3rd week of January

Monday was Martin Luther King Jr day so the kids and Dode were home. We asked the kids what they wanted to do as a family activity and they chose swimming. I looked at the Lynwood pool and the Snohomish pool which both have water slides and a play area for the little ones. Both places only had swimming available during nap time. We decided to go the YMCA.  There are no waterslides but there is a nice play area for the twins and a lazy river for the bigger kids. We swam for almost 2 hours, which I thought was plenty of time but the kids thought was too short.  When I got our membership last year, I bought the cheaper family package that only included one adult membership because I knew Dode wouldn't be working out.  He can come as our guest three times in a calendar year.  I figured that would give us three family swimming trips.  He came once last year with us, that's how much we dread and put off taking the family swimming.  It's such a hassle to get dressed and undressed, it's always a bit cold, it's pretty boring for us old folks.  When I joined the Y, I'd told myself I'd take the kids swimming once a month.  We went swimming in January, February and March.  In April we went to Ocean Shores during spring break so I decided that counted as our monthly swimming and with that I broke the cycle and I never took the twins swimming again!  Twice a week when we visit the Y for my workouts, we walk right next to the pool with it's big windows and I told myself that if I took them once, they'd want to swim every time.  It was pretty easy to talk myself out of it.  Well, it's a new year with new goals.  We went swimming on MLK day and I already promised the twins we'd go swimming the day after their birthday.  Twice in January!

On Wednesday, we met my mom at the Everett Children's Museum in the morning. Thankfully Elizabeth came because my mom had Finnley and I had the twins and they had very different interests. Although they were all at the museum at the same time, they spent most of their time playing in different areas. For Luke, his favorite area was the trains, both an extensive Thomas the Tank Engine set and a model electric train. Leah loved playing inside the kid sized airplane. Finnley enjoyed playing with the air filled tubes that will lift a ball up into a maze of tubes in the ceiling before dropping them back down to play with again.  They all spent some part of their time in the water play area.  After playing, we had a delicious teriyaki lunch.

In the fall I sent a DNA sample off to Ancestry.com which allows you to find relatives through DNA. Well, a few weeks ago, I received a message from my dad's first cousin that neither one of us have ever met. She's 76 years old and lives about an hour south of the Canadian border in New York State.  When we were emailing back to forth, it was in the 50's here and raining while it was minus 32 where she lived with 8" of snow on the ground.  I have been thrilled with the results of my DNA test verifying on several sides of my family that I have built an accurate family tree. My dad's cousin wasn't able to give me any additional information about their shared grandparents who immigrated from Czechoslovakia but she is sending me some photos of them. I'm so excited!  Another exciting thing she shared is that her mother lived to 102 and her uncle into his 90's.  My grandfather on my dad's side died in his early 60's, I thought I was short lived genes.  Maybe there's hope!

I usually hand toys on when the older kids had outgrown them (we thought we were done with kids) but there are three things I've saved over the years, the play kitchen, Thomas the Tank Engine set and the dollhouse equipment.  We first got the dollhouse when Elizabeth was little, and we've added on to it with both Miriam and Leah.  The big dollhouse is still stored out in the barn (you'll see Luke's fire station "dollhouse" in the photo above) but I brought in a small tub of the furniture as well as a mom, dad, sister and three babies this week and the twins have been really enjoying setting up little scenarios and acting out parts of life. Their favorite thing to do is make the dolls and babies use the toilet.

Toileting is a big part of their life.  Leah is fully potty trained and runs to the toilet multiple times a day.  Luke is a more reluctant potty trainer.  If I have him in underwear or a swimming diaper, he will pee in the toilet on his own volition 80% of the time.  If he is in a diaper or pull up, he never decides to use the toilet.  As to pooping, we have a zero success rate.  I've tried everything with him.  He uses a stool softener every day to keep things moving.  He gets a lollipop if he uses the toilet but that didn't seem to be motivating him to use the toilet for #2.  I bought matchbox cars for him to receive if he poops in the toilet.  He knows what they're for and he knows he can't have them until he poops.  He will sometimes take them out of the cupboard and look at them in their package but he still won't poop in the toilet. 

On the health front: Dode broke a tooth this week.  He was just sitting at dinner eating ham tetrazini when he pulled a piece of his tooth out of his mouth.  When he'd felt it in his mouth, he first thought it was a piece of gristle, nope, it was a piece of him!  He doesn't have any pain, just a jagged tooth.

Luke had his yearly IEP meeting for speech this week.  After attending preschool twice a week with 20 minutes of speech therapy a week, he hasn't made much progress.  The speech teacher wants him to receive speech services twice a week, once for 20 minutes with another student, the other for 30 minutes of one on one time.  She also wants me to make a photo book with pictures of his family and things that are important to him that he can keep in his backpack.  When he's trying to talk with his teachers, if they don't understand what he's trying to tell them, he can use a photo to help.

