What a zoo!

We went to the Denver Zoo today and had a fantastic time! I'm not sure the weather was quite as good as predicted but it was still great to spend lots of time outside in a light jacket in February! It had been a long time since our last visit and Connor was very excited! He immediately took over map reading duties and found the three things most important to him: the train, the carousel and the bears! :)
Our little navigator


Bears!


Feeding the lorikeets was a lot of fun! At first Connor was scared of them (so unlike him, right?) but then he got into it and didn't want to leave! He made sure every bird in there had a chance to drink some nectar :)


Logan loved all the birds but the lorikeets, geese and peacocks were his favorites. He followed this peacock around for a few minutes...


Daddy and Connor waiting to ride the train


Logan walking like a big boy...


With the penguins...

Blue Mountain Elementary's mascot and colors

I'm sick. Ugh. We actually made it something like three weeks without any sickness in our house but that streak was broken by me. Luckily Jeremy had today off for President's Day so he kept the boys away from my germs as much as possible :)

Anyway, I wanted to post that Blue Mountain Elementary has a mascot and colors now! I went to the meeting on Saturday the 9th where the group narrowed it down to two mascots and two color combinations:

Blue Mountain Lynx
or
Blue Mountain Bison

and

Maroon, Navy Blue and Silver
or
Brown, Blue and White

The kids at Eagle Crest (half of whom will attend Blue Mountain next year) voted last Friday and they chose....

Blue Mountain Lynx and Maroon, Navy Blue and Silver!!!

These were my favorites too so that's exciting :) It was fun to participate in the selection process! Now we just have to decide if Connor will go there for preschool next year...

Flabbergasted

I don't even have words for what just happened but I'm going to try to find them so I can blog about it. Forgive me if I don't make sense because I am just so stunned that my brain isn't working right. :) Logan goes to a Mom's Day Out program on Monday and Wednesday mornings. Connor and I picked Logan up today and got back into the car and as I was getting ready to back out (and looking both ways to see that no one was coming from either direction or walking behind me) a pink winter coat in the minivan parked on our passenger side grabbed my attention. There was a little girl in that pink coat. She was strapped in her car seat. The windows were up. She was ALONE. She was evidently over a year old because she was forward facing...I guess she looked close to Logan's age. My jaw dropped. Alone? In the car? Ok, it's February so maybe heat wasn't the issue but it is currently 59 degrees in Longmont and it's warm. And the windows were up. And she was alone! The car wasn't running, so I guess carjacking wasn't a big issue but....still. I couldn't remember if the van had been there when we pulled up. My mind was racing with worry and Connor was trying to figure out why I'd backed up two inches and then put the car back in park. Was I supposed to do something? The woman who was parked on my side of the car came out with her two kids and I asked her if she'd noticed the mom going in when she went in but she hadn't. She said it was "sweet" of me to worry but that the mom would probably be back in a second. I waited for what seemed like an eternity but was probably only two or three minutes and the mom came out, with two more kids in tow, and got in the van. I couldn't stop myself. I felt my feet moving toward her van with no plan of what I would say but then words came out. "Um, sorry to bother you and I know it's none of my business but I was really worried about your daughter being left alone in the car." She barely looked at me and continued getting the older kids in the car "Oh, why?" WHY? "Well, I wasn't sure if your car was here when we got here and she was alone and I know it's not that hot out today but the windows were all up and..." I didn't get a chance to finish that run-on sentence because she interrupted with "I was only inside for maybe five minutes and it's not against the law in Colorado to leave your child in the car. I looked it up online. It's not a big deal." I didn't know what to say to that so I walked away in disbelief. JUST BECAUSE IT'S NOT AGAINST THE LAW DOES NOT MEAN IT'S A GOOD IDEA. And is it really not against the law?? When we got home I called Child Protective Services to find out. All they could tell me (after being transferred to four people, apparently I'm the only one who cares about this sort of thing) was that it's not against the law but that you can get a ticket for it. What? Someone help me out here! Do you know what the law is? I looked online and found this Fox News story which says it's a law in 12 states but I can't find anything that says Colorado is or isn't one of those states. It just seems wrong that it's against the law in some places to "puff" (leave your car running unattended like to warm it up in the morning) but it's not against the law to leave your child in that car unattended. So...the potential for a car to be stolen is more important to us than the safety of a child? Again, this van wasn't running but it still totally freaked me out.

Maybe it's just me...poor Logan is dragged out of the car every time we pick up Connor no matter what the weather conditions or how short the time I think I'll be gone or even if he's sleeping. And there's no keeping Connor in the car - he wants to go with us wherever we go :) Am I just being overprotective here? Do you leave your kids in the car alone and go into a building where you can't see them for a period of time? Part of me feels embarrassed that I created this small scene with another mom who likely has a child in Logan's class so I'll have to see her again at some point but the other part of me thinks she should be the embarrassed one, right? Ugh...

Pictures!

We've been slacking on taking and posting pictures! Oops! Here are a few :)
Our sister-in-law Naomi made me a beautiful scarf for Christmas and Connor was so in love with it that we asked Naomi to make one for him too. It arrived on Monday and Connor LOVES it! He says "Thanks Aunt Mioni!" :)


And some Valentine's Day pictures!


