The Journey To Eternity: January 2021

Evan is 9 months old today!

Some new things that happened this month:

~ Still wakes up consistently at 6 AM

~ He now pulls himself up to standing

~ Can stand by himself when he is holding onto something of leaning on something.

~ He eats everything that the family is eating and finds all the food that his brothers drop on the floor

~ We put up a gate at the top of the stairs but not before Evan had his first fall down the stairs...OOPS

~ We also had to move the crib down to the lower level, again not before he fell out of the crib after his nap one time.

~He gets really frustrated when Connor takes all the toys way from him (which he does every chance he gets)

~ Loves to play patty cake with Mom

~ Still army crawls but s very fast

This month seems to be all about Connor. On January 22, he had ear tubes put into his ears. We got his hearing tested in December to see if that was affecting his speech. We found that he had fluid behind his ear drums. So we went the the ENT and he scheduled surgery to put ear tubes in his ears.

The funny thing is that most kids have a lot of ear infections if they need ear tubes. Connor has never had one that I know of. So without the speech problem we never would have known about the fluid in his ears.

He did very well in the hospital. He didn't get to eat at all that morning and surgery was scheduled for 12:15 pm. He was aggressively sucking his thumb though. He was very friendly with the hospital staff and didn't cry when they took him into to surgery. I don't know if he cried when he got there though because obviously I didn't go in with him.

Before Surgery:

The surgery took about 20 minutes. Connor has small ear canals and they had to really dig out the wax so he bleed a little bit but other than that we had no complications.

He woke up and then promptly went back to sleep in the recovery room.

After Surgery:

He was a little out of it when I finally took him home too.

Connor's first day of Preschool

Connor is going to preschool now that he is 3 years old. We enrolled him to try and get him to improve his speech. After 6 months of working with a speech therapist, Connor still doesn't use speech functionally in his day to day life. He is great at repeating words that you say but he won't ever initiate a conversation when he wants something or wants you to do something for him. So we enrolled him in preschool. He goes Tuesdays and Fridays for 2 1/2 hours in the morning. He also gets to take the bus to school.

Today was the first day. He seemed to have a great day. He went into the classroom with his teacher no problem and seemed happy when I picked him up at the end of the day.

Connor's Biirthday

This year we just had a small family birthday for Connor. We had breakfast for dinner, since Connor can't really make any requests yet and that seems to be what he eats the best. Grandma and Grandpa Scott also joined us.

Wyatt wanted to make Connor cupcakes, so we didn't even have a really fancy cake. Wyatt picked the cake mix out and made the cupcakes with mom. Although mom did make homemade ice cream with her new Christmas present.

Some how we didn't get any pictures of him opening his presents but he got a new car track with a powered car and dinosaurs, a new backpack for preschool, new books, a new ball to play with on the trampoline, and a new singing teddy bear. Then he got a balloon powered car from Mamu and Papu.

Evan is 8 months old

Evan is 8 months old. Some things that happened this month:

~ Evan now army crawls everywhere. He never gets on his hands and knees but he can get anywhere he wants to pretty fast

~ Evan can sit up on his own now.

~ We drove in the car to Ohio. It was a total of 37 hours in a car due to many delays. He was very happy to get out of the car at the end

~ Still sleeps through the night but is up at 6 AM still

~ Loved the Christmas tree and playing underneath it

~ Had his first Christmas. He wasn't sure what to do with the presents

~ Eats really well

Christmas in Ohio

Well this trip to Ohio was a little rough. We left Utah around 1 pm on December 22nd and only made it to Rawlins WY (about 4 hours) before we hit our first road block. I-80 was closed. So we got off and had dinner in Rawlins. Then we decided to try a back way to go south to I-70 in Colorado. Well we had just passed into Colorado when we came upon a jack knifed semitruck. We weren't stopping in time some Liz had to go off the road to avoid hitting the car in front of her. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, when not 10 minutes later, as we were trying to get our car back on the road, a car came up over to hill going fast and tried to slam on their brakes. They then fishtailed all the way down the hill and slammed into the car at the back of the line (which would have been us if we had not ended up off the side of the road). We spent 4 hours there waiting for a tow truck to come fix the semi, then get all the other cars around the wrecked cars and then they finally pulled us back up on the road.

After that we decided to turn around and try to make it back to a town to stay the night. We ended up off the road again about 3 miles from Baggs, WY. Luckily the tow truck driver gave us a card and we called them back and they came and got us back on the road again. They also towed us basically all the way into Baggs WY. After that we just got a hotel room and stayed the night.

The next day we headed out again heading south. We made it to I-70 around noon that day. Then we headed east on I-70. We finally made it to Denver around 8 pm that night. If you are keeping track, it took us 11 hours to go about 320 miles. Then we proceeded to drive straight through to New Castle Indiana. We arrived there around 1 pm, just in time for lunch with Liz's extended family.

After that, we continued on to Ohio.

That night the boys got new pajamas for Christmas. The younger boys got Christmas pajamas and the older 2 got matching Minecraft creeper pajamas. They loved them.

The next day was Christmas, we just opened gifts and hung out at the house and played with our new gifts. The boys got lots of Legos to put together and play with. Liz got an Ice Cream Maker which she was very excited about and used throughout the rest of the week that we were there.

Connor loved to be right next to the dogs. He was a little rough with them though and we had to constantly remind him not to grab the dogs but to be soft.

The next day we all went to the Cincinnati Zoo to see the Christmas light display.

By far, the boys favorite part was the bug building. Spencer was having a very tough night and didn't even want to be there after about 10 minutes in the zoo. However, even he got really excited and wanted to look at every bug when we came to that building.