October!

IZABEL IS 4!!!

These are a few of her favorite things :)

We started off the month by heading to Disney's Princesses on Ice. Noah and I just took Izabel for a special night to start her birthday celebration. We met up with her friends Evie and Lily for dinner and then went over to the show. Izabel was feeling pretty yucky but she enjoyed the show a lot and we all had a great night.

Izabel, Evie and Lily at the Hampton Coliseum

Izzy and Daddy!

Izabel turned 4 and Tanner turned 2 1/2 on October 8th. Unfortunately they both had strep throat the whole week before so we ended up canceling the big party we had planned and only had a little get together at the house instead. We filled Izabel's room full of balloons the night before and they ended up being great decorations for the party and the rest of the weekend. Of course Izabel woke up in the middle of the night and said she wanted them out of her room! 

So much fun!

Noah's Mom, Aunt, Cousin and Grandma were all in town and got to celebrate along with all of the local family and close friends. We had lemon cupcakes opened presents. 

Izabel's new Leapster Explorer from Mommy and Daddy

Tanner got a little something too!

Strawberry Shortcake!!!

Busy coloring before bedtime

Mimi got Izzy and Tanner their very own bounce house so most of the party was spent outside jumping!

Jumping and Sliding

They had a blast and then we went to Izabel's favorite restaurant, Friendly's, for dinner. She got lots of great stuff and I'm pretty sure she had an amazing weekend surrounded by the people who love her the most! Thank you to everyone who came. 

P.S. Thank you notes will be coming soon now that I'm done with mid terms :)

Finally a good picture of both of them together and it was taken at school!

In other news - Tanner had his speech evaluation this month. We've been waiting forever for CHKD to get to him so we finally went with the city's early intervention program and they have been fantastic. They brought a team of people to the house and tested Tanner in every area. They tested him at a 3 year old level and he passed every test with flying colors. He is doing a great job in everything except speech. He makes sounds, but not words. He definitely expresses himself and makes what he wants known, he just can't quite form the words that we do. A speech therapist will be coming to the house once a week now to work with him and hopefully I'll finally get to hear his sweet little voice soon!

Tanner at 2 and a half

At the end of the month both kids had their check ups with our new found favorite Dr. Carson! If you need a pediatrician in the Hampton Roads area she is absolutely fantastic and we couldn't love her anymore!!! Both kids are doing pretty well. Izabel is 34lbs (42nd percentile) and 39 inches (37th percentile) and Tanner is 35lbs (90th percentile) and 37 inches (75th percentile). We talked about Tanner's asthma and the fact that he is back to coughing all the time and using the inhaler. For right now he is on a one-a-day allergy medicine but I am thinking he will be going to the one-a-day asthma and allergy soon. Since it looks like he probably has asthma