Brotherly love


Have a Happy Valentine's Day tomorrow!

You may call me Madame Chairwoman :)

Well, ok, you could have called me that for about an hour and a half on Tuesday night....not that anyone did. :) I was voted as our precinct's chairwoman for the caucus on Tuesday which really only meant that I had to organize the people who showed up from my precinct, make sure they got to vote for who they wanted, and then read out loud the twelve party resolutions for them to vote on. There were only 23 people from my precinct but there were hundreds of people in the room (I think there were 10 or 12 precincts there) so it was CRAZY! But FUN! The caucus leader said she was in that same room 4 years ago and there were only SIX people for all of the precincts so she was shocked to see it at standing room only. The whole thing was really disorganized but everyone was pretty patient and understanding. Before it all started one guy tried to get me to switch my vote so it was exciting to have some political discussion - I am so not a great debater but I think I held my own! We both walked away smiling and probably even more set on voting for our original choices, but it was a good exchange of information. It was the first time I've attended a caucus (and the first time for most of the people in my group) but I don't think it'll be my last! :)

potty talk

If this post doesn't epitomize the #1 clichéd Mommy blog post, I don't know what does! :)

We bought a stand alone potty for Logan today. Actually, the box says in big bold letters that it's a "3-in-1 Toilet Training System" and below that in slightly smaller font says "supports you & your child at every stage of training". That makes it sound like much more than what it is - basically a big plastic bowl! I guess it's 3-in-1 because it's a standalone potty or you can take it apart and use one part on top of the adult size toilet and the other part as a step stool for hand washing. I'm not quite sure how it supports me at every stage of training but hopefully it'll help Logan out a bit. :)

Anyway, we bought it today not because we necessarily think Logan is ready for potty training - after all, they say you should wait until the kid can say when they need to go and since he's not saying Mama or Dada yet he's clearly not meeting that criteria. However, Connor showed interest and started sitting on the potty around this age and we thought it really helped us all gently ease into the idea of potty training. He only sat on it right before his bath and eventually figured out what to do with it, became more consistent over time and used it at other times of the day and then, voila, he was potty trained (wow that made it sound so fast and easy). So we figured we'd get Logan into the same habit and since we passed by that aisle at Target today we picked one up (I could go into why we didn't save the one we used with Connor but this post is probably more information that you wanted already).

So when we got home Connor was really excited about the potty. He asked if we were going to wrap it up and give it to Logan as a gift, since that's what the parents do in a potty book we used to read. But, we just opened the box and Logan sat down on it immediately, fully clothed. At bath time Jeremy took it and the boys upstairs and had both boys sit on their potties at the same time (aww, how cute). Guess what? Logan actually peed in it! Can you believe it? I'm sure it was just a fluke but we were totally not expecting it! In fact, Jeremy was picking Logan up to put him in the bath when he actually started to go and had to sit him back down quickly! Connor was really cute during the whole thing - telling Logan what to do and then he got really excited when he actually did it!

I guess we'll see how it goes! Now, where did those potty books disappear to? :)

Hi hi

A long time ago I signed up for a daily Brainteaser text message to be sent to my cell phone. It was free and the little blurb on Verizon's site said something about challenging your mind. I like brainteasers so I thought they would be fun. Unfortunately, they're just silly things like "if the world is spinning so quickly, why don't we all get dizzy?" or "Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways?" or "I may be inconsistent, but not all the time." Ugh. Today's was "Why do we say "bye bye" but not "hi hi"? Silly, but very fitting for this particular morning, because we had Logan's ChildFind evaluation today.

A team of four people evaluated everything you could possibly want to know about Logan and more in about two hours! They asked me a bunch of questions, watched how he played with toys, how he moved around the room and how he interacted with the evaluators. Not surprisingly (since this is the reason we went), they recommended that he have speech therapy. He's just not mimicking us the way he should be and isn't making very many consonant sounds. The good news is that he is trying to talk and seems to understand a lot of what we say to him, but just isn't forming the sounds properly. He "talks" at the right times - like when he needs help, after you ask him a question, etc. - but it's just not understandable. So, they're going to set up a meeting for us with a speech therapist and we'll also see an audiologist to be sure his ears are ok after his two recent ear infections.

What was surprising about the whole thing is that his other skills are not only on par with other 18 month olds but advanced in several areas. For example, he's already holding a marker correctly (not using his whole hand but has it positioned correctly between thumb and first two fingers), can put together puzzles really well (not by trial and error as most kids this age do - he put the right shapes in the right spots on his first attempt) and excels at pretend play (while we were there he fed a baby doll in a high chair and then washed the dishes in the play sink). Emotionally he is right on track - for example he laughs at things that are funny and is really attached to me but feels safe enough to go across the room with one of the evaluators and just look at me occasionally to be sure everything was ok. They were also impressed with his persistance - he wasn't able to turn a knob on one of the toys at first but kept trying until he figured it out.

So, all in all, it was a positive experience for us both. I'm sure no one ever actually wants their child to be in speech therapy but I'm glad we're taking steps now to make sure he's on track and not waiting for him to get frustrated with not getting his point across. :)