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.