Mosquitoes!

I grew up in Nebraska, so coming to Houston after college was a big culture and climate shock!  It bothered me a lot the first few years that there were no seasons here.  I would joke with people that it was like living in a sensory deprivation chamber and that there were only two seasons: Daylight Savings Time and Not.

It was especially strange to me to see all the plants and trees be green year-round.  Flowers in January?  Really?...

But for the past year, Houston has been in a drought.  It's the first time I've ever seen Houston turn brown.  People's yards are dead and driving around, you can see that about half the trees along the highways are brown.  Pretty sad.

One thing I didn't notice until recently was that along with the rain, the mosquitoes had kind of gone away.  That is, until this past week.  It finally rained for almost a full day about 3 weeks ago.  And that was the trigger for the mosquitoes to come out of hiding.

We walked the kids to school on Friday morning last week and got swarmed by mosquitoes the entire way there.  They were biting us through our clothes and a couple of times, I had to start running to get away from them for a few seconds of peace.

It's crazy around here lately!  The mosquitoes are EVERYWHERE.  I kill at least two per night in our house and just in the last couple of days here at work, I've killed 4!  (and my office is on the 7th floor of an office building - they seem to be hitching a ride up the elevators and then coming through the security doors on our floor.)

The guy who sits next to me likes to tell everyone that there are two kinds of mosquitoes in Texas: the small ones that can get through the screen door and the big ones that can open the screen door.  Hardy, har, har...

(But I'm almost beginning to believe him.)

Toothless

Yesterday, Marxo had to get some teeth pulled.  She is the product of two people who have/had crooked teeth and is therefore pretty much doomed to a childhood full of orthodonture.

Fellan already started the process last fall with a palate expander and then this past May, he got brackets put on his two front teeth to pull them together. (Can't believe I forgot to include this tidbit on my blog!)

Brace Face!

Even though it seemed that Fellan's teeth were going to be really bad considering the way they first started coming in, I'm afraid that Marxo's little mouth is going to doom her to even worse things than Fellan.  Her first two permanent teeth (bottom front) came in over the last few months and one of them is almost completely sideways.

The last time we were at the orthodontist's office with Fellan, we asked him to take a look at her teeth and I think it took him about 2 seconds to look in her mouth and immediately start filling out "extraction orders" to our pediatric dentist.

Yesterday was the dreaded day.  She had already lived through getting a pedunculated pyogenic granuloma removed about a year an a half ago (which involved a trip to the oral surgeon and IV sedation, and which, once again, I can't believe I didn't document on here!), so she expected the worst. We kept on telling her she would have an oral sedative and that they didn't have to stick anything in her arm, but it really didn't make a difference to her.  She would cry about it every time we mentioned her impending "doom".


Amazingly, she didn't freak out too badly when we got to the dentist's office.  There was a little crying, but she pulled herself together and bravely went back and drank the oral sedative.  Then we had to wait for 45 minutes for it to kick-in.  I was expecting her to become loopy and act drunk, but that didn't happen at all.  She did seem to calm down a little, but she continued to work on her word-search puzzles while we waited.

When it was time to go back for the procedure, she calmly walked back and apparently had no trouble at all with it.  They said she was just fine during the whole thing.  And this morning she told me, "Next time I have to get any teeth pulled, I'm not going to be afraid at all." Poor thing.  Unfortunately, there probably will be a few more "next times".

Here she is showing off her toothless grin!  She lost her top tooth this past weekend while we were out of town in NYC.  Luckily, the tooth fairy found her at Grammy's.  And we found out this morning that the tooth fairy pays double for extracted teeth! :)

Toothless

NYC, Take 2

We're becoming quite the jet-setters here lately.  This past weekend we went to New York City again!

This time, it was for a friend's 40th birthday.  She and her husband had planned a trip to NYC to celebrate her birthday and he decided it would be fun to invite some of her friends and surprise her by all showing up there.

It worked.  We all met at a restaurant on Friday evening.  We were a little late, so our friend was already there and when we walked up, she asked us, with a bewildered expression, "Why are you here?!" To which I responded, "Because it's your birthday!!!"  She was really surprised.

