Joys and Trials of Change

This year seems to be the year of change for us, positive things definitely, but change is change and that isn't always easy to take as you can see...



...in preparing for the city-wide-garage-sale here we decided that John needed to get out of his crib and move on to a different bed. We've talked about this for quite a while, ever since he could put a foot in the bars on each side and shake the whole crib, and most certainly since he started to kick so hard that we were afraid that it wouldn't survive. We told John that the crib was going, but alas once he realized what dad was really doing, well, you'll see...



...silly kid. Of course with the crib and changing table out of his room there is now much, much more room for parking his jeep, plane, gait trainer and who knows what else will end up in there. For now he is sleeping on his crib mattress on the floor, eventually, later this year we hope to move him to a single bed, but for now this seemed like a painless, read you can't fall to far out of it, way to learn to sleep without bars.

Since he got up at 7am this morning and then 'helped' with the garage sale by walking up and down the driveway all morning and monitoring everyone who came we thought he'd be ready for a nap this afternoon, we were wrong. He wasn't, but he did realize that he can roll out of the new bed and go get some toys, and maybe this will supply the incentive that he needs to finally finish learning to sit-up by himself.

Getting rid of things and moving things also meant that his gallery of stuffed animals could now have a home that didn't involve black trash bags in corners...



...I'm not sure exactly why John is choking this poor stoat, but after this he proceeded to get most of the animals out, give them drinks, make them 'talk' to each other and a few of them even went for a complimentary flight, oh well, Mark tells me that boys really do play with their stuffed animals this way.

Of course this afternoon during church I finally had the last straw when John scooted up to the elevated portion of the floor that the pulpit stands on and started marching the stuffed panda across the front of the base of the pulpit, hmmmmmm, this just doesn't seem like the place that panda's need to be. The poor panda had to spend the rest of the service in the chair in the bathroom, but the boy was marginally better behaved and of course demanding it as soon as church was over. Lol, I would have never given it to him to start with if it hadn't been so darn cute that he needed to feed the thing a fortune cookie, good grief.

Last of the pictures is one for John's godmother...



...in going through things we found the hat that she made for him when he was a preemie size, actually it was a wee big at first, as you can see he's grown a bit, he was much happier when daddy helped him put it on an animal.

All in all John is doing well, he's actually getting over the end of the intestinal virus he was fighting, we're being able to push his g-tube feeds up a bit and he's starting to realize that if he wants daddy to understand him he's going to have to sign more words than one and point at the direction that daddy needs to go in. I was very worried about John's expressive language skills, but Mark assures me that he just needs to want it bad enough to overcome his physical inabilities and it'll all be fine. Daddy's know best, I'm sure of it. We have noticed lately that he is much, much, much more interactive with things that he is watching and is signing through shows and imitating motions, it's really funny when he is imitating Mark putting his collar on, if you didn't know what was going on you'd think the kid was trying to choke himself.

We are headed off to Omaha on Monday, early, early, as in I'm doing laundry and packing tomorrow, because we want to get in as much play time as we can at the Baker's before we have to head into town for appointments and such and then head back home so that we can get on with all the stuff we need to do here. I'm going to try to remember to take the camera, we'll see!