On Saturday, Miriam and Dode had a Miriam/dad day.  It was really hard to come up with something for them to do in the winter.  While it seems on the surface that Miriam is up for anything, when you think through the things you could do, a lot of them don't seem practical.  They ended up going to the Museum of Flight in Seattle.  The kids have free memberships through an educational program that allows them to bring a parent with them for free.  Although we've had the free memberships for several years, this is the first time we've taken advantage of them.  We've taken little people to the museum so many times and it's really not a relaxing time.  We've kind of given up on it!  Dode was worried that Miriam would spend a few minutes at the museum, flying through the museum, and be bored.  They spent hours there and she really seemed to enjoy it.  After the museum, they went out to pizza before coming home.  Miriam is in a stage of life, middle school angst, where she just can't seem to fill her reservoir of meaningful parent interaction.  Each night when we head to bed, she wants to lay in bed with us and cuddle and talk.  Unfortunately for her, the twins are always there too, interrupting her, bumping into her as they climb around the bed, taking all the fun out of it for her.  We need to be more proactive about getting her some parent time.

2nd week of January

The second week of January felt really low key. Dode didn't have any church responsibilities at all! The kids didn't have youth night at church either. To take advantage of that open youth night, we had Sharon and Lynn and great grandma over for dinner. After dinner we put Lynn to work recording the narration for the laser maze Dode is working on for the church talent show.

I think this will be the third year of the talent show. The talent show has both performing talents and display talents.  The first year, we did a funny family skit about a pretend enlarging machine and Dode built a floor piano that Anastaya and a friend performed on. Last year, we brought the floor piano as a display talent and set it out for the kids to play on, as well as our secret combination box where when they solve the combination, they can take a token they can use to get candy from our candy machine. This year, Dode decided he wanted to try his hand at building a laser maze. I teased about it on the ward Facebook page as a display talent with ping pong balls, toilet paper tubes and Bionicle pieces. So far, he's experimented with lasers and found that he needs to use green lasers since they're more visible than red lasers. He's repurposed a tap light to be the button the kids will push at the end to turn off the lasers. He's also built a count down clock. The kids will have 40 seconds to make it through the maze. He wanted a quick narration to set the stage for the kids. Lynn has a very deep voice that worked perfectly. Great Grandma Dickson was in the room when he was recording and she kept giggling and laughing at him. It was so sweet!

Wednesday was early release for the Arlington School District. I try to do something fun with the kids each early release but this year is a bit of a challenge because there is an early release day each month! When I asked the kids what they wanted to do, Miriam really wanted to go get frozen yogurt. That was an easy activity! While the twins and Finnley were sleeping, we headed over to frozen yogurt. It was waffle Wednesday which meant you could get a waffle bowl for free. Score!

Thursday after dinner, Miriam and I had some one on one time. We visited the four little free libraries in Arlington. A little free library is a small display that people put in their front yard with books in it. The idea is you can grab a book and leave one behind. We visited four libraries and Miriam never found any books she wanted. She enjoyed the time with just mom so she could vent about all the stresses of middle school life.

I made it to the YMCA four times this week so I'm half way to the goal of 12 visits in January. I did TRX on Monday, strength training on Tuesday and Friday and yoga on Thursday. They have free child care at the Y that is divided into “child watch” and “adventure zone”. You have to be 3 and potty trained to go to the adventure zone. Leah is potty trained but Luke and Finnley aren't. Since it was just Leah going with me on Thursday and Friday, she got to go to the adventure zone. She thought she was a pretty big girl! Maybe it will encourage Luke to start using the toilet?

This weekend is a produce weekend. I can't believe I've been doing produce for over 8 years! Every other Saturday, Dode and I get up in the middle of the night to meet the semi truck at the end of the driveway and transfer about a ton of produce from a pallet to our trailer. Semis won't fit up our driveway so this is how we have to do it. For years, they've told me that they don't send the smaller trucks that would fit up our driveway as far north as we are. Well, every time I'm driving around on a Friday afternoon and see one of the smaller trucks in my area, I'm just a little bit peeved. I've asked for our delivery time and truck to be changed but the company said that's not an option.

1/8/18- trying to get back into the swing of blogging

After years of keeping a blog, the bomb that is the twins went off in my life. The trauma of their pregnancy, the exhaustion of the first year, the business of keeping up with them combined together to keep me from chronicling their life. So, it's as if the last four years didn't happen. In an effort to get back to it, and with the strong encouragement of my husband, I'm once again trying to get into the habit of journaling our family adventures.

The first week of January is always a busy week for us. We started off on New Year's Day with our monthly community family night.   For the last two years, we've been hauling out our donut robot, cotton candy machine and soft serve ice cream machine and using local community Facebook groups to invite anyone who wants to come to come enjoy free treats.  I think we had one of the smallest crowds we've had in two years! Maybe about 40 people. With school starting again the next day and two college football games that night, I think people decided to stay home. What made Dode happy was that we got a few families from the community. He's worried as he's seen a drop off in the number of non Mormons attending the event. He's concerned that when the group is 90% LDS, community members feel odd because everyone else seems to know each other.

