The Hunter Family Five: Spring is in the Air!

Spring has been teasing us a little this year it seems, with it's warm then cold cycles. But, spring is definitely in the air! And the hope that all of my children will be healthy again is coming along with it :) We have been enjoying lots of outdoor time at the park and in our backyard over the past couple of months and it makes for happier people all around. I don't know what it is about being outside but I do believe God created us to be outside as much as possible because it just seems to raise everyone's spirits tremendously when we walk out the door into the sunshine. Seriously, my children can all be having meltdowns and bad tantrums over silly little things, but when we walk out the door into the sunshine it all stops for the most part and my children run around screaming and giggling and just being so silly :) I love this time of year because it's warm enough to go outside, but not too hot like like mid-summer. I never really cared much about the weather forecast before kids, but now I am checking the weather on the news and on my weather app every single day...what did people do before weather forecasts? These forecasts seriously help me plan my days. Which brings me to my next point...we love Virginia Beach and we are going to be so sad to leave it in a few months. It is so family friendly and has so much to see and do that we never run out of things to do. If it's pretty outside, we have so many places to choose from: the beach, zoo, parks, our great backyard, so many scenic walking trails, and they even have a botanical garden that we have yet to visit. If it's rainy, they have 2 aquariums, an indoor children's museum in Chesapeake, or we have a terrorize the aisles of Target or Babies R Us playdate :) Everything is so convenient and we are right in the middle of it all. We sure are going to be sad to leave Va Beach behind :(
However, we are also excited at the new adventures that await us in Chicago! People that have lived there say they have LOVED it, with so many things always going on and so much to do it's a very lively city. I am a little bit dreading the transportation issue when it comes to getting into the city and maneuvering around. I have heard it can be okay if you hit the city at the right times on the right days, but it can also be pretty miserable to try to drive around that city if you don't. I'm having flashbacks to driving around the DC area...
But overall, we are excited about this new adventure!
Here are some updates on what's going on with everyone:
Patrick: Loving being stable at home and not having to sleep on a ship at night :) Working hard, he passed his ship's dental dept inspection with a 98%...pretty much unheard of. Way to go! He is also loving this warm weather because it means he gets to work outside on the weekends doing anything and everything he can think of from mowing the lawn to washing the cars, even organizing the garage and shed. My husband LOVES to be outside in the Spring!
Christy: Loving being back to work very part time. I am co-teaching an online nursing research course and I teach a pediatric clinical group at the local children's hospital, Children's Hospital of the King's Daughters (CHKD). The online course is okay, but I love the hands on clinical group and I have a great group of students this semester! It's been really neat because I taught these students in an intro to nursing assessment course back in the Fall of 2011 when we first moved here and now I am getting to teach them again in this clinical course as they are going to be graduating soon. It's been fun for me to see how much they've grown and how far they've come as students. This is another reason that I'm going to be so sad to leave this area, I have LOVED working for Old Dominion University (ODU) and the people that I have encountered there. I'm not sure when/if I will be able to get back to work when we move to Chicago, depends on location of any nursing schools and hospitals. Working part time is such a blessing for me as I always say I wasn't cut out to be a full time stay at home mom. I really enjoy getting out of the house and feeling like I'm being a productive member of society and getting to interact with other adults in the meantime. It helps that I love what I do, I feel like nursing is exactly where I am supposed to be and it's such a fulfilling job for me. Teaching is also fulfilling in that I am training the next generation of nurse's to do the best job at taking care of patients that they can do. But with all that being said, I am also glad that I only have to work part time and I get to be the one to stay home and raise my children most days. For all of the hard times we have been through over the past few years, I feel like we are in a really good place right now where most things in our lives are pretty calm...something we can't say very often. Hopefully things will settle back into a calm mode quickly after making the next big move this summer.
Charlotte: She is just as silly as ever! She loves to get a laugh and makes jokes to get a smile or laugh all of the time :) She will sometimes just make a funny face at anyone who's around to get a reaction...I always say (jokingly) this is going to be the kid that gets kicked out of kindergarten for not listening and always cutting up in class ;) She is extremely strong willed and loves to tell everyone "NO" a lot! We are navigating through those mucky waters of discipline, trying to break the will and not the spirit as my sister Cyndi says. Charlotte LOVES baby dolls, feeding them, changing their diapers, spanking them and putting them in time out, putting them down for naps, rocking them, taking them on walks in her stroller, putting them in Micah's highchair for feeding times, pushing them around in her shopping cart, and pretty much anything else you can think of. When we drop them off at school or church nursery, she walks straight over to the baby dolls and doesn't look back. Patrick & I joke that when we walk into the doll aisle at Target or Babies R Us her head is about to explode when she sees so many baby dolls at once!
