Family Fun & Fitness

A lot of our family and friends comment on the fact that we are always really busy, and that we are always outside doing stuff and doing random trips and adventures.  So some might say we are a VERY active family.  We like to be out and about and we love for the girls to have all sorts of fun memories when it comes to family time.  Myself, I have always been a very active person.  I worked at a health club through highschool and collage, and in the summer I worked at an outdoor education camp in the Northern California Mountains.  Before the girls came we did very little (in Hawaii we took up surfing and hiking ALOT.....because that was all we could afford LOL).  When we became parents we decided we wanted our kids to experience as much as possible when it came to trying new things, and seeing new things.

So, I thought I would do a post about what we do, and why we do it.

First of all, wee let them try out every sport they want.  Some they like, some they don't.  Sometimes one is good at a sport and the other is not.  They know that it's not about winning, but trying our BEST and having FUN. We do not always love having to drive them around and take them to practices, and to be honest some days we flat out just don't do it.  But they go to almost every practice for whatever they are signed up for.  Doing sports at a young age gives kids all sorts of confidence (not just in their athletic ability, but in their body image, courage, and so many other ways), teaches them team work, and good sportsmanship. We have found that Abby tends to like the less aggressive sports (well except hockey, but at her age they are not aggressive yet) like gymnastics, and Jordy likes the more aggressive sports like wrestling.  Sports where she isn't busy and having full contact she loses interest in much quicker (track) (she hasn't gotten to try a whole bunch yet because she is just now old enough to start trying them).

 During the summer we go to the base pool at least a few times a week, if not every single day. More than half of those days, we bike to the pool which is about a mile away.  In the winter we play out in the snow, and not just the kids...we all go out and build snowmen, sled, and have snowball fights.  Most people think we are nuts.  I know that most of the people we know here have never gone and played with their kids in the snow.  IF their kids even like going outside in the snow, they just send them outside.  Going outside in the cold isn't for everyone, and we will admit, we are not outside with them every single time...but people who NEVER do...you are missing out big time.  This is the sort of stuff kids remember.  In a few years they will not remember me slaving over a hot stove and making that perfect healthy meal...they will remember us being with them and playing.  When we have in between weather we love going on family bike rides and just being outside.  So yes, we are definitely that "outdoorsy" family.  But there is more to it than just having fun and creating memories for our girls.  We are trying to set in them that being active is important.   It keeps you healthy and lets you enjoy life.  Real life, not the fake life you see on TV.  The girls know that we need to be active, and they know there are tons of ways to make it fun.  They see Geoff and I going on runs, or doing a work out video.  We never say it's to lose weight when they are around.  We tell them we do it to keep our bodies healthy.  Eating healthy and staying active are very important to living a happy life and we try to lead by example.  Our girls watch VERY little TV.  Somedays they watch none at all.  Most days they get 30 minutes at night before bed to help them sort of veg out and relax.  In the summertime, we walk after dinner as a family every night that we do not have any other commitments (which is usually some sort of practice).

  Also most nights we eat a healthy homemade dinner...at home...TOGETHER...at the dinner table.  I know this isn't an option for many military families, but we are blessed that it is for us.  It is VERY rare that we will all just sorta randomly eat dinner at different times.  We have a set dinner time.  Now when we are more involved with some sort of sport with the girls we are not able to do this as often as we would like, but if we are home, this is what we do.

With that said, here are some random photos from the past year or so.  Most of them are pretty crappy photos because they are from a point and shoot or camera phone because I usually don't have a good camera with me when we are out and about.  I have a waterproof/shatterproof/freezeproof point and shoot camera that can take a pretty good beating and take decent enough photos to capture the memories.  It's not the best quality, but it gets the job done :)

Swimming

exploring the peace gardens

playing at the park

Splash pad at Sea World San Antonio

Mount Rushmore

Climbing on rocks somewhere in South Dakota

Exploring Oahu, Hawaii...Windward coast.

Hiking in South Dakota.

Watching the boom operator refuel planes on a military flight to Hawaii.

(Jordyn's 1st military HOP, Abby's 5th)

Learning the Hula...Waikiki- Honolulu, Hawaii

Turtle Beach...North Shore Hawaii

Hockey

Tubing in Bottinau, ND

Jordyn's first Hockey practice

Jumping in the rain puddles

Splash pad in Grand Forks, ND

Running Track

Gymnastics

 Gymnastics

Abby's first time without training wheels.

