Everyone else

The rest of the kiddos have, luckily, been a lot more boring this year!

 Teresa turned seven in May. I didn't get a birthday interview, sadly. She is super fantastic. She absolutely relishes her role of oldest child. She is a huge, huge helper to me. She has been learning piano for the past year and is really starting to sound great on it. She doesn't love the practicing, though. She wants to already be amazing at it and has a hard time accepting that it will actually take years of practice to do that! She loves second grade and is just a little social butterfly. 

Finners turned three in September.

I just love him so much. He is so delightful. He goes a hundred miles an hour all day, every day. He is very into categorizing things as being only for boys or only for girls. Though he still loves his baby dolls! He loves ninja turtles and super heroes and his siblings so much. 

I guess he thought Conor was getting too much attention because he did decide to give us a bit of a medical scare as well. He has had a bump on the top of his head for the past 9ish months. We've been keeping an eye on it, along with his pediatrician. She originally thought that he had gotten a bump on his head, like little boys do, and his body had overreacted and sent too much calcification to it, causing the lasting bump. However, at his three year check up she decided that it wasn't doing what it should be if that were the cause of it, so she sent us off for further investigation. She wanted him to get an xray just to make sure there was nothing weird going on with his skull, and she also sent us to see dermatology. Dermatology originally said they thought it was a cyst and needed to just be removed by plastic surgery, but then they decided he should have an ultrasound just to make sure. The ultrasound determined that it was actually a hemangioma, so we are holding off on the surgery for now.

 Before we could get any further on that though, the pediatrician called and told us that the xrays indicated that he had some hydrocephalus, or water on his brain. Then there was talk of MRIs and neurosurgery referrals and brain surgery to get a shunt placed. Needless to say, we were pretty stunned. 

Finn was a rock star for his MRI. They wanted to try to do it without putting him under, since it was meant to just be a super fast confirmation of the hydrocephalus. We watched lots of YouTube videos about MRIs leading up to it and I was so proud of him for laying nice and still in that big scary machine. The imaging only took about ten minutes altogether and he held perfectly still for about the first eight. Then he sta/rted whimpering and calling for me and wriggling about, but they luckily were able to get all the pictures they needed. We were thrilled to hear about a week later that the MRI was perfectly clear! No explanation from the doctors as to why the xray and MRI were different, but it was such a relief to hear them say that his brain is perfectly normal. We have had so many miracles this year!

Noodle has had a steady year, thank goodness! She was so, so incredibly excited to start kindergarten. They do a staggered start for kinder here, to kind of ease the kiddos in to it, and she was super bummed that T got to start back to school a few days before her. She loved the first day. 

And then did NOT want to go back. It was quite the struggle for the first few weeks. She would wait in line with the rest of the kindergartners and then once they got close to the doors she would turn and make a break for it. One time while I was kissing T goodbye she even booked it back to the van while I wasn't looking. She did great once she was actually in her classroom, it was just the getting there part that was hard. She is doing awesome now, though Finn still insists on escorting her all the way to the door. He is so funny, he will take her elbow and not let go until she is in the building. 

She is still doing awesome at Taekwondo, too. She leveled up to a yellow tip, which meant she got to start actually sparring with her classmates. This is pretty much what she's been waiting for since she started. She loves it. Marc and T loved watching her so much that they both started taking it as well.