Button holes

Whatever change the orthotics guy did to Dylan's braces worked! They are perfect! No slipping at all. Yay! This makes me so happy. She is doing great with them.

We got her some new footy jammies. for some reason her room and our room are so COLD during the winter and hot during the summer. Not good venting I guess and t's getting time for her to dress warmer. They are new so I had to blow the dust off of the sewing machine and figure out how to do the one single thing I have ever done with it before, sew button holes. Large ones that her feeding tube will fit through for those after-jammie feedings. Remember how genius this idea of Matthew's was because the cut holes would tear and stuff?

Ugh, sewing is the most frustrating thing ever. I have to look up the manual to figure it out and the YouTube tutorial is laughable... "put this foot on, set the button size, push a button!" Uhmm... no. First it doesn't give you fundamentals like how to put the freaking foot on and second, what if something goes wrong? Who doesn't have enough time to figure out enough about sewing machines to deal with this? THIS GIRL. The first several times were disasters because the feeder feet thingies weren't pulling the fabric around. Nice.

Who doesn't have a spare scrap of fabric to test on? THIS GIRL. So we have a partial button hole in a rag now, but I got it to work. Well enough anyway... Good thing they just need to be functional, not pretty.

After three of the four jammies what happens? Bobbin runs out of thread. Yup. Nice. Back to the manual to figure out how to load the freaking bobbin! Only one more disaster and the fourth pair of jammies has a button hole. Away goes the sewing machine for another year but hey? Now at least it has a full bobbin!

I never did make it in to the school to talk to the teacher about the IEP, but I need to. It's on the list of things to do. I will keep you posted. I mentioned that my art lesson is next Friday and I am so ready! We will be reading Mouse Paint and making our own color wheel with PlayDoh. Oh thank heavens for the Internet. There are all kinds of great ideas! I think the kids are going to love it!

There is a cute girl in Duncan's class who loves to say bye to him, several times. One morning after I picked them up she said by a few times and then waved to us from the school corner AND the corner down the street! It was so cute! He turned in to an actual BOY over night it seems! So big. And friends of his very own.

One of our neighbors called to see if she could borrow Duncan and Ian for an hour this week. If you want them, you can have them! Her daughter Lily is in Duncan's Primary class at church and one Sunday they both went different ways after class and circled around and met each other again and gave each other great big huge hugs like they hadn't just spent two hours together! Lily has chickens... and we buy our eggs from them now "Easter eggs!"

When they came home they came home with a bounty! Pumpkins for each of the family members that they had picked out themselves from the garden. Whoa! Better mom than I, takes all the neighbor kids pumpkin picking! And pictures too! She took some AWESOME pictures of my boys for me! Remind me to thank her again because they loved it!

It was LDS conference weekend and I didn't see much of it. It is so hard to get the quiet time to really listen without distractions. I got a text from my niece Eden hoping that I was watching a talk by Elder Holland. I wasn't... but I had it recorded so I was planning on watching later. She told me I MUST let her know when I watched it. I watched it later that night, sitting in the hall outside Asher's door making sure he was going to stay in bed. His talk was called "Like a Broken Vessel" and was pretty awesome. In it he talks about depression and all kind of ways the body can be afflicted. He addresses caregivers to take care of themselves. At the end, and this was the really amazing part, he said “I bear witness of that day when loved ones whom we knew to have disabilities in mortality will stand before us glorified and grand,” he said, “breathtakingly perfect in body and mind. What a thrilling moment that will be!” He talked about how we will be unsure whether we will be more happy for them that they are no longer afflicted or for us that we were a witness to it all.

So this morning as I saw that another beautiful girl with Holoprosencephaly passed away unexpectedly all I could think about was those two words. Amazing. So blessed that I have the council and the faith in eternal families.

"Breathtakingly perfect." Let that one soak in for a while.

No Asher representation in the pictures this week but he gets his fair share!

I die. For real.