First, though, the trip up there...  We flew into Newark, but there was bad weather in Newark on Friday morning, so our flight was delayed by about an hour and a half.  We finally made it to our hotel and got checked in at 4pm, but we still hadn't eaten lunch!  No worries, though, when we checked in, they told us that there would be free wine and cheese in their lounge from 5pm to 8pm that night.  It sounded like a good idea at the time.

We got to the wine and cheese room a little before 6pm, loaded up our plate with cheese and crackers, and accepted a couple of over-full glasses of red wine from the server.  After finding a table to sit down at, we overheard part of the conversation from the tables next to us.  The people were from Canada, in the mining industry, and talking about the Oil Sands.  This was right up our alley!

So, we struck up a conversation with them.  Eventually, a Swiss couple came into the room and sat down with us and then a British man came over to introduce himself.  With this mini-United Nations, we attempted to solve all the world's problems.  And after three more glasses of wine, we were certain we'd gotten everything back on track.

But it was time for us to head off to the surprise dinner by that point.  We were supposed to be meeting at 9pm at an Italian restaurant in the middle of Chinatown.  A likely location. (?)  The food was really good, but the husband and I kept waiting for them to bring out the main course.  They brought out several small plates of food and nobody else seemed to be eating.  Since we didn't want to seem gluttonous, we nibbled along with the rest of the group, and when midnight rolled around and the food was all taken away, we finally figured out these were tapas plates and there wasn't going to be a main course.  Oops.

Everyone chatted for a little while longer and at about 1:30am, the husband and I made our way out of the restaurant and to the subway station.  The others apparently went in search of pizza! (that would have been a good thought)  But after not sleeping much on Thursday night, I was really ready to head back to the hotel.  We got on the subway and I promptly fell asleep on the woman sitting next to me.  I woke up when my head apparently started drooping over onto her shoulder and she sort of pulled quickly away from me.  "You haven't really lived until you've fallen asleep on someone in the subway in New York City," I always say!  ;)

Saturday morning came early and we kinda missed it.  We grabbed some croissants and cantaloupe (the "gourmet" free breakfast at the hotel), showered, and met the group for lunch at Stage Deli, where we opted to split a rather benign grilled cheese and tomato sandwich.  After not eating most of the previous day and replacing that with drinking instead, neither the husband nor I could stomach much more.

Most of the rest of that group had gone for a run in Central Park that morning and needed to go shower before doing much else.  We decided to meet for drinks mid-afternoon before the husband and I needed to head off to meet my pen-pal for dinner between shows.

While they were getting cleaned up, we thought it would be fun to go down to Greenwich Village and wander around for a little while.  And it turned out to be a good decision because we got to see some of the protestors marching around.  I took pictures.  :)

Look! Real live protestors!

Such anger and violence! (not really)

It was sort of hard to figure out what they were protesting.

After our dose of anti-capitalism culture, we headed back uptown to get a dose of theater culture!  First, we stopped in to say good-bye to our newly 40-year-old friend and then we went to meet my pen-pal friend.  When we came over Labor Day Weekend, the two cast members who played the managers in the Phantom of the Opera were being replaced with new blood, so there's now a new picture of Carlotta out front.  Sorry for the glare, but I kind of liked the way her face ended up framed by it.

Carlotta with new managers

We thought it would be fun to see the performance again while we were there so we could catch more of the details of the show.  It didn't disappoint.  It's amazing that they put on this show day after day after day, but the performances continue to be so good every time.  My pen-pal said she learned a lot from working with George Lee Andrews about how to bring his best to every single performance during his 23 years there.

Each Saturday night after the show, one of the dressing rooms becomes an impromptu bar and the cast has a drink or two together since Sundays are their days off.  So, after having a few drinks with the cast (sounds so "fabulous", huh?! [it was pretty cool!!!]), we walked out of the theater only to find that there were still people hanging out waiting for autographs.  We quietly stood out of the way while Carlotta, Monsieur André, and Monsieur Firmin signed playbills for their adoring fans.  Afterwards, we whisked Carlotta away to find a quiet place to hang out and while walking down the street, we happened to see John Larroquette getting into his limousine.  (I heart New York!)

Our flight left early the next morning, but that didn't stop us from staying out late once again.  So, after 3 hours of sleep, we somehow managed to get up and out of the hotel the next morning, and made our way back to the heat of Houston.  The kids seemed to survive the weekend with Grammy and PaPa and I was asleep on the couch at 8pm that night.  Whew.  I'm getting too old for this.

