A lot has happened during that time. We had a fun filled summer tagging the baby along everywhere including camping (which should have been its own separate post mostly consisting of my whining of how that wasn't a great idea). All three oldest kids tried out Tae Kwon Do and loved it for 3 lessons. Ahem. I was persistent and dragged them to almost all remaining lessons, cuzzz we are no quitters! Besides, it was their idea in the first place!
Abby played volleyball for her school in the Fall and loved it. She has now narrowed down her sports of choice to volleyball and soccer which are both Fall sports. Not sure how we are going to do that. Nick and Tim are doing swimming right now and are really enjoying it though Nicolas is super excited about doing soccer this Spring(our local community center hosts the league in the Spring) and both of the older boys will be doing wrestling next Winter. Because they want to and their mama agrees that they need to ;)
We sponsored a family of newcomers for a month and a half that has an autistic child who melted my heart and turned it toward unending gratitude. I stayed home for 10 months and returned to my part time job. I've met my students and have been trying to win over their
I am sure there was more but since I neglected to journal, I have probably forgotten it. Which is why I need to journal more.
Most of 2012 was spent getting to know the little guy. He is definitely popular around here. His older siblings adore him. His sister is his second mom who on many days does a better job of rocking him to sleep than I do. He is not yet walking but loves to explore. His crawling gets him everywhere he wishes to go. Climbing stairs are his favorite mom is busy lets see if this gets her attention activity. We think he knows about 5 words already. Most are names for the people closest to him. He loves to wake school kids up in the morning by crawling on them and giving them hugs. Even the crabbiest non-morning persons of them are tamed by this gesture. He is learning the animal sounds right now and can mimic dogs bark and cats mew good enough for a 1 year old. He loves to rough play. Whenever he sees his older brothers wrestle, he gets right in the middle of them and joins in the tackling. Most of all this boy loves to eat! At age one he eats everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) we eat and a lot of it. At Sweet Tomatoes once we joked that even though Phil was free, he ate more than Nick and Tim combined. He gives me no grief about my cooking for which I love him even more ;)
He is still being breastfed. The longest of all of my babies. In fact, he is the only one who outright refuses formula and cow's milk. Which is not worrisome to me but presented a problem to his nanny (my sister in-law) when I first went back to work. We still rock him to sleep and on most nights he ends up in our bed because he still nurses about three times a night. Yes, I have no spine. And no, we haven't really tried to fix that problem except for a time when I was sick and slept in a different room. The training lasted for 3 nights and the sleeping through the night thing lasted 3 nights as well...[sign].
We had a little party celebrating Phillip turning one. We kept it small (by our standards) and had about 5 families over. I kept the decorations at a minimum too since it is against my religion to spend $500 on a decor for a 1 year old's birthday) I was happy with what I was able to get on a $40 budget. Here are some pics from his big day:
With his auntie who is expecting her first baby this summer! Super excited about that event in our lives.