Tower climbing

Kayaking

Both girls were taught how to swim underwater last summer.
This next summer is going to be even more awesome!

I know this probably seems like a lot to most people, but this is only a small handful of the stuff we have experienced and done over the past few years.  Being busy and active isn't for everyone, but we love it and have no plans on slowing down :)

Relaxing snow weekend :)

We are still adjusting to Daddy being home around here again.  We have had him home for a full week!  We had a super busy first week filled with appointments and wrestling practices, followed by an amazing relaxing weekend.  After being so busy all week we decided we would just stay home all weekend...to relax, play and snuggle.  We couldn't have picked a more perfect weekend as a storm hit us Saturday evening, forcing us to stay home (we love these kind of storms!).  I must admit, this past weekend, just being together, was one of the best weekends I can recall.  We are always so busy (which we also love) doing all sorts of different things, with a goal of creating wonderful memories for our girls, that it's nice to slow down and create these types of memories for the girls as well.  I will leave you with some photos from this weekend....as we prepare to go back to a busy week of school, cleaning up from the lazy weekend, appointments, and practices!

This was a photo of our front yard less than 12 hours before the storm hit, as you can see, almost no snow!

This was about an hour after it started

And this is what we woke up to...

Where is Daddy?!!?!?

Abby getting pelted by the snowblower...she loves this!

Kota getting some pulling practice in

Poor Holly...she still doesn't know she is a husky.  She just wants to play.  She hates pulling, she doesn't really care for the snow, she loves curling up and snuggling, and she really has no desire to run off like Kota does.

This was about 3 minutes before they realized they could run slightly faster than I could and took off...with Abby.  Once we realized they were running off and not listening to us to stop, Geoff ran behind them (he was running slightly faster than them, slowly catching up) After being chased for a bit, Abby fell off (she was fine, they were not going FAST, they just had the advantage of the snow, which was a disadvantage for Geoff).  I can't imagine what all the people thought who were out snow blowing, as a dog sled ran past them (with no rider).  LOL.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our family and friends.  We are spending the day relaxing and doing lots of cooking for our military family that is coming over tonight to join us in thanks.  

We hope you all have a wonderful day filled with lots of love, food, and joy!

Family Update

I just realized the other day, that I have not done much blogging, other than my Projct 52 posts each week.  Facebook makes it easy to forget doing it, but at least most of our family and close friends are all on facebook.  But I know, not all of our family knows what is going on, as far as the medical issues that has caused us to go on this trip back down to San Antonio, TX.  I think most know why Geoff came had to come down, but I will touch base with that as well...

I think all of you know that Geoff has 100% hearing loss in his right ear, due to a tumor that was removed a few years ago on his auditory nerve.  Since then, he has a tried a couple of different hearing aids, with no sucess.  One option has always been a BAHA (bone anchored hearing aid).  This is not a regular hearing aid though, and the though of having it surgically placed, made it our last resort, when nothing else worked.  So we decided to go with it.  We all 4 drove down a few days ago.  We did the drive in 2 days, and the girls did AMAZING as usual.  We spent half the day on Thursday doing pre-op appts and preparing for his surgery.  Friday morning we had to be at the hospital at 8:30.  We ended up having to wait about 3 hours before he finally got called back.  He was back there a few hours, and then the surgeon finally came out and spoke with me when he was waking up.  The surgery was sucessful and took a little over an hour.  The purpose of this surgery was to drill into his skull and place a "post" which will hold the BAHA.  I was able to see him about an hour after his surgery.  He was feeling really sick and had a huge headache (to be expected).  His surgery was a same day surgery, so he was able to leave just a couple of hours afterwards.  We are now back at the hotel and he is still feeling pretty crappy.  They said the first 48 hours or so he will feel not so good, and then he should be feeling up to getting around some.  He has a follow up appt on Thursday where he will be checked over, and probably released for us to head home.  He will be on convelesent leave until June 3rd as of now.  As of right now, he will be probably flying back to Texas, in 8-12 weeks, when he should be all nice and healed up, and he will recieve the actual hearing aid, that will plug into the post that was implanted into his head.  He should start "hearing" again right away.