Doing it again...

Well, I'm doing it again.  I've gotten sick of looking at the flab in the mirror and instead of waiting for another contest to come to me (because it seems I'm only motivated by competition!), I've started my own contest here at work.  And I've got 26 other people signed up so far!!!

The contest works like this:

• Pay $20 to enter the contest
• Weigh-in every Monday (starting this past Monday)
• Lose 10% of your body weight by Dec. 19 and win 1/3 of the pot (divided equally between winners)
• Maintain the weight loss until Jan. 30 and win the remaining 2/3 of the pot (again divided equally)

10% is a pretty aggressive goal, but one that I'm hoping to be able to make in the 10 weeks I have until Dec. 19th.  I did a pretty good job of "bulking up" over the weekend, too, so without trying too hard this week, I've lost about 3 pounds.  :)

Anyway, I'm hoping this will, once again, get me healthy and back to regular exercise.  One thing's for sure - it's forcing me to really keep track of everything that I'm eating.  And I think that's a good thing.

Marxo is 7 today!

Well, my baby girl turned seven today!  Hard to believe.  Today is also picture day at school, so she got to wear one of her new birthday outfits - she looked very stylish.  :)

We had just about everyone in town this weekend for the birthday festivities.  My parents came down, the husband's folks were here, the husband's brother, sister-in-law and kids came to town and we all celebrated in style.  My brother wasn't able to make it down this trip, but he'll be here at Christmas, and that's not too far away.

We had Marxo's party at a place called Mad Science.  There were lots of kids that ended up coming, so I was stressed out during the whole party, trying to count the number of kids that came, figuring out how many were in the same household, and then trying to decide which kids weren't going to get party bags since they were the siblings of kids that were invited.  I always have so many leftover party bags, I tried to only buy what was necessary, but this time, that kinda bit me in the butt!

Anyway, the kids all still had fun and Marxo appreciated everyone coming.  I only got a couple of pictures with my phone, though, so I'm going to have to get everyone else to send me theirs!  Here's the birthday girl getting ready to blow out the candles...

Her Person

Marxo can't keep her hands off our new little kitty.  She is so happy to have a living thing to "mother"!  As soon as she comes home from school, she's looking for Spot.  She picks her up and cradles her and carries her around and generally smothers her with affection.

And apparently, Spot is perfectly fine with it!  I was worried that she would become resentful of this person who just won't leave her alone, but it's exactly the opposite.  Spot has determined that Marxo is her person.  She follows Marxo around and wants to sleep with her every night.  Marxo doesn't like that, though, because Spot keeps her awake by trying to play with her feet under the covers!  So cute.  :)

Marxo ended up being sick off and on over the last few weeks - she had a fever that kept coming and going.  After going to the doctor a couple of different times, he finally figured out she had a urinary tract infection!  Something so simple and easy to treat and it kept her out of school for 8 of the first 23 days of school.  Ugh!

Anyway, while Marxo was at home being sick, she had some very good company.

Loyal Kitty

Labor Day 2011

Yep, I'm a little late with this post, but if I don't do it now, I'll never get around to it.

We spent Labor Day weekend in New York City this year!  My pen-pal from third grade (with whom I've kept in touch all these years) is playing one of the lead roles in the Phantom of the Opera on Broadway right now and we just HAD to go see her. (and I got a text from her the other day saying she's just been offered a 6-month extension!  I'm so proud of her!!!)  Labor Day seemed to be the perfect time to go see her and get to spend time with her.  So, we sucked it up, bought 4 plane tickets, and vowed to have an excellent time.

And we did!  We arrived on Friday evening and had tickets to see the matinee on Saturday afternoon.  We traveled into the city (we were staying at my pen-pal and her husband's house in Newark), walked around a bit, left my pen-pal at the theater to get ready for the show, grabbed some lunch, and then went to the show.

