Lights, Elves, Christmas Cookies and More!

Man we had a crazy fun week last week!  Monday Devin had Speech Therapy which he is so rockin'!  She finished up his year end testing, and did some fun things with him.  Monday night Elizabeth had gymnastics, I gave them notice that this would be her last month at The Little Gym. :(  Tuesday as soon as we were done with dinner we went to Temple Square and it wasn't nearly as crowded as our last attempt!  We watched the Nativity story and stressed the importance of it during this time of year, and that it is the true reason for the season.  At the end President Monson speaks and it was so touching to hear Elizabeth suck in her breath, turn to me and say in innocent excitement, "That's our prophet!  Thomas S. Monson!! He's talking to US!"  Oh how I love my gorgeous girl!!  Then we just wandered and took in all the beautiful lights, and Nativities.  The batteries in our camera died toward the end but se la vi.  It was a great night, and really left us in the right spirit of Christmas.  Wednesday night some sisters from our ward provided us with tickets to A Christmas Carol: A Musical at Pioneer Memorial Theater, they even provided babysitting! (can you see why it's so hard to leave this ward?!  It truly is the most amazing ward in the world!! In fact it's less like a ward and more like a big family!) Tony and I really enjoyed the show...It was AMAZING!  And we really enjoyed the time alone.  And our kids actually even behaved themselves...for the most part, so that was a relief to me!  Thursday Devin had OT and feeding therapy in the morning.  Dani had a lot of fun just playing with our handsome little man, and feeding therapy went pretty well too.  That night we went to Gardener Village and saw all the fun and silly elves, we did the little scavenger hunt, which isn't nearly as hard as the witches hunt, but just as fun!  At the end the kids of course got their free cookies, which even came with a cute little Christmas ring!  It was a very fun night!  Friday morning my mom came and picked up Elizabeth and took her back to her house with her cousin Daniel whom she was watching while Eric and Jen saw a movie, that night Elizabeth helped Nana and Papa pick out "the most beautiful Christmas tree EVER!" and Saturday morning she decorated it!  Meanwhile back to Friday with Elizabeth at Nana's, after Devin was down for his nap I pulled out Christmas presents and organized them, wrapped Elizabeth's and Devin's presents from us, and I even got Tony's presents wrapped and under the tree!  Go me!!!  That night we did some much needed grocery shopping.  Saturday morning we had tithing settlement, we went to Dessert Star to get our Christmas present(season tickets), we even made a stop at the bank and were still to lunch at Sizzler's with my grandpa Holbrook early!  Lunch was a lot of fun, I got a New York Steak with broccoli, which unfortunately thanks to baby messing with my tastes....was a no go(Tony definitely benefited though!)  And our kids ate really good so I'll take it!  We had a good time visiting with family, I ended up filling up on rolls mostly, but they are really yummy rolls!  After we stopped by the condo to get some things then headed up to my parents house, we only had to go back once for forgotten things ;) Then Tony and my dad got to work in the basement getting to work on the two bedrooms they're building.  Jen came up with Daniel so my mom and I and her got some good visiting in.  We spent the night, as it was a pretty long night(we knew it would be) Then got the kids in their church clothes and ready, headed home, Tony and I got ready real fast and made it to church in time for Nursery and Primary.  Sunday night we had our niece and nephew over to help us decorate Christmas cookies and watch a Muppet's Christmas Carol as is tradition. They had breakfast for dinner with us then got to decorating cookies. They had a lot of fun with it!  Elizabeth was getting pretty artistic with her cookies this year...but Emily takes the cake for most effort put into decorating her cookies!  It was a very fun night!!

Light at Temple Square!

The Elves at Gardener Village!

One of her fun 12 days of Christmas gifts!

Making dinner and decorating Christmas cookies!

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes!

