Sidney's diaper here's outer layer is made from the same material as his daddy's ACUs, and we borrowed his patrol cap for this picture. We cloth diaper for lots of reasons (from economical to skin sensitivities), and one of the later reasons we added to the pile was the cuteness factor. In my opinion there's not much cuter than a sweet baby in a cloth diaper. Sidney has made a few milestones this week, he's tried taking a single step, started standing alone without encouragement, and waving. Gyven and Kyra are both only a few interviews away from being enrolled in school before the end of the semester. I'm looking forward to them getting to interact with more people and learn some new things.

We've spent the last week preparing for Patrick to deploy early tomorrow morning, and it's been busy. We're hoping the whole thing goes smoothly, tho at this point he may be bumped to the next flight at the end of October. We won't know for sure until the morning.

And some pictures

For a long time now, everyone had been operating under the assumption that Gyven was on the autism spectrum, as that was what we had been told by our previous developmental pediatrician, and that's what fit based on the knowledge I had acquired. Borderline autism. Well, today the developmental pediatrician we're seeing now sent a shocker to us. Gyven no longer fits that diagnosis! While he does still have delays in the areas of speech and social skills, he's not a good fit for a diagnosis of autism. We're going to continue to pursue speech therapy, and work on getting him in a preschool setting (probably through the public school's special education department). It's looking better and better that by the time he's in elementary school Gyven may be able to function on a similar level to his peers.

In other news, Patrick has been given orders and today reports to a new unit. This unit is currently deployed and under strength, so it is very likely that sometime in October Patrick will receive deployment orders and join the main body of the unit for the remainder of their time in Iraq. Patrick was at first very dismayed, as this extends our stop loss until 2011, but now he's prepared to go if called upon and actually looking forward to some aspects of deployment, tho he will miss us very much, and we will miss him.

Pictures like this really show off how tall Sidney is! This morning at the pediatrician's he was measured in at 29 inches, which is 90th percentile for his age group (meaning 90 percent of kids his age will be smaller than he is). He weighed in at 26 pounds, which was 99th percentile. He's a big boy! He loves the bathtub, so when he's not in a bath, he has to investigate who is and what they're doing. He got his own bath not long after Kyra was done with hers.

Kyra had her second set of dental work done today, but with a twist. Instead of a root canal, the dentist decided that they could save the tooth as there was no decay, and applied a sealant. If the sealant doesn't hold the dentist will do the root canal and crown later, but with the cost of the sealant subtracted from that bill. Kyra also had a filling done. She did so well! Hardly cried at all, opened her mouth good and wide when asked, and she actually fell asleep in the chair while the work was done! The dentist is very good with kids and has done a great job on Kyra so far, I'm very happy we were referred there for Kyra's work.

Busy weekend.

This Sunday we spent all afternoon at various parks around town, and ended with an hour at this pebble beach in Steiliacoom. From this spot you could see the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (the predecessor was the famously nicknamed Galloping Gertie which collapsed in 1940, the current bridges were finished in 1950 and 2007). Despite the hint of Fall keeping the morning cool, it was warm enough by mid-afternoon that the kids could get in the water and we all got a little bit sunburned.

Today Kyra had an evaluation with a speech therapist, who confirmed my suspicion that Kyra does indeed have trouble with her articulation and putting nouns and verbs together, and so tomorrow we'll meet with the therapist again to determine what the best course of action is for getting Kyra on track. We'll probably be doing a group therapy once a week and hopefully a one on one therapy as well, but it depends on the waiting list (currently the clinic we were seen at has a 300+ child wait list, so we'll be looking at other clinics as well in the hopes we can get services for her shortly). The therapist suspects Kyra may have a specific kind of trouble with speech called Apraxia, but it will take more time watching and working with Kyra to determine if that is the case, as it is a difficult condition to diagnose in young children.