An interesting thing that happened with Charlotte: When Patrick & I went out of town to Asheville back in February, we came back home to discover that she had developed a pretty bad stutter. I was surprised because she didn't have one at all before we left. Another thing we noticed those first few days back is that anytime we had to reprimand her she would lose it and scream and cry, almost like she was afraid and ashamed. I remember mentioning to Patrick that I wondered if she was afraid if she did something wrong that we would leave her again (this is the first time we have both left our children and gone out of town). Fast forward about 2 weeks later and we had to take Micah to the doctor for yet another ear infection so I asked him about Char's stutter. He said sometimes kids can't process what's going on so they develop some strange symptoms such as a tic or a stutter. His advice: keep as much of a routine as possible over the next couple of weeks and it should go away soon. And he was right...within 2 weeks, her stutter was completely gone again. I asked him if she was purposely doing it and he said no, her little brain couldn't process us being gone for several days in a row so it manifested as a stutter. Once the worrisome matter was well out of the way, it went back to normal. I am amazed at how the human body works and so glad that it wasn't a permanent development.
Hannah Kate: This girl doesn't have one particular thing that she loves, but rather develops a new attachment to something about every week. A few weeks ago it was my old Care Bear from childhood, then it was a tiny elephant stuffed animal, and now it's a little stuffed ducky that was in her bassinet at the hospital when she was born. She also likes dolls but she doesn't have the obsession like her sister. She is so good with Micah and is always aware of where he is and his needs. If he's in the highchair and has thrown all of his toys on the ground, she will go check on him and give them all back to him and ask him if he's okay and look at him expectantly as if he's actually going to answer her. She is distressed if he's crying or upset, too sweet. She is so easy going for the most part and not nearly as strong willed as her sister these days. She is so funny too, but in a completely different way than Char. She is just so naturally funny without trying. She will just say something or make a face that you can't help laughing at, and she's not always so sure when we do laugh. She is super sensitive so sometimes she doesn't know if we're laughing at or with her. And if she starts crying and we're laughing it can make the situation all the more funny. It's so interesting how kids change so much because at this time last year I remember saying over and over again that HK was my defiant, strong willed child and that Char was so laid back and compliant. This couldn't be more opposite now. I feel that it's almost always a little easier when you go through something the second time because you know from experience that everything is a phase and that this too shall pass. I have hope that everything won't be a battle with Char forever.
These girls are very creative and love to build things with Lego blocks. They also LOVE play-doh and pretty much any craft. They are obsessed with stickers right now and almost every day I am peeling multiple stickers off of their clothes after we put their pjs on them at night. They just stick them on everything, and just yesterday HK had put about a handful of shiny silver stickers in her hair...she looked like an 80's punk rocker!
Micah: Happy boy! I love how happy this boy is most days :) Even when he's sick he tries to give people smiles. He is always making other people smile too. Now that he's big enough to sit up in the front of the shopping cart he is so happy when we go to the store and just looks around trying to catch people's attention so he can give them a big smile! He has 2 bottom teeth, but he's not eating food with any substance yet. He wants to so badly but he just can't seem to swallow anything that's less than pureed. I've tried puffs, a grape cut into 16 pieces (truly the size of a large crumb), watermelon, and cheerios cut into 6 pieces each. He will put them into his mouth and chew on them with his 2 teeth and gum the food for a while but when he tries to swallow it he immediately starts gagging and heaving. He will continue to do this until he throws up whatever is in his stomach. I've spoken to the doctor about it and if he still isn't tolerating chunks of food at 12 months we are going to have to have ENT evaluate him. It's so weird because around 11 or 12 months with the girls, we were cutting up whatever we were having for dinner and letting them eat it. They never had a problem progressing from purees to chunks of food. The doctor said it may be because he still has pretty bad reflux and is still having to take Prilosec daily. I guess the reflux can evoke that gagging reflex because he's been conditioned to think something foreign in his throat is negative from all of the times that food comes back up. His other big issue is that he's still getting sick pretty often. The doctors are pretty sure that he has an allergy to something and that's what's causing lots of congestion. They also think he has tiny little sinus and nasal passages so the congestion has a hard time draining. When it can't drain it just sits there and brews, eventually causing an infection which leads to a sinus infection. He's had 2 pretty bad ear infections since having his tubes in February so we are being sent back to ENT this week to have him reevaluated. We aren't sure if the thing causing the allergy is just seasonal allergies to pollen or something like that, or if it's due to his milk protein allergy. He got sick the day after I stopped breastfeeding him at 5 months and hasn't really recovered since. We started him on Nutramigen formula because it's supposed to be easier to tolerate for babies with milk protein allergies. However, it's still milk based, just the proteins are more broken down. I spoke to the NP about this and it could be that he's still too sensitive for even this formula. So we are going to try Soy formula. About 1/2 of kids with milk protein allergies are also allergic to soy so back in the fall when he was having bloody stools the doctor told me not to try soy because there is a high chance he could be allergic to it as well and we needed to try to allow his gut to heal from the sores causing him to have the bloody stools. Last week we ended up having to give him Rocephin antibiotic injections for 2 days because the oral antibiotics weren't working for his very bad double ear infection that had thick yellow drainage coming from both ears for 5 days. Ahhhhh! Hopefully we will have all of this figured out soon so he can get healthy and stay healthy and feel good again.
On another note, he is able to sit up unsupported and even push himself to a sitting position from a lying position, but chooses not to sit up most of the time. He LOVES rolling from one end of a room to the other and can get where he wants to go by rolling very well. Sometimes if I leave him in the living room for a minute while I go back to one of the bedrooms I find him in the hallway trying to roll to me. I can't help but laugh when I see this and he is so proud of himself for finding me :) Another thing he loves is clapping. He loves when other people clap and joins right in just smiling from ear to ear.

