Puree no more

It is good day when the doctor releases us to eat "real" food. No more pureed food for us. After Ashlyn's previous mouth surgery, she was on a liquid diet for about three weeks. She ate everything out of a cup. Last night we had our fast and easy supper, eggs and biscuits, and she wanted to know if she was going to eat her biscuit out of a cup. How truly excited she was to find out that she didn't have to eat her biscuits that way any more!!

Ashlyn's before and after pictures. I thought it was kind of interesting. She had around 120 stitches in her little girl mouth.

And here is her bright and shining face, I couldn't dare only put a picture of her little mouth, so here is what truly counts. She is such a blessing to us and we are thankful for her.

4 teeth MIA

We are really snaggle-toothed right now. This week, Caleb has lost another tooth. This the 4th tooth in the last 3 months. We are in a desparate need of some teeth to come in. From the looks of it, we may not get any in any time soon. Poor little guy has to bite all of his food on the sides of his mouth. Everytime Caleb looks like he might be wiggling his teeth, Ashlyn decides her teeth might be loose too.



Lately, the tooth fairy has been really creative. Caleb has received anything from "Cars" toys to money to socks. Caleb doesn't really care what he gets, he is just so excited when he finds out that the tooth fairy came to visit him.

Colorblind no more

I love to see my little guys learn and explore new things. Caleb is always learning something cool at school and coming home to tell us about it. And of course, Ashlyn always has something new to say. But then came last week, when Caleb learned about Martin Luther King Jr. I am all about learning about MLK and all of the great things he did. You could tell Caleb's class had been talking at great length about him because he knew lots of details about him and some of the things he did. And then it hit him. People are different colors. For the last 6 years, Caleb looked at people without color and now he sees it. It was really hard for me to see this stage of innocence gone. To me it is just one more thing showing that he is growing up. When he was little, he always called "new" friends by the color of their clothes. " Hey Mama, look at that blue guy..." (The blue guy was the one with the blue shirt, etc.) Even though Caleb is getting older, I pray that he will continue to see people for who they are inside like he did in years past.

For the last 2 weeks

One thing that we have been dealing with the last few months have been surgeries. Right at the end of November Caleb had hernia surgery. Nothing too major, but something that had to be dealt with. He was a great little man and made a quick recovery. There was a day or two that he walked around rather slow like, but came out with flying colors. (What the best part of the whole thing was the bandage on his incision was clear, so he could look at the blood and how it was healing up. He thought that was way cool.)


And then came Ashlyn's surgery. We knew she was going to have a surgery at some point due to a whole in the roof of her mouth. She had had a cleft palette when she was born, and had surgery in the Ukraine to help the problem, but it in need of some more help. On Christmas Eve we found out it was going to be on January 3rd. We didn't really have very long to prepare our hearts for this surgery, but that was probably God looking out for us.







The surgery took about 3 hours and she came out with about 115 stitches in the roof of her mouth. (This particular surgery normally happens here in the US when the child is about 9 months old, not 3 1/2 years old.) The doctor basically had to locate all of the muscles between the roof of her mouth and her nasal cavity, stitch them together, and reconstruct her soft palette. The hardest thing about the whole process is that she had to be on a liquid diet for three weeks. AAAHHHH!! A liquid diet for anyone is hard, much less when they are 3 years old. We are hopefully nearing the end of the 3 week period where she can go to soft foods and we can get back to normal.





We are very blessed to have had this surgery and I know it is going to help her in the long run, but we are getting ready to be done with it for a while. She really has been amazing through it all. We couldn't do it with all of the help and hand-holding from our parents, my aunt Carri, and from different people from church who came to support us.

Where does time go -

I can hardly believe that it has been almost a whole month since my last post. I am sure, like most everyone else, it has been a crazy, crazy month. Our Christmas celebrations took up most of that month, but we have had a wide array of other things in our lives as well. (I will post on that later.)


I don't know how most people celebrate Christmas, but we celebrate it a lot. I love Christmas and love celebrating Jesus' birth. Monty and I both are very blessed to have 7 of our 8 grandparents still alive. With that said, we barely have Christmas at home. We travel to see all of our grandparents and parents usually between Christmas and New Years. This year was no different. We got to visit and be with all of our family at one time or another. It was so fun being with all of our family. We love having them all near enough to visit them.

Caleb and Ashlyn loved all of the Christmas presents. Here they are sporting their new animal headphones.

Mik even enjoyed the holidays. She got a new red "glittery" dog collar.

Santa did come to visit our house, even though it was a few days early. He brought Caleb and Ashlyn a fort/swing-set and a fish. Santa worked most of the night putting the fort together, but knew before he started that he was going to need some extra help from Mama and Papa. Both Caleb and Ashlyn were very excited about their new things. They love playing in their fort and swinging, as well as loving their new fish "Freckle." Here is a picture of their first time in their new fort. Caleb was so excited that he started dancing around and Ashlyn was so giggled at watching him.