We have an announcement to make.....................
Charlotte went poop on the potty today!!!!!
We weren't really planning on potty training yet, but she keeps wanting to sit on the toilet and pats her butt every time she poops (or in today's case, when she needed to poop). So I guess we will have to enter the world of running to the bathroom like crazy people every time she makes the slightest indication that she has to go. Let the fun begin!
And some of you probably thought we were going to say we were pregnant with our number two baby. Shame shame on you for thinking those thoughts...... :)
Friday, December 12, 2008
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Big girl!!!
Charlotte went potty on the potty chair this morning!!! She loves to sit on it, but until today she's never actually gone! Of course we cheered and clapped and she looked so proud of herself.
Sorry it's been so long since we've posted anything. Charlotte has grown up a lot in the last month! I don't have pictures on this computer, so I can't put them up right now, but I will try to do it later today or in the next couple of days. If you don't want to read this without pictures, I understand...
Little miss sunshine is chattering more than ever, though we can only understand a few words. The understandable words are: shoes, baby, teeth, bear, grandpa, daddy, mama (although she more often calls Kristi "Ba"... go figure), egg, hat, hair, eyes, cow, ball, fish, thank you, wow, drink, agua (spanish for water), yeah, and no. No is the most clear word of any of them. She occasionally will say some words she used to know, like apple and breakfast, but she seems to forget words if we don't have her practice them a lot. Her fastest growing area of communication is signing. She learns new signs really fast right now. Her signing repertoire includes--please, thank you, eat, drink, milk, more, cookie, fish, puppy, ball, bear, shoes, and sleep.
Animal sounds are coming along nicely. She can do cow, horse, lamb, pig, chicken, rooster, duck, puppy, kitty, elephant, goose, alligator, lion, bear, and tiger (the last three are pretty much all the same...). Goose is probably the funniest--she knows that a goose says honk, but she also knows that when you squeeze someones's nose it goes honk. Put the two together, and you get a honk on the nose every time you ask her what a goose says. Ha ha ha...
She loves to help with anything. She likes to wipe things with a washcloth and wash dishes, especially with daddy. She pulls a chair over to the sink from the dining room and asks to be helped up. Then she'll stir the soapy water and play with the bubbles while daddy washes.
Her favorite thing in the whole world is to play with dolls. She has several at home and at Grandpa Mark and Grandma Cindy's house that she carries around (often several at a time!). At the moment she is at my feet dancing to some Cuban music with two of them in her arms. Spinning in circles is a good dance! She also loves to wrap her babies in blankets, although she gets really frustrated if she can't do it just right. She shares her pacifier with her babies, rocks them, pats them, and kisses them. She is such a little mama.
Charlotte has a funny face she makes on command. We call it her "surprised face." She started doing it when something surprised her, such as Matt's coffee grinder or another loud noise. She pulls her mouth into a little "O" and raises her eye brows. She'll do it if she truly is surprised and if you just ask her to "make your surprised face!"
At her daycare they speak almost 100% Spanish--and she understands it now! Matt went to pick her up the other day and the teacher was asking, in Spanish, about animal sounds, and Charlotte answered them correctly! She also knows what is going on when her teachers tell her something or ask her to do something! What a cool thing! Unfortunately she probably won't be able to keep it up when we move for residency because bilingual daycare is hard to find...Oh well. Our hope was that by exposing her to another language early in life that she would make some of the brain connections important for learning language later in life. Who knows if that will be true or not, but we can hope.
We just got back from Chicago where we had to take one of our licensing exams. We left Charlotte with Kristi's parents in Byron, and then headed to Chicago where we stayed with our friends Luke and Shannon. The test was a clinical one where we had 12 patients who were all trained professionals to have a particular medical problem. We had 15 minutes with each patient to talk to them and do a physical exam to discover the problem, then talk to them about what we thought was going on and what we wanted to do about it. Then we had 10 minutes to write a note on each patient (like one that would go in their medical chart) about our findings and our plan for their care. The exam was from 3pm to 10:15pm! It was a long day, that's for sure. We have to wait 6-8 weeks to find out if we passed or failed. Hopefully we both passed, because it cost over a thousand dollars each and we don't want to drive to Chicago again. The test is only offered in Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Too bad it's not in Hawaii...
These next two weeks are filled with residency interviews for us in Minneapolis, Duluth, La Crosse, and Rochester. It should be fun, but also exhausting to be "on" all the time. The experts recommend not doing more than a couple of interviews in a row, but geniuses that we are scheduled 4 in a row in 4 different cities...We took the two weeks off before Christmas, and so we had to squeeze most of our interviews in to those two weeks. We think it will be ok; hopefully we don't burn ourselves out. I guess then we have the week of Christmas to recover.
Well, this post is certainly too long. But anyone who wasn't interested didn't have to finish reading the whole thing, so I guess if you read the whole thing you must have been starving for an update from us. Thanks for checking in!
Sorry it's been so long since we've posted anything. Charlotte has grown up a lot in the last month! I don't have pictures on this computer, so I can't put them up right now, but I will try to do it later today or in the next couple of days. If you don't want to read this without pictures, I understand...
