Yesterday was Parent Participation Day at Julien’s gymnastics class. We all got to join in the fun!

Julien hanging from the rings.

Joe climbs to the top.

I did some swinging.

And Ali did a sommersault.

And the whole family got to participate in a relay race where we were given things to stand on and had to move them across the floor in order to move forward. We were at a serious disadvantage because we had 5 people and 5 objects to stand on (the other teams had 4 people and 5 objects to stand on). So, we lost!

My seven month non-blogging anniversary came and went. So did the automatic renewal of my domain name….

I’ve actually missed blogging, but life has gotten in the way. Since I’ve got another year anyways, I think I’ll take another stab at this! So, I’ll start with the last few months in a nutshell:

– Jesse is fine. We had to go back to the vet for x-rays only once before it all came out in the end.

– The car has been repaired. I figure that, since it was a rental car before we bought it and has now been in an accident, we will have to drive it until it is truly dead because we have totally killed the resale value on that car. On the plus side, we really like it and it’s been a great car so far, so I’m hoping to enjoy driving it for several more years!

– Business has been going really well. That would be the main reason that I haven’t been blogging and you will hear no complaints here!

– Sophia has started 1st grade and has decided to join the Girl Scouts. I couldn’t think of any reason not to so I said, “OK.” and then realized that I had just set myself up to sell cookies. I’m not looking forward to that aspect of it, but she seems to be enjoying the meetings.

– Julien has started gymnastics classes and can now be seen using the sofa as a vault whenever he thinks that I’m not looking.

I’ll leave it at that, for now. And, I’ll be back soon!

Today would be one of those days that you wish you could rewind back to when you got out of bed and just do over.

Actually, I’d like to rewind to when I brought the kids home from school. Julien had made a coccinelle (ladybug) at preschool and was so proud of it. It was made of some kind of play dough and had six little pipe cleaner legs sticking out of it. I told him to go show Dad and went into the kitchen to start lunch. I returned to the living room only to hear, “Jesse!” and watch the dog scarf down the ladybug. There was only one little leg left when he was done with it.

Oh no.

Called the vet. No answer. Called the emergency vet. No answer. Checked the first aid book that says to get to the vet immediately if a dog has swallowed a sharp object.

Got Jesse in the car. Drove to the vet. They’re closed until 2pm for a staff meeting. Called another vet. They can see him if I get there before 1:30pm. No problem. Make it to the correct street. Do a U-turn. Drive the driver’s side door of the car into a pole.

Start swearing. Throw car parts into the back seat and keep going.

X-rays vividly show five small pieces of metal in Jesse’s stomach and the vet recommends an endoscopy, but they don’t do it there and she doesn’t know how much it will cost. I can now tell you that it costs $1,128 after they removed the Foreign Body Retrieval fee because they couldn’t retrieve the foreign body. In other words, I did all of this rushing to the vet, put Jesse under anesthesia for an endoscopy and they couldn’t get the pipe cleaner pieces out. I still get to inspect his pooh for the next few days to make sure everything comes out in the end (oh, and we’ll be back at the vet tomorrow for an x-ray to make sure that everything is moving along).

Wouldn’t a do-over be nice here?

Sophia’s school had their annual auction two weeks ago and the theme was Mardi Gras. They said that costumes were encouraged, but having never been to one before we weren’t quite sure how literal people would take it. So we got some masks, dressed up and were on our way.

The auction featured both silent and live auctions as well as several fund-a-need opportunities. The fund-a-need options included giving money to buy library books or computer supplies, that sort of thing. Joe and I won a silent auction item for an eco-tour and tasting at a winery in Napa — I’m definitely looking forward to that.

And I contributed to the auction, too. I made a purse. I thought it was my best one, yet (I’ve made three now), and was really hoping that it would do well. Instead, it got one bid and sold for $45. I was quite disappointed since I had spent closer to $60 in materials. Oh well, it was for a good cause, but I don’t think that I’ll be knitting anything for the auction in the future!

Joe called me a witch the other day.

He did it as I was making my first batch of chamomile tea. I had planted German Chamomile in the garden toward the end of last summer and was surprised to find that it grew really, really well. I have since learned that it self-sows very easily so where I planted three plants last summer, I now have about seven little plants ready to keep me stocked with all of the sleep-inducing chamomile tea that I may need.

I dried the chamomile and used both the flowers and the leaves. Apparently, you get a milder flavor if you use the leaves than if you used just the flowers.

And I’ve started seeds of Lemon Balm to add to my tea for next season. I’ll just have to keep brewing until I can find the perfect combination!

A couple of weeks ago, Joe suggested that it was time to do a thorough spring cleaning of the house. He talked about moving furniture, wiping down walls and cleaning out cupboards. My response, “OK, let’s get started!”

He wasn’t quite ready for that.

So I had a little time to think about this spring cleaning and then came to the conclusion that maybe we should put it off. Before this talk of cleaning, we had been contemplating removing the carpet in the hallway and bedrooms. If there was even a remote possibility that we were going to get rid of the carpets, there was no way that I was going to do an extensive cleaning of the house beforehand.

We knew that there were hardwood floors underneath the hallway and bedrooms, but had no idea what condition they were in. Since the carpet was in pretty bad shape we decided that we didn’t really care.

As we started to pull up the carpet, Joe and I just shook our heads. We still can’t understand why anyone would have covered up the floors in the first place. (We also uncovered traces of pink carpet which had me shaking my head yet again.) The floors underneath are not in great shape, there are a few places with stains and more than a few places with bits of paint, but they still look a whole lot better than the old beige carpet did.