I had never seen the Phantom of the Opera until that day and it was such a great experience.  I feel so lucky to have gotten to see it for the first time when one of my dear friends was playing one of the lead roles!  She was afraid that the kids were going to be freaked out by the Phantom's make-up during the show, so she talked to Hugh Panaro and he agreed to let us watch him put on his make-up.  That was cool!  (And, for the record, Hugh Panaro is a really, really nice guy.)  The kids thought it was neat to see him put on his make-up, but they especially liked meeting his dog, Soot (whose name is also on the dressing room door). :)

Before the show

After the show - on stage with the chandelier

This is one of her dresses - some of her dresses weigh up to 50 pounds!

After the show, my pen-pal gave us a back-stage tour and we all grabbed a bite to eat. She needed to get back to the theater for the evening show, so we headed off on our own to go to the top of the Empire State Building.

There were some guys outside the building telling us it was a 2.5 hour wait and that we could pay them for the "Express Tour".  We figured that was a scam, but it turned out to be pretty accurate!  It was around 10pm by the time we made it up to the observation deck!  :o

On Sunday, we all walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.  My husband and I had to read the book, The Great Bridge, in college so it was particularly interesting to us because we learned a lot about the building of the bridge.  It's amazing that this bridge is almost 130 years old!

The Great Bridge

It had gotten to be late in the day by the time we made it across the bridge, so we found a restaurant in Brooklyn to get some dinner.  Marxo was ready for a rest.

And after dinner, we took the ferry across the river to the Financial District, where we were able to get a shot of the new World Trade Center building.

Our flight didn't leave until late Monday afternoon, so we decided to make the most of it and head to Central Park for a carousel ride!

Hard to take a picture of a moving horse while also sitting on a moving horse...

Fellan is the King of Central Park!

And, on the way to the subway/train/plane that afternoon, my pen-pal informed us that you can't go past the pig in front of Rudy's without giving it a high-five!  :)

Interpretation

The other day, Fellan and I were headed to our Fantasy Football Draft.  Marxo was sick and the husband had to get some work done, so it was up to me to draft our team.  (neither the husband nor I know anything about football, but we like to keep a team each year, otherwise we'd never see our friends!)

Anyway, it was Saturday morning and "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me" was on the radio while we were driving.  Fellan is really good at listening to stories on the radio and remembering all kinds of facts about what their talking about, so he was enjoying the show.

After we'd been driving for about 15 minutes, the next show came on the radio.  It was "This American Life." This past Saturday, the show was about gossiping and how it's different in different cultures.  They didn't get too far into the show before they gave the warning: "This program contains descriptions of sex and birth control."

Upon hearing that, I looked in the rear view mirror to see if Fellan was paying attention.  He had a HUGE grin on his face.  So I asked him what he was laughing about.

F: "They're going to talk about sex and birth control!"
Me: "What does that mean? 'Sex and birth control'?"
F: "It means they're going to talk about sexy women and how they control their children!"

I didn't correct him.  :)

Much news...

Well, we did make it back from our trip to Colorado, the school year has already started, and we finally got the results of Fellan's Dysgraphia testing back last week (surprise - he's got it!)...

Anyway, we had a great trip to Colorado.  I just wish it would have coincided with the Tour of Colorado "US Pro Cycling Challenge" which just finished up yesterday.  But it could not be helped - we had to get back for school to start last week.

While we were in Colorado, though, we made the best of it.  It never got above 75 deg F the whole time we were there.  Quite the contrast to the 113 deg F temperatures we drove through in northwest Texas on the way up.  The car actually had trouble starting a couple of times in that hot weather, so at potty-breaks, we started to take turns, leaving the car running the whole time in order to avoid getting stuck somewhere!

We started off the vacation with a visit to the family down in Denver.  My parents and brother came out and stayed with my aunt and cousin and we celebrated my dad's 70th birthday and my aunt's 60th birthday.  Boy, my dad is getting old!  :)

Then during the rest of the week, we hiked a couple of days and rode bikes the other three days before we had to head back to the Houston heat.  I was impressed with the kids and their riding while we were there.  We rode to Copper Mountain one day and Fellan rode there on his own bike.  We had Marxo ride the trailer bike with Daddy that day.  But for the other two days of riding, both kids were on their own bikes.  And one day, we ended up riding a total of 27 miles!  They did a great job.

Top of Copper Mountain - good thing these rocks get completely covered during ski season!