Now for the pictures:

St. Patrick's Day 2013

Coloring Easter Eggs! The girls LOVED this!

Night before Easter 2013. We went to the Saturday Evening service this year at our church and it was great!

Charlotte (L) & Hannah Kate (R)
Easter 2013

Running into church!

The Easter Bunny brought the kiddos some goodies!

Easter morning digging into their spoils from the Easter Bunny!
Char (L) & HK (R)

Micah loved all of his new goods from the Easter Bunny!

HK (R) & Char (R), Micah in back

The girls tried on their new rash guard shirts from Nonny!
Char (L) & HK (R)

Fun at the park! Micah riding on the teeter totter with HK.

Micah taking a turn on the teeter totter with Charlotte.

Happy girls! Char (L) & HK (R)

Micah trying grapes for the first time

My mom had the idea to get a picture of them sharing a swing now and compare it to the first time they ever got in the swing! How they have grown! HK (L) & Char (R)

HK (L), Char (R) around 6 months old

Backyard fun! Char (L), HK (middle), Micah (R)

Char (R), HK (R)

Sweet sister kisses!

Sweet Micah hanging out while his sisters get a haircut.

4/13/2013 The girls were so excited all week about going to get their first hair cut but were a little shy once we walked in and both refused to get into the chair or let Bonnie anywhere near them. We distracted HK with enough things that she didn't notice at first that she was getting a haircut ;)

Once HK did realize she was okay with it.

This big girl (HK) can wink! I am so impressed because I have never been able to do that!

Once Char saw her sister getting a haircut she was ready to hop up into the chair and get hers cut too!

Char trying to watch Bonnie's scissors cut her hair :)

Daddy found a little baby bunny while he was mowing the grass and had me hold it while he finished mowing to keep it safe.

The girls LOVED petting it!

Barnes & Noble is a fun place to be loud and jump off of benches ;) These girls try to jump off of everything they can climb these days. Mostly successful but still lots of scrapes, bruises, and bumps.