Remember me?

I apologize for going so long without posting, but my beloved husband has recently discovered facebook, and thus, is monopolizing the computer poking his friends, playing odd western facebook games, and commenting on esoteric economics blogs. 

Much, much to post on...

Julianna cut her third tooth.  She cut the first two on the bottom and is getting one of her incisors on the top on.  Each tooth is a hard fought battle for her and I, involving days of screaming, endless nights of nursing and copious amounts of motrin.  For both of us.  At almost eight and a half months, she's still not crawling.  In fact, I've concluded that she's going to skip working towards that milestone and is just going to devote herself to flying.  Her new thing is to sit and flap her arms frantically whenever she gets really excited about anything.  It's actually brilliant, when you think about it, because she's quickly trained all of us, her siblings as well as Marc and I, that when the arms start going, we look around, figure out what she wants and deliver it to her, usually with praise and smiles because she's so damn cute.   At this age, Sam was climbing on top of everything, and so far, Julie shows no inclination to do any of that.  To continue on in comparing my children (which I know is not a good habit for a mother of many to have), Jessica didn't walk independently with any kind of consistency until she was close to a year and a half.  Jess was an early talker, and I'm thinking Julie will be as well.   She's incredibly verbal already.

Sam is still my sweet little Samilicious boy.  Seriously - he's so sweet.  If I get irritated (which has happened a lot, see first paragraph), he always comes over to me and drops a kiss on my hand.  He's all emotion and love and tenderness.  Unless he's interacting with Marc, in which case, he's all violence and wrestling and fighting.  They've got a relationship that's so absolutely different from mine with Sam.  He's still adamant that he's not attending kindergarten in the fall, and any mention of it is enough to start a torrent of tears and frantic insistence that he's not, under any circumstances, going to be attending any kind of academic instruction at any point.  Ever.  I'm dreading September...

Speaking of school, I had a meeting today with Jessie's teacher and the special education coordinator.  We've all concluded that she doesn't have a learning disability, because the number reversals and transposing isn't in any way affecting her ability to learn.   She tests higher than average, and it's not affecting her reading skills or her computing skills.  She's got the understanding of all of it, but frequently when she writes numbers down, she reverses or transposes them.  So we're going to work on encouraging her to double check her work.  Her teacher seems to be incredibly sensitive to Jessie's needs, well aware of her personality and quirks, and I was very impressed with the level of knowlege that the staff had, not only about Jessica's personality and ability, but also with our whole family. 

There's been a lot of other stuff going on - my aunt has been staying with us off and on for the past month or so (also a computer addict, so that's another valid excuse for the lack of blogging).  My cousin had her beautiful baby girl and I couldn't be happier for her.