I feel like the month of May should still be here and it's already the middle of June. Wow. A few updates from the last month. Boys had their last day of school as I mentioned in the last post. It was sad. We won't be returning to that school next year, so it was sort of the end of that journey.
Tried my hardest to get some good pics of them outside their school, but you can see how well that worked out. At least they were holding hands :)
For their teachers this year, I did Lands End canvas bags with their initials monogrammed on them. They turned out cute. I'm such a slacker on pictures these days that I didn't even take one of the finished gift. I stuffed John Robert's teacher bags with tissue paper and tied a bow.
For Hudson's teachers, another mom and I went in together and stuffed their bags with flip-flops, beach hats, magazines, sunscreen and tumblers. Super cute! These are great gifts!! And very reasonable. This is the BIG bag and it was only $25 because I bought 4 bags (or more) and you get a $4-5 discount when you do that.
The boys are excited to be out of school for the summer. We have lots of activities and camps scheduled for Hudson. And I have a full-time babysitter this summer too. Yay! Her name is Katie and I cannot say enough good things about her. We love her!!! These were a couple of projects she did with Hudson while John Robert was napping last week. They picked up different leaves on their walk back from the park one day and made this:
And one day, they practiced all of their shapes on the chalkboard wall.
They also drew an entire ocean on our back porch with chalk that showed different fish, octopus, coral and other fun things. Hudson is loving it. And I love that she's teaching him stuff while also having fun!
She brought brown paper sacks the other day and they decorated them with stickers and googly eyes and made puppets. Then she and Hudson did a puppet show for John Robert. So fun!! Seriously love her.
Hudson started going to the Spanish Schoolhouse 2 days a week last week. I thought it would be a fun camp for him and he might pick up some more Spanish. He already knows a lot from his school because they teach it as well, but this school is a little different. They speak ENTIRELY in Spanish the whole time. It was hilarious to see his face the first time we walked in. He seems to enjoy it though!
And it obviously wipes him out. This was him after the first day. And this child doesn't nap!
The weekend of Memorial Day, Hudson woke up and decided he wanted to make Uncle Austin some cupcakes for his birthday. We made strawberry with white icing and sprinkles. He's a good little helper in the kitchen. We need to work on his egg cracking skills though :)
The finished product. Thank you, Aunt Berta for the cute construction cupcake toppers/wrappers!
John Robert wasn't feeling super great during Memorial Day weekend. I knew his ears were bothering him (more to come on that), so I figured that's what it was. He ran a fever that Friday night, but woke up on SAT morning without one. I thought he probably just had a 24 hour bug, but we decided to hang out at home on SAT and SUN just to make sure. He never ran another fever and seemed to feel fine, so we headed out to the lake on Monday (Memorial Day) to celebrate Uncle Austin's 35th birthday!
I noticed a little rash on his back before he went down for a nap, but it looked like a heat rash so I didn't think much of it. It was only on his back at that point and we had been outside.
He looks so much like Trey.
I put him down for a nap and he slept for about 2 hours. When he woke up, the rash on his back was almost gone, but he had a few red spots on his hands and a few on his feet that looked like ant bites. I thought he might have gotten into an ant bed in the grass where we had been playing???
Long story short......one of our friends who's a doctor was at the lake and took one look at the spots and diagnosed him with hand, foot, mouth disease. WHAT?!?! I know it goes around daycares and schools all the time, but we hadn't heard of any outbreaks at his school. In fact, there were none. The only place I can think of that he may have picked it up is when we went to have his hearing test done at TCU. That's the only public place he'd been beside his school. I can't believe we went a whole year at school in a class with 7-10 kids without ever getting this and then we get out of school and get it! Ugh.
The spots got worse and worse as the day went on. Within about 3 hours of waking up from his nap, he was covered in a rash. And it just got worse the next day. He was supposed to have surgery on Thursday to get tubes in his ears. I took him to the hospital on Tuesday and they wanted to wait. The anesthesiologist didn't want to put him under being sick. Basically, if he had a reaction to the medicine, they wanted to know 100% that it was from the medicine and not from his illness. Make sense! But I hated to postpone surgery because I knew how bad his ears were hurting him :(
FYI - if you ever see these spots or if your child runs a fever and then develops these spots or a rash on his/her back or stomach - call the doctor and make sure you're not around anyone else! Hudson never had this, so I had no idea what to look for or even what the symptoms were. John Robert ended up infecting my cousins little girl, Eva with it too. They played with the same toys at the lake. Makes me sick, but like I said...we had no idea he was really sick.
This is what his hand looked like on Tuesday.
His feet were the worst. Thankfully, he never got any sores in his mouth.
So............. that was a fun start to the summer.
John Robert had his surgery for tubes last Thursday. He did great and he's doing so much better!
The doctor took a ton of fluid out of his ears. I can already tell that his balance is so much better and he's saying: Hi. You can tell he's really trying to say some words, so hopefully being able to actually hear now will help him learn.
He's a much happier baby! He's always been happy considering everything he's gone through, but now you can just tell he's comfortable.
Of course, being out at the lake right now is torture for him. He's not allowed to get water in his ears for at least a week. But, he's having fun playing in the sand.
The lake is still very low, so we decided to have a guy come dump a load of sand and make our own beach. It's actually been awesome! The kids love it and we can set up chairs and watch them wade in and out of the water. It's perfect.
We're having John Robert's 2ND birthday out there this weekend, so lots of pics to come!
Can't believe he's turning 2 already!
Seems like just yesterday, I was holding him like this:
