October 18, 2009

Beautiful Sunday in Sioux City. Claire just woke up from a nap and is ready to eat, and Grace is ready to play dress up. Being ready to play is a never ending stage for Grace. Today she is rotating between dress up, drawing, polly pockets, doctor, and kitchen. While she is o-kay at being willing to play by herself, much of the time she demands a play partner. Now that it's basketball season and I'm home one day a week, Sunday is dad's play day.

Michelle spent her first full day home with both girls yesterday, and she was worn out! Claire keeps her pretty busy wanting to eat every hour (it seems), and Grace always finds a way to keep us busy. Things will be a little more normal at our house now that Michelle is cleared to lift Grace and drive, neither of which she'd been able to do since her C section.

We got word Friday that Grace's preschool had been exposed to H1N1. That's a little scary, but we'll monitor Grace closely. She's been really healthy this school year so far.

October 10, 2009

October 10 and there is a little snow on the ground in Sioux City. Are you serious? We have a quiet weekend at home planned, and it's badly needed. Our first week at home with Claire has been pretty hectic with the combination of people at the house and my first full week of basketball practice.

Grace is doing really well with the changes. She really loves Claire and enjoys holding her. Her school year is going really well. I'm continually amazed at how she knows so many kids at her school (not just the kids in her classroom). We already anticipate her report cards being filled with comments such as "Grace talks too much at time and is too social." Oh well.

Michelle and Claire are doing really well. Claire pretty much sleeps and eats, and Michelle pretty much feeds Claire while trying to squeeze in sleep when possible.

September 29, 2009

Big day in our house. Grace's baby sister was born this morning. Claire Marie Nelson. 6 pounds, 5 ounces, 18 inches, full head of hair. Claire and her mommy are both doing well right now. The plan is for Michelle and Claire to come home from the hospital on Friday. Grace is overwhelmed with joy and excitement at the idea of having a little sister. When I called and told her the news this morning her quote was, "I just knew we were going to have a baby sister!" We'll get some updated family pictures on the website when we get a chance.

September 22, 2009

If you're reading this we're assuming you've had a chance to look at the updates to the websites. Michelle's brother Austin made the changes, and we think they look great. He added a ton of pictures from this year's RAGBRAI, and the home page of the site includes a list of all the participants in this year's Race 4 Grace. We're thrilled to have so many new donors, and we are so appreciative to everybody. We're close to sending our final check in to the Iowa FSMA, and we can are happy to say that we raised a lot of money this year!

September 10, 2009

All is good here. We're busy getting ready for baby #2, and Grace is especially excited. She is constantly saying that it's taking forever for the baby to come, but overall she seems to have a pretty good grasp of the whole baby thing. She says that she'll be happy with a baby brother or a baby sister, but if you press her, she would prefer a sister. That's not surprising to us, because she'd see it as an opportunity to have another doll to dress up and play with.

Grace is off to a very good start at preschool. She still loves it, and she remains one of the more social kids in her class. When we bring her everyday, she says hi to pretty much everybody (students and teachers). One skill Grace has (that her dad definitely does not) is an uncanny ability to remember names. We're continually amazed when she'll remember the name of a person who she met months ago. It took her about a day or two to know everybody in her class, and she knows the names of a lot of the kids at her school who aren't even in her class. Not sure if we can make money off that skill, but maybe we should look into it.

August 31, 2009

Two weeks into preschool, and Grace is loving it. Three weeks into the valproic acid, and so far no side effects that we've noticed. She'll get her blood drawn next week and we'll know more then.

Grace had a pretty busy weekend. We had some friends and their kids over Friday night, then Saturday she got her hair cut and went to a football tailgate. We laid pretty low yesterday (Sunday), which Grace and I plenty of time to play school. That's one of her favorite things to do. Yesterday I got to be the teacher and she was the student--often times it's the other way around.

August 22, 2009

So far so good two weeks in to Grace's VPA experiment. We haven't seen any side effects, and she's taking the medicine with her food just fine. This next week we up her dose half of the full dose.

This morning Grace is planning a play. Right now she's huge into thinking up plays and then acting them out. Pretty soon we have a dress rehearsal coming up, because as Grace just told me, "you need to practice if you're gonna have a good play." She's also huge into dress up right now, and thankfully she has enough princess dresses that we can accommodate her demands.