For day one..

I told Ella that today was the start of Down syndrome Awareness Month. She didn't seem to care.

Just kept sleeping away.

Since I am going to be blogging for 31 days, I am going to go all boring on you guys and make this one an update. We have to start somewhere and I figured that since I have been missing for a few weeks, we should get all caught up. Here it goes:
Ella – Well, Ella isn’t laughing. She gets really close to laughing, she smiles, sucks in her stomach like a giant laugh is going to come out and then – nothing - . I know that she will laugh in her own time, but I want her to laugh now! I want to hear her cute little belly laugh and hear her make little squeals to go along with how excited she gets at things. She is also really mobile. She rolls all over the place, reaching for toys, pivoting to change directions, she is only happy if she has free reign of the floor. She has no interest in sitting up though, none at all. I think since she is such a mobile baby (she is already getting in a crawling stance) she sees no reason to practice sitting up. Her PT and I are diligently working at getting her core muscles stronger so sitting will happen one day, but for now, she is happy with getting from point A to B by rolling.
She is also an eating machine. She loves her baby food. 3 times a day and she eats an entire 3.5 ounce package each time. We are feeding her Ella’s Kitchen Organic baby food. It started out as something cute because it had the same name as her and now it is all she will eat. Good that it is organic, bad because organic baby food is expensive. I think we spend more on her food and formula each week than the two boys put together!

We found a new occupational therapist and all is going well so far. She is nice and knowledgeable and Ella seemed to smile at her, so that is good. Her PT and Speech Therapist are also doing great. I love the team Ella has helping her. I do sometimes dream of a day where we don’t have anyone coming into the house and I can just relax and not vacuum and not be out of bed by 5:00 AM, I can dream, right?
Other than our little girl not wanting to give up any laughs, she is doing great. I stay far away from milestone charts. Ella has a wonderful team helping her achieve her milestones and when she does them isn’t important. She will do them.
Reed – Oh Reed… We learned over the last week that Reed isn’t the friendliest kid in his class. This was a little shocking as he is by far the most outgoing of all of us. He likes to make friends and play with others, or so we thought. His teacher was wondering why he was always alone and the kids would leave the table he was at. She decided to kneel behind him during play time and heard him whispering “Go away”, “don’t touch that”, etc. under his breath if a kid walked up to play with him. Awesome. Not only is our kid being mean, but he found a super creepy way to do it! We talked with him and while I hope we got through to him, I am not so sure. His reasons for doing it? He just wants to be friends with Ryan so there is no reason to talk to the kids in his class and he didn’t want to be loud about it so he whispers.

Ryan – I didn’t have much to post about Ryan until I received an email from his teacher this afternoon. To paraphrase her email –“Ryan got in a food fight at lunch. The cafeteria workers were not happy at all.” I can’t wait to hear about this when I get home tonight. This is not like Ryan at all! I am not happy with him, but a little part of me is glad he knows how to break out of his grown up shell sometimes and be a kid (don't tell him I said that though!)

So… That catches you up on the kids. See you all tomorrow!