Ok so here's the true update on our life.  Some of Devin's autistic tendencies have been getting alarmingly worse lately...namely his self-harming.  In the last few months Devin has gotten worse about biting himself, scratching himself, pulling his hair and ears, his head banging has been getting worse as well.  Since he doesn't seem to be able to process pain he has no idea how badly he hurts himself...scary is an understatement!  So we've been making TONS of changes in his living environment to help him cope, obviously we scaled down the toys that are out, and organized them away in bins, we improved his "calm down spot", it's now a crib mattress with a Buzz tent and very soft arm pillow inside.  We also gave him his own room as sharing with Elizabeth was stressing us ALL out, so we moved Elizabeth into our room, and we have been sleeping on the hide-a-bed in our living room, at that point we had to get a storage unit to put excess stuff in and we tried to further de-clutter our little home.  All of these things have helped though quite minimally. And honestly sleeping in our living room is not a permanent solution...mostly because....well we're going to be adding a little one to our family in July(there's your announcement, I'll be more excited Jan 9th when I hear a strong and healthy heartbeat at 12 weeks...miscarrying even once kinda kills your early excitement) and we have nowhere to put a baby at the moment.  On top of all that...let's just say we're drowning in medical expenses...between my hospital stays, surgeries, tests and such, Elizabeth's hospital stays, surgery, and ongoing medical issues, and Devin's hospital stays and intense ongoing...probably never ending medical expenses, we just can't stay on top of everything, we did the best we could as long as we could but short selling our condo has become a necessary step to recovery.  Not ideal....but necessary.  Luckily my parent's have offered to let us live in their basement apartment that we're finishing and expanding, and then it will actually be bigger than our condo and most importantly have 3 bedrooms. And a little more room for us to spread out hopefully helping Devin feel less...."stressed" in his living environment.  It was an extremely hard decision to come to, as we absolutely love our ward and neighbors and are going to miss them so very much, but we know it's the right thing for our family at this time.  Devin will have to change therapists which is hard and not ideal in the least, but once again a necessary change for the greater good.  Elizabeth will have to leave The Little Gym but we plan on enrolling her into a dance and tumbling class at Bravo Arts Academy which is like 5 minutes from my parent's house(and less expensive!).  The wonderful thing about my parent's basement apartment is that it has its own entrance, own kitchen...even its own laundry room, it is totally separate from the main part of their home, you don't have to see my parents to see us.  Getting out from under our condo and living under my parents will allow us to get back on top of things, regain a savings, and build up a down payment for a house.  It will take a couple years but I'm so grateful for the blessing that my parents being able to help us like this is! As hard of a time as I'm having adjusting to the changes, I am so very grateful for the windows our Heavenly Father is opening up all around us, it reaffirms to us that we are doing as He would have us do, and that it's all a part of His great plan for us.  We weren't expecting to get pregnant....we're super excited that we are....but I must admit I'm a bit nervous to have a baby around Devin who is convinced a doll and a real baby are essentially the same.  Not to mention that Devin takes so much of my time, energy and attention.  As does a newborn, so I'm really counting on Elizabeth being a big help with this baby.  I must admit dealing with all this while my hormones are all over the place isn't real peachy either, I've probably cried way more than necessary over it all, in fact yesterday when I was filling Elizabeth in on it all, I was fighting back tears, as she's jumping around with excitement...oh how I wish I could have the innocent faith of my 4 year old! Then again I'm not getting a princess room out of this ;)  Tony is going to have an hour commute to and from work, but luckily he drives a commuter car, and is up to it.  Oh I guess I should mention that we're planning on moving around January 12th...yep just one month from today(and the tears start coming).  We're listing our condo empty for lots of reasons, but basically it will be easier on us and sell better to boot.  Well I think that's pretty much it....now y'all know.  :)

A Broken Toe, The Dicken's Christmas Festival and More!