Little miss sunshine is chattering more than ever, though we can only understand a few words. The understandable words are: shoes, baby, teeth, bear, grandpa, daddy, mama (although she more often calls Kristi "Ba"... go figure), egg, hat, hair, eyes, cow, ball, fish, thank you, wow, drink, agua (spanish for water), yeah, and no. No is the most clear word of any of them. She occasionally will say some words she used to know, like apple and breakfast, but she seems to forget words if we don't have her practice them a lot. Her fastest growing area of communication is signing. She learns new signs really fast right now. Her signing repertoire includes--please, thank you, eat, drink, milk, more, cookie, fish, puppy, ball, bear, shoes, and sleep.
Animal sounds are coming along nicely. She can do cow, horse, lamb, pig, chicken, rooster, duck, puppy, kitty, elephant, goose, alligator, lion, bear, and tiger (the last three are pretty much all the same...). Goose is probably the funniest--she knows that a goose says honk, but she also knows that when you squeeze someones's nose it goes honk. Put the two together, and you get a honk on the nose every time you ask her what a goose says. Ha ha ha...
She loves to help with anything. She likes to wipe things with a washcloth and wash dishes, especially with daddy. She pulls a chair over to the sink from the dining room and asks to be helped up. Then she'll stir the soapy water and play with the bubbles while daddy washes.
Her favorite thing in the whole world is to play with dolls. She has several at home and at Grandpa Mark and Grandma Cindy's house that she carries around (often several at a time!). At the moment she is at my feet dancing to some Cuban music with two of them in her arms. Spinning in circles is a good dance! She also loves to wrap her babies in blankets, although she gets really frustrated if she can't do it just right. She shares her pacifier with her babies, rocks them, pats them, and kisses them. She is such a little mama.
Charlotte has a funny face she makes on command. We call it her "surprised face." She started doing it when something surprised her, such as Matt's coffee grinder or another loud noise. She pulls her mouth into a little "O" and raises her eye brows. She'll do it if she truly is surprised and if you just ask her to "make your surprised face!"
At her daycare they speak almost 100% Spanish--and she understands it now! Matt went to pick her up the other day and the teacher was asking, in Spanish, about animal sounds, and Charlotte answered them correctly! She also knows what is going on when her teachers tell her something or ask her to do something! What a cool thing! Unfortunately she probably won't be able to keep it up when we move for residency because bilingual daycare is hard to find...Oh well. Our hope was that by exposing her to another language early in life that she would make some of the brain connections important for learning language later in life. Who knows if that will be true or not, but we can hope.
We just got back from Chicago where we had to take one of our licensing exams. We left Charlotte with Kristi's parents in Byron, and then headed to Chicago where we stayed with our friends Luke and Shannon. The test was a clinical one where we had 12 patients who were all trained professionals to have a particular medical problem. We had 15 minutes with each patient to talk to them and do a physical exam to discover the problem, then talk to them about what we thought was going on and what we wanted to do about it. Then we had 10 minutes to write a note on each patient (like one that would go in their medical chart) about our findings and our plan for their care. The exam was from 3pm to 10:15pm! It was a long day, that's for sure. We have to wait 6-8 weeks to find out if we passed or failed. Hopefully we both passed, because it cost over a thousand dollars each and we don't want to drive to Chicago again. The test is only offered in Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Too bad it's not in Hawaii...
These next two weeks are filled with residency interviews for us in Minneapolis, Duluth, La Crosse, and Rochester. It should be fun, but also exhausting to be "on" all the time. The experts recommend not doing more than a couple of interviews in a row, but geniuses that we are scheduled 4 in a row in 4 different cities...We took the two weeks off before Christmas, and so we had to squeeze most of our interviews in to those two weeks. We think it will be ok; hopefully we don't burn ourselves out. I guess then we have the week of Christmas to recover.
Well, this post is certainly too long. But anyone who wasn't interested didn't have to finish reading the whole thing, so I guess if you read the whole thing you must have been starving for an update from us. Thanks for checking in!
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Time flies
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Family ties
Guess who this is? Not Charlotte, as many have assumed as this has been hanging on our refridgerator, but in fact is baby Matt in 1983. I guess we know who she looks like now! (Kristi has shuffled through many of her own baby pictures, looking for any sign of resemblance, but has so far been unsuccessful...)
Charlotte's kissing face--bottom lip sticking out.
She loves her swing...ok, not so much in this moment of fussing. But she actually does love it hanging in our sunroom, and rides in it at least once a day.
What more could a lady ask for than a purse and a dolly?! She always carries the purse like that, with the strap long and her arm up in the air to keep the strap on. She gets really mad if you try to help her with it.
Our little mechanic, working on her car.
Carving a pumpkin!
Helping scoop out the seeds.
This is Skeletor on Halloween. (Skeletor was from the cartoon "He-man") Her shirt was glow-in-the-dark. Grandma Cindy and Auntie Kate got it for her, figuring that as the daughter of two med students she could get away with wearing it at times other than Halloween.
For Halloween we went to Grandma Carol Ann's and Grandpa Randy's to help pass out candy and spend some time with them. Charlotte loved helping to answer the door and seeing all of the kids in costumes. She also loved playing with the candy in their crinkly wrappers. Lucky for us she doesn't know what's inside of them!
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