Next up, we have Jordy on Monday.  She will be seeing a developmental team here.  From the sounds of it, they will evualuate her in the morning, and then meet back up with us later that day and discuss they actions they think we should take with her.  The purpose of this is not for us to find out what is "wrong" with her. We WILL not medicate her.  We just feel she still has trouble when it comes to listening, following directions, getting alot with other kids, some speech issues, and still strong oral issues.  We simply want to know how to teach her.  We want to know how to be better parents to her, and help her learn to focus better. We do not want to change who she is.ever.  We were referred here, because it seems she does not qualify for any of the speical needs programs up in Minot (besides just 1 hour of speech thearpy a week).  So, I will post more on that when we find out more Monday hopefully.

The 2nd issue with Jordy...could possibly be more serious, and really scares us...alot.  A few nights ago, Jordy fell asleep in our bed, and when I went to move her to her bed, around 11pm...she started seriously convulsing, and her eyes rolled back into her head.  At first I didn't think a whole lot of it, until I told Geoff, and it clicked, that she may have had a seizure. I would not have even considered this, if she did not have a history of seizures in the NICU.  She didn't have any after she was discharged, but was followed by nuerologists for her first year, until she was finally in the clear.  I decided to take her to the DR a couple of days later, just to be sure.  It really concered the DR because she had the history of them, and then we found out something we had never heard of thought of before.  She may be having "Spacial Seizures) for the last 3 years or so.  Most of you know this as "Jordyland" as we all like to call it.  She completely spaces out and just seems gone...but happy. We never though tthis was a bad thing, but just her being Jordy.  The DR told us that this concerns her even more that she has been doing this her whole life. So basically now, we are taking her to a nuerologist in Bismarck, sometime after we get back from TX. 

Now Abby. I am pretty sure I blogged a while ago about her having headaches and stomach pains, and having trouble sleeping. Long story short, we took her to a gastro specialist in Fargo.  He diagnosed her with migraines and gave her meds to help reduce the instances of those.  Well we had a follow up with her Pediatrician in Minot.  We told her we didnt' like the side effects of her meds (making her sleepy, kinda lazy, not wanting to play as much). So she went ahead and ordered an MRI so we could try to confirm migraines.  So we go in for the results of her MRI, expecting just the regular "everything is normal, but we had to make sure" only to be hit with a big slap of scary news.  They ended up finding 2 abnormalities on her brain scan.  The first one was a cyst.  Right now they are pretty sure no action will need to be taken, but the location of the cyst is actually down in her brain, where surgery would be VERY risky, so we are hoping its the type that she can just live with, and get scanned every once in a while and make sure there are no changes.  The 2nd thing was the part of her brain stem that carries fluid is sort of tilted, which it should not be.  Right now, it is not causing any problems, but later on, could cause possible fluid build up.  So she said she wanted her to have a consult with a neurosurgeon...right away.  We told her we were coming down to TX and asked if we could get seen here.  Mind you, this was on Friday and we were leaving Tuesday.  She was able to talk to the surgeon personally and got him to squeeze us in while we are here (saving us a trip to Minneapolis in a few weeks as well).  She will be seeing him on Tuesday afternoon.  Again, we are hoping to find out some good news, and we will post updates when we know anything.

SOOOO, yeah.  Right now I just do not know how I feel. I guess overwhelmed is the best way to describe it.  Today, we made it through the first thing: Geoff's surgery.  So that was a huge relief, but I still have so much on my heart and mind right now, I do not feel much relief yet.   Ummm, 3 out of 4 members of our family are getting seen by specialists here because of the lack of any sort of speicality Drs in Minot.  We love Minot, but this is super frusturating to us.  We are thankful we were able to do this all in one trip, even though Tricare is completely stupid about how and what they will pay for (they do not give a crap that we saved them THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS by doing 1 trip, instead of 3 individual ones like we could have).  So of course, that just adds to stress that we should not have to be dealing with right now.

Family Visits

As promised, here are some photos from our visit with Grandma, Aunt Laurie and Aunt Carolyn! We had so much fun with them here and the girls had so much fun as well!

sing a long song with Grandma!

Sitting around, knitting us scarves for Minot! hahaha

Grandma and Daddy are pooped!

Mamacitas!

We went to Sea World, and we went to the Sesame street show...and this is the reaction we got from Jordy....

.....ELMO!!!!

oh gosh it was soo cute!!! She just couldn't believe it was actually him!!!

everyone minus grandma goin on the log ride!

Grandma and her Shamu kids meal

on the boatride at the Riverwalk

Eating on the River

Grandma is so proud of him!