Lets start last Sunday(like a week from yesterday) in the evening we met up with my parents and brother and and sister in law at the Bountiful Cemetery to put a Christmas decoration on my sister Linda Kay's grave, Elizabeth understands more about her every year...this year she gets that Linda Kay was mommy's sister and so she is her aunt, but as for why the name Linda is so important we're still getting there ;)  The kids had tons of energy so they were having fun running around(we did our best to keep them off headstones), I got another 3 Linda's picture with my mom,(Linda Gail), sister (Linda Kay) and daughter (Linda Elizabeth).  Oh how I wish my grandma Linda Mae was still alive for so many reasons but mostly I wish Elizabeth could have known her!  But I'm definitely going to do my best to help my kids at least know of her!
Lets see....Monday was of course gymnastics.  Tuesday, oh Tuesday!  In the morning Elizabeth had an appointment with her new ophthalmologist(eye doctor), her old one accepted a teaching position out of state. But her new one seems very good as well.  She very thoroughly checked her eyes, I could tell from the start that her prescription was off, as she struggled with the basic pictures just getting smaller test they didn't get that small before Elizabeth would say she couldn't really see it.  And sure enough her eyes have gotten a bit worse, so we came out with a new prescription for her.  The only good thing is that her glasses bit the dust a few weeks ago, so she's just been wearing her back-up pair since, so at least we didn't just buy new frames and lenses and have to replace them!  They had to dilate her eyes of course which she for some reason absolutely HATES! So I promised her lunch after if she'd cooperate and it worked pretty well, so after we took her to lunch at Arctic Circle since their play place is always less crowed which works best when Devin is there, and sure enough our kids had it to themselves most of the time!  That night was our Relief Society Christmas dinner which was very good!  I had a great time visiting! And enjoying a great dinner and wonderfully spiritual program!  Afterward I ended up totally breaking down and loosing it talking to the Relief Society President about changes that have somewhat suddenly come up in our lives(but all that is for another post) she was a great help and comfort to me, and sometimes ya just need to talk about that kind of stuff!
Then we get to Thursday which was one heck of a day!!  It started with Devin's OT at the center so I dropped Elizabeth off with Kay a wonderful neighbor, friend and primary president!  Devin did really well with the sensory exercises Dani did with him, we were both very pleased with the progress he's made!  Feeding therapy even went well as he ate a couple newish things!  I informed Dani of the changes that are coming in our lives and she was full of great advice to help Devin adjust and cope the best he can to them.  That night was crazy to begin with, Elizabeth had a Christmas program rehearsal at 6:30 and we had a meeting at our house at 7, but we were all set to make it work when at around 5:45ish Devin got mad at Tony for not picking him up and holding him(Tony was working on dinner, which is why he wasn't able to hold Devin)so Devin out of anger pulled our medium crock pot off the kitchen cart, but showed no signs of pain like it hit him.  But when I looked over at him across the living room a couple minutes later the tip of his sock was soaked in blood so I bolted over and looked at his foot and the big toe on his right foot was HUGE, stretched black, blue and bleeding.  So he and I bundled up and went over to instacare  which left Tony having to drop Elizabeth off at her rehearsal, and when it was clear I was not going to be back in time to pick her up, wonderful Kay agreed to bring her home.  Meanwhile back at instacare they had to take an x-ray of Devin's foot to check for broken bones....the x-ray turned out to be by far the most traumatic part of the whole night(but that's an explanation for another time, though some of you already know why).  The x-ray showed a small fracture at the tip of Devin's big toe bone :( They said that there's really not a whole lot that can be done, that the bone should repair itself just fine, so they got a flaming hot poker and stuck it under his toenail to release the built up blood under it.  He didn't make a peep when they did it which totally took the doctor off guard even though I'd warned her that he didn't really feel pain, I think a part of her didn't fully believe me....she did now!  They then wrapped and bandaged  it up(which also didn't seem to bother him at all).  He ended the visit with an otter pop so all was good!  And by the time I got home it was the kids bedtime....so there went the night....thank you very much Mr. Devin!! ;)  (his toe seems fine now, he didn't even loose his toenail!  It's still the wrong color, but it looks so much better!) Friday my mom came down and did a little Spanish lesson with Elizabeth, though she had a really hard time staying focused and wasn't really into it(it must be December!) so it was short and simple!  Friday night was our Ward Christmas party, which was wonderful! Tony ended up wandering with Devin as he wasn't up to sitting still...at...all.  The primary acted out the story of the First Christmas, and Elizabeth got to be an angel, and she was so very excited about it!
Saturday morning Tony and Elizabeth went to a Lowe's Build and Grow clinic and Elizabeth got to build a gingerbread house!  It is way cute!  Then after Devin's nap we went to the Dicken's Christmas Festival, which was cold but lots of fun!!  After we picked up a Little Caesar's pizza on our way home and had pizza and hot chocolate while we watched the Polar Express!
Oh and this past week Elizabeth and I learned about Hanukkah, neither one of us has been into full on lessons so we just had a kinda casual learning week.  And that was our week!

These are the pictures from the cemetery

Elizabeth cutting paper snowflakes as one of the activities on our Countdown to Christmas

These are just some fun pictures taken through out the week of the kids silliness!

Putting up Elizabeth's little tree in her room(which is the master yes...explanation in next post, forgive the mess)

Elizabeth making a bird "treat"(another activity from the Countdown to Christmas)

Talking to Santa and Mrs Clause at our ward Christmas party, apparently Devin will go up to even Santa to get a candy cane...then again sissy survived so he knew it was safe!

And the party dinner, and Elizabeth the (rocking horse riding) angel

Elizabeth doing her advent calendars...she loves them!!

Elizabeth building her gingerbread house at the build and grow clinic.

And finally the Dicken's Christmas Festival...so much fun!!