We had two birthdays to celebrate this week. Dode turned 47 and Jacob turned 25.   We "celebrated" Dode's birthday by putting four new tires on his truck.  He'd come home from work a few days before his birthday and noticed that his tires had cracked to the point that they weren't holding air anymore.  His "gift" was a 15 horsepower outboard motor that I received off of a Buy Nothing group I'm a part of on Facebook.  Now when we go out on the Puget Sound, we won't need to borrow an outboard.  We have an inboard motor but take a second motor along in case we break down out there.

I can't wrap my mind around the fact that Jacob is ¼ of a century old now! How did the years go by so fast? I also can't fathom that at my age, my mom was a grandma a few times over.  Here I am, raising toddlers, not feeling in any way ready to transition to the grandma stage! Each time the kids have a birthday, I reflect back on the day they were born. My mom was a great labor coach. I had back labor and she spent so much time rubbing my back, I had bruises the next day. Jacob's was a difficult birth. His heart rate was dangerously low and his birth was assisted with a vacuum, then forceps and an episiotomy that took 45 minutes to repair. As he was born, the doctor held him up for me to see and at that moment his cord detached from the placenta. I came that close to loosing him!

When I asked Jacob what he wanted for his birthday treat, he told me he just wanted something he'd never had before. That was a struggle for me.  I wondered what there would be that I hadn't made that was worth making.  I thumbed through my cookbooks and found a recipe for figgy pudding. None of us have ever had that before so it seemed like something worth trying. It's delicious!  Jacob and Elizabeth celebrated his birthday by going to the movie.  After the movie, his car was acting up so he had to call Dode to come down and help him.  It turned out that when he'd put his wheel on, he'd put the lug nuts on backwards so the tire was wobbling.  As fate would have it, he'd cleaned his trunk completely out before going to the movie and shampooed the carpet in the trunk, so his lug wrench was back at the house, 20 minutes away.  They ended up leaving the car there and driving home to get the wrench and headed back to fix the wheel.

With school starting up again, I was able to get back to the YMCA for the strength training class I usually go to twice a week. After a two week absence, my legs are so sore! The Y does a monthly motivational challenge and for January it's to come in 12 times.   Getting there 8 times a week is easy and most months I can squeeze in about 9-10 times by going a third time in a week once or twice.  Getting in 12 workouts means I have to go three times a week each week of January.  That will be a challenge but I'm going for it.  

For the last 18 months, I've been watching my two year old niece Finnley three to four times a week. This week she started attending preschool three days a week.  My mom and I will share her the remaining two days of the week.  Mom will get her one week and I will get her the next. Although she was here two days this week, Leah is really missing her best friend.  They have such a close friendship.  All day long I hear, "Come on Finney, let's......" and they head off on their next adventure.

Luke has a severe language delay.  His diagnosis is apraxia which is where the connection between the brain and the mouth has problems.  Luke understands everything we say to him but a lot of what comes out of his mouth is gibberish.  Because of Luke's language delays, he attends a developmental preschool at the elementary school two days a week for 2 ½ hours . Every other Friday, I attend speech therapy with him so that I can know what they're working on and support their work at home.  Leah tags along, always hoping that the speech teacher will be sick and she'll be able to participate in the 30 minutes of free play that happens at the end of the preschool day.  Luke's speech teacher has been employed by the district for a long time. Isaac, Elizabeth and Miriam have all worked with her. Not only that, but when we were both going to college at Western Washington University, I went to speech therapy with the student therapists and she was assigned to me! Small world. When Miriam was graduating from speech, she said, “I guess I'm done working with Dicksons”. I said, “Well, I had twins a few months ago and I bet with our track record that at least one of them will need speech.” “YOU had twins?! Yourself?! You gave birth to them, you didn't adopt?!” I think she was dumbfounded because we're both the same age and I bet she couldn't imagine having a baby at her stage of life. Well, my prediction came true!  But, I am certain Luke will be the last Dickson she works with for speech. (At least the last one genetically related to us).

One noteworthy thing happened this week.  We have been heating our homes with wood for 20 years.  This year is the first year where the firewood didn't make it through the winter.  The wood splitter broke in the fall and when I saw the amount of wood we had stored, I was pretty worried.  Dode assured me that we had just enough for the year.  As the months of burning wood went by, each time I'd go out and get firewood, I'd worry about how much was there.  Dode thought we were fine.  Well, we did have enough to make it through the year, if you're talking calendar year and not winter season.  We are officially out of firewood.  Thankfully, Lynn said we could have some of his dry wood and Dode is newly motivated to fix the wood splitter.