I guess it’s time to start that spring cleaning now!

My new garden arrived in the mail the other day in the form of seed packets. I may have gotten a bit carried away when I was ordering because seeing all of the packets prompted Sophia to say, “Mom, I think you got too much!”

She may be right, but I’m hoping to tackle a bit more of the backyard this year. Last year, I just wanted to get the vegetable garden under control and plant a few fruit trees. This year I’m hoping to remove the calla lilies that have taken over the border. I’ve waged war on them once before and it looks like they have won. They’re big and beautiful, but they take over the garden like weeds — they’re popping up everywhere!

So, in addition to the usual tomatoes and beans, we’ll also be planting lupine and Kiss-Me-Over-the-Garden-Gate (I couldn’t resist the name on that one) and a whole bunch of other stuff that I barely remember ordering. Sophia can’t wait to plant sunflowers and I’m hoping to start an herb garden.

Julien and I started some of the seeds on Friday morning and by Friday evening he was already shouting, “Mom, they’re not growing!” He has been impatiently checking on them ever since, but has now been rewarded as we have a few peeking out already. Happy Planting!

Last November marked the one year anniversary of our move back to the US. I even baked my own baguette to commemorate the date! The baguette turned out pretty well (if I do say so myself). I spent the entire weekend watching bread rise while using the recipe from Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan. (Can I add that I think it’s pretty funny that the Baking with Julia cookbook won the Julia Child Cookbook award.) I will definitely be doing that again the next time that I really need a baguette fix.

Julien turned three. He went from being a super-easy, laid-back two-year-old to saying things like, “GO AWAY!” and, “I don’t need you!” almost overnight. I mentioned this to his pediatrician because I thought it was entertaining and she said that it was pretty typical for kids who speak well to be easy two-year-olds and hellacious three-year-olds. We’ve been warned. Having said that, I also get big hugs and, “I love you, Mom.” on a daily basis so that makes up for everything.

But our biggest news for the past few months has to do with Sophia. At the end of October we went to our first parent-teacher meeting and, I will admit, we fully expected to hear how Sophia was doing really well in class and that she was such a good student, etc., etc. Instead, we found ourselves discussing whether she might have an auditory processing issue. The teacher brought up that she wasn’t remembering her letters and I had noticed that she didn’t remember her classmates’ names — even though they obviously remembered hers.

In the meantime, we had been seeing an Ear, Nose, Throat specialist and had found that she was having trouble hearing — she was hearing in the normal range, but at the low end of normal. Once we became suspicious of a processing issue, the ENT recommended putting tubes in her ears in order to improve her hearing. We did that in December.

We got to see an audiologist in January in order to test her for the processing issue and she has now been diagnosed with a Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD). The audiologist sent me reeling for a bit by discussing brain damage and asking if Sophia’s had been a difficult birth or if she had been in any major accidents as a toddler. She then assured me that no matter what the cause of the CAPD was, it was treatable with therapy. Her own daughter has it, as well as a PhD from Stanford and she’s now teaching at Yale.

For Sophia it means that she has a tough time with rote memory that would normally be done at the brain stem level (this letter is a “T”, her name is “Jane”, we call this “red”) and that she needs to move that type of learning up to the temporal lobes. We basically need to figure out the easiest way for her to learn and then teach her to do that type of learning on her own. Since that October meeting with her teacher, she has learned the names of her classmates as well as more of her letters. So she does eventually learn these things, it just takes her longer than it should and we need to find out what helps her to finally learn them.

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I will start this next section by saying that we will do whatever we can to help Sophia with her memory, but……

All this talk of brain damage and processing disorders and learning disabilities has me a bit skeptical. Joe read the audiologist’s report and asked, “Is she sure this isn’t genetic. She’s describing the way that I learn.”

So we can blame Joe for all of this!

But seriously, could it just be a matter of Sophia learning things a bit differently? No one was talking about processing disorders for Joe when he was a kid (maybe ADD, but that’s another story) and he’s an electronic engineer. Must we really label this as a learning disability?

Since receiving the audiologist’s report, we have seen an educational therapist (who said Sophia was too young for her reading therapies) and a developmental therapist. The developmental therapist has done an assessment and determined that Sophia would benefit from developmental therapy (shocking, I know). And while I do believe that they can help her, I also wonder if I’m being asked to open my wallet for a never-ending series of therapy sessions.

Here’s hoping that they figure out what makes her tick….quickly.

We are planning a camping trip (for July) and, in honor of that, I made a batch of S’mores Bark the other day. (Or, I bought all of the ingredients back in December with the plan to make it for the holidays and never got around to it, take your pick.) The recipe is from Martha Stewart‘s Living.

The bark has been a great hit and was SUPER easy to make. It’s definitely one of those It-Took-Me-No-Effort-But-Everyone-Thinks-I-Slaved-Over-This type of confections. I’ll be keeping this recipe to use again.

In other news, I’ve been taking a lot of grief lately for the state of my blog (meaning the complete negligence that I’ve been displaying toward it). And rightly so. There are no excuses, really, but I’ll catch you up in the next few posts.

As the stores around here started filling up with decorations back in September, I was reminded of how the French don’t embrace Halloween because they see it as a commercial American holiday.

They’re right. It is, but I missed it nonetheless.

Sophia had a parade at school.

We got together at Rachel and Charlie’s house for dinner and trick-or-treating in the neighborhood.

Julien got to show off.

And Sophia declared it “the best Halloween EVER!”