Friday, October 23, 2009

The 18 Month/18 Week Update!

Hey All,

So Julie will be 18 weeks pregnant this Monday, and Dixon just turned 18 Months old on the 16th. Hence the 18/18 Update. So how are things in our camp? Well, tiring. lol. Julie just got over a bout with some food poisoning, and Dixon has been teething (we think) for the last week or so and has had a low grade fever, and a constant runny nose and a "on and off again" cough... Then, to top it all off I caught a cold or something last weekend, which just started innocently with a sore throat, then after a couple of good days, I turned into a completely congested, stuffed up and sneezy mess of myself. I am feeling a tad bit better as I write this.

So, onto the updates:

First, Julie had her monthly baby check up last week and everything was ok. Baby Jellybean's heartbeat was great (somewhere in the high 150's) and everything is on course for a March 28th delivery. We have scheduled our ultrasound appointment for the 20th of November and then we will be able to find out (hopefully) if Baby Jellybean is a Boy or a Girl... I'm sure it is a girl, Julie wants another Boy, so let the betting begin... Remember November 20th we find out, maybe.

Second, Dixon had his 18 Month checkup and he is doing great as well. Except for one thing, which the doctor has more of an issue with than we do, which is that Dixon has dropped to the 8th percentile for his weight. He weighs just around 22/23 pounds now, and though WIC told us they thought that was good for his height, our doctor wants him to get his weight up. His height is in the 50th percentile for his age. Anyway, Dixon eats 3 meals and has snacks throughout the day, and this last week, really hasn't wanted to eat dinner at all, but gets his food without a doubt. The Doc also wants Dixon to drink more milk, but the boy doesn't really like milk at all, so we feed him cheese, yogurt and smoothies quite a bit to compensate. Though today, he drank most of his cup of milk. He really loves orange juice however... The Doc also checked Dixon's throat, ears and lungs (just because of his runny nose and cough) and all were fine, and since he has no fever currently, the Doc agreed with us and said it was more than likely just due to teething. He is just a few teeth away from having them all in... Gee, he should probably go see a dentist now...

Dixon is just a joy to watch right now. I swear he is an engineer in the making. He loves to take things apart just to try to put them back together. He loves to stack the boxes of kleenex up, take them down and then stack them up again. He takes the caps off of pens just to try and put it back on. He loves reading his books, he has started to draw and color, and his new thing is to point to your belly button and say, "baby" because Julie has been teaching him about babies in preparation for him being a big brother. The other day I handed him a old USB flash drive to play with, and he ran right over to the laptop and tried to plug it in to the USB slot. Who taught him that? I never did. The kid is a genius I tell you. He takes our keys and walks over to the door and tries to unlock it, luckily he can't reach, and Julie often has him help her put stuff away when she is cleaning and he is a great help as seems to know where everything goes, even if we do find some items in strange places later on. If you are reading a book with him now and he sees something in the book that he recognizes (such as a duck, a cat, a teddy bear, a ball, a horse etc...) he will immediately get up and go find his toy that matches the picture and bring it back to you to show you that it is the same as in the book... we were reading one of his sign language books and we came to "cracker," and he said, "coocoo" (which is how he says cracker) then did the sign for cracker, and if I didn't understand all of that, he went and pointed to the crackers on the table to show me as well... guess he was hungry :) Well that is enough about my brilliant son for the time being.

Third, hmm... what else? Lets see. Our work here at Keeler's Corner is going good. We are just starting to get the swing of things now and feeling comfortable in our "Community Team" shoes, though we aren't sure yet just how the new baby will change things. One thing for sure though, we will need a bigger apartment.

Work at Kenmore Camera has been busy to say the least. The "recession" hasn't hurt us at all, and we just finished our 4th annual 2009 Expo at the Lynnwood Convention Center this last weekend, where we doubled what we did the year previous and packed the center with people. How many I don't know, but 5000 wouldn't be a bad guess.. easily could have been more. We have some changes in store as we are adding a class room here soon (across the street from the store) and are looking to continue steaming ahead into the new year.

Julie and I are taking a vacation in December and flying down to Amarillo to spend Christmas with her parents. This will be the first vacation we have taken in close to 3 years and the first we will have taken with Dixon. He gets to fly on a plane! I pray that works out ok :) It will be a great time and I am really really looking forward to some downtime during the holidays.

Well, that is all for now. I think I will go have some Pumpkin Pie now...

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