Waterfalls at McCullough Gulch

Lunch at the McCullough Gulch waterfalls

The day before we left, we hiked to the McCullough Gulch waterfalls.  We had never done that before, but we'll definitely include that every year from now on.  It was really worth the climb - very beautiful!

Alas, it was time to head back to the heat and get ready for school to start.  We had a week between vacation and the start of school to get re-acclimated to the heat.  It didn't really work, but we did get ready for school.

First Day of 3rd and 1st grade!

Someday, I'm hoping they're going to out-grow their need to "pose-smile" for pictures...

Anyway.  The kids seem to be really enjoying school this year.  Fellan is even pro-actively sitting down and doing homework every evening after school.  When he came home from school the first day and started doing homework, I commented to the husband that the hypnotist they hired for the first day of school must have REALLY been good.  ;)

The fact that Fellan has been doing his homework with little to no prompting is especially amazing given the fact that we finally did get the results of his testing and he's now officially been diagnosed with Dysgraphia, which literally means "difficulty writing".  This website talking about handwriting solutions gives a really good description of Fellan's problems. I still find myself wondering if this is a real disorder, or if he just has poor fine motor skills and that he could get better if we just made him practice writing more, but since practicing hasn't helped thus far, I'm more inclined to believe this paragraph from the handwriting solutions website:

It is often thought that continued handwriting practice will improve a Dysgraphic student’s ability to use paper and pencil alone as a useful tool to complete all their written schoolwork. This is rarely the case. While Occupational Therapy can sometimes help to improve a Dysgraphic student’s letter and number formation in isolation and/or in short writing samples, this improvement is, 99.9% of the time, not able to be sustained when kids are actually using their handwriting to complete their written schoolwork. The same thing is true of making kids re-do written assignments to make them more legible. In cases of Dysgraphia, “practice does not make perfect.”

The woman who did the testing gave us a lot of helpful ideas and recommended an occupational therapist who specializes in writing problems like Dysgraphia.  We're going to see how that goes, but we're also going to check into keyboarding options for Fellan to use in the classroom and we're scheduled to meet with his teacher tomorrow to talk about the recommendations from the testing lady.  One of the recommendations is actually, "Do not count spelling mistakes against his grade." *gasp*  The horror! This is going kill me - I can't stand misspellings!

The good thing about the type of Dysgraphia that he has is that it's mostly motor and spatial problems and it's not related to grammar or speech.  Thank goodness for that - my reinforcement of proper use of adverbs must have helped him throughout the years.  :)

And I think that catches everyone up!  Later gator...

It's a...

GIRL!!!  As of yesterday, we have a new member in our family:

We were definitely not thinking about adding a kitten to our house, but she needed a home and we decided to go ahead and take her.

She came from the girl the I used to tutor when she was in high school.  She's now 25 with two kids of her own!  Anyway, her girls convinced their daddy that they really, really needed this kitten.  So he bought it for them.  But then they decided that they didn't really want it (and the little one decided to see what would happen if she scratched the kitten's eye with her own claw) and they wanted to know if we would take it.

Like I said, I weren't intending to get another kitten for quite some time.  We currently have an 18 1/2 year old cat named Midas who has kidney disease and requires sub-cutaneous fluids every other day or so.  We figured that we would let him live out his sunset years in quiet peacefulness without the stress of adding any kittens to his life.

But I guess that plan is pretty much wrecked!

I think it will be OK, though.  This little kitten is so friendly and sweet - I figure Midas will eventually get used to her.  If she ever gets over her fear of him, that is...

Midas basically lives on the 3rd floor of our house - where the bedrooms are.  He rarely makes it down the stairs anymore and so we set the new kitten up with a litter box, food, and water on our second floor - where our living room, dining room, and kitchen are.  She hasn't ventured up the stairs on her own yet.  After a tentative meeting yesterday morning when she first arrived and Midas yelled (he doesn't meow anymore!) and hissed at her, she doesn't seem to be in a hurry.

Since the new kitten hadn't been to a veterinarian before, and she had one scratched, squinty, goopy eye, I made an appointment for her today.  The scratched eye should be fine with a little ointment and she's now gotten her first round of shots.

Such a sweet little thing!

Oh, and her name?  Spot.  In honor of Data's cat on Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Since she's a calico (and therefore somewhat spotted), we thought it was especially fitting.  :)