a LONG day.  Both Chris and I had stayed up until 2:00AM the night before we left with some last minute packing since I spent most of the early evening helping a friend make a Christmas present and attending a Relief Society event. Between getting 6 hours of sleep within 48 hours, I had a bad migraine that first night in Washington and went to bed with the kids at 6:00pm. 

The next day in church all the kids fell asleep on the bench or on us in Sacrament Meeting. Actually, I think Alec is faking it for the picture, but he really was getting CLOSE to falling asleep once or twice.  

We're so happy to be able to come home for Christmas and are ready for some much needed vacationing and family time!

Foundation!!

For weeks now the kids have been asking when the cement trucks will come to our house. As we got closer to our departure day to fly home to WA for Christmas, I was worried that it would happen while we were gone. But the day before we left, they came! They came early in the morning and started right away. The first truck pulled in an hour or two after the kids left for school and I worried they would still miss the whole thing because of school. I was tempted to go get them out early so they could watch but thought I'd just see how it played out. Turns out the first truck was just delivering the gravel.

After a few hours they had the gravel all spread out and rolled down some tarps. Then they laid out the metal rods (I've forgotten for the moment the actual term for those). 

And an hour or so before the boys would get home they started on the first cement truck. If I remember right, I think there were 6 or 7 trucks. It was a little nerve racking for me to see it getting dropped and shoveled so close to the opening for the storm shelter. I worried we'd have a pile or two of cement to sit on in there, but one guy in particular seemed to keep an eye out for it and took good care. 

They had the foundation all poured before the boys got home, but still had to do the strip of covered patio. Hurray! All the kids got to see a 'real cement truck actually pour cement.' It was very exciting and entertaining.

They workers asked the kids if they wanted to put their hand prints somewhere and like they usually do when a stranger talks to them my kids just shook their head no. Then proceeded to whine to me during the next hour that they wanted to put their handprints in somewhere! Haha. Silly kids. I wanted to wait for Chris to get home from work so he could help me think of the best spot for them.  The concrete was pretty set by the time we did them, but they turned out ok! Only Frederick's is really really faint since he went last and it was hard to hold him over the wet cement at the same angle as the kids. 

Storm shelter installed and some Freddy cuteness

Installing the storm shelter. It will be in the shop area of the garage that we walk through to get from the mudroom to our cars.  There are steps down one end, that can be removed once we're all in to allow for more seating.  It says it can fit 10 people and I think I may even be able to stand up in the middle. Chris on the other hand, we're hoping, will at least be able to sit up straight when he's sitting on the bench. 

I was supposed to be putting Frederick down for a nap the other day but I got distracted by his cuteness. He's growing up so fast! I love the way he crawls so fast to me, and then climbs up me right up to my face. 

He seems to enjoy snuggling and will lean his head in towards us so we can kiss him or just breath in his soft neck. These cheeks are just incredibly perfect to kiss and to feel up against my own cheek. He gets plenty and plenty of love from all of us. 

Freddy loves to put toys into buckets and take them out again. 

He loves to play games with us. His favorite seems to be "make-them-eat-a-toy" where he shoves a toy into my mouth, takes it out for a second and then puts it back in again. I love his face when he plays with us. He already has such a teasing look in his eye. I wish I could capture it better on the camera but he's just too fast for me! 

In other big Freddy news, he's started taking steps by himself this week! He's done up to 3 at a time. Today he even took two steps from the couch into the nothingness of the room before dropping to his knees and crawling the rest of the way to whatever it was he was looking at. He's definitely got 'Stranger Danger' down and screams whenever someone new gets too close to him and he can't immediately find Mommy or Daddy.  He is pretty attached to either of us and is no longer happy being in a different room from us. This new thing is getting kind of annoying, but luckily he's still so cute. 

Year-after PET scan ... Back up to Nashville

This doctors appointment and scan sort of snuck up on me. I wasn't sure when it was happening until about 2 days before it. My parents were super awesome again and let us use some Marriott Points so we could stay in a hotel the night before. With a 5 hour drive to get there, and Chris needing to be at the hospital at 6:30AM for his scan, a hotel the night before really is the only way to go. We drove straight from church and got to the hotel around dinner time. We had packed some microwave dinners but found out there was not a microwave in the hotel room, so Chris was forced to get take out at the yummy Mexican restaurant across the street. Darn. :)  

Everyone slept well in the hotel room and by 6:00am we were all up and checked out of the hotel before dropping Chris off at Vanderbilt's hospital. I didn't arrange for childcare this time, so I just had to kill time with the kids while Chris had his scan, blood work and doctors appointment. We ate breakfast at our nearby favorite: the Pancake Pantry. This place seriously has the best pancakes I've ever had.

We still had about 4 hours to kill so I took the kids to explore the two places in Nashville I hadn't been to yet, but always wanted to see - the Parthenon park and the downtown riverbank area.  We swung on the swings for a while, played on the playground, did the monkey bars, walked a few miles around the park looking for port-a-potties with toilet paper. (We left the hotel so quickly, no one got a chance to do some real business in the bathroom!) 

Walking around this older-style building gave me a pre-deja-vu moment of maybe someday walking around ACTUALLY old style buildings with my young kids in Europe somewhere when Chris does a sabbatical there. We've always dreamed of doing that someday.

On our quest for a port-a-potty we found this awesome old train. 

It was huge! Just check out these wheels...

The kids were great sports as I tried to draw out the hours we could spend at the park since Frederick finally fell asleep sometime around 11:00.

I didn't get any pictures of the downtown river boardwalk area because I was driving the whole time. But we enjoyed seeing all the flashy lights of the musical/blues history area with electric guitars lit up and places like Johnny Cash museum and store, Swingin Doors Saloon, Country Music Hall of Fame and HardRock Cafe: Nashville showing up on every corner. 

Meanwhile.....Chris was like this:

Now that I'm at the end of my post, I can write the serious, emotional bit. We were super worried about this scan. The previous scan in September showed some abnormal inflammation/uptake and while the doctors said it was probably just a result of a recent cold/sore throat Chris had had, it didn't really make us feel better. "Probably" didn't really work for us 4 years ago, or 2 years ago. Chris said he felt like his mild sore throat never really went away and he was bracing himself for the worst. Which totally explained his tendency to zone out our everyday world a couple of times during the Thanksgiving break. Like I said, I had (maybe subconsciously?) forgotten about this scan and it wasn't until Chris shared with me his feelings that I too started bracing myself for possible bad news. We fasted the day before together and prayed hard. I so wanted to be in the room with the doctor when he explained the results of the scan, but the kids aren't allowed in that area. So I just sat the kids down in the outside hallway with my phone so they could watch a movie while I sat next to them, feeding Frederick a bottle and waited.  I kept staring off int he distance waiting to see him pop out of the next hallway down. I actually saw the doctor before Chris did. Dr. Kassim was making the rounds and saw me and the kids in the hallway and stopped by for a quick chat, but didn't say anything about the results. 

It ended up being mostly good news! The inflammation in his neck lymph nodes is less than the previous scan...and if the cancer had been back, things would be growing.  Yay for no growth! There still is some inflammation and there was some 'uptake' in Chris' prostate that makes the doctors want to be cautious still and so they've scheduled another scan for 3 months. Two and a half years ago, Chris had shown some uptake in his prostate area after his first round of chemotherapy that ended up being some kind of urinary infection. Chris told me he has felt a little bit of similar symptoms and so it could just be another urinary infection. Anyway. Bottom line is that we didn't have bad news! and we have another 3 months of enjoying normal ahead of us. Chris feels much lighter and is so happy to NOT be dealing with his worst cast scenario.  I'm trying to not focus on the grey-ness of the results and just be content like Chris. I really prefer to deal with black or white results...just finish the thing and let me move on completely! But I guess that's being a bit unrealistic. Life is full of grey-ness and its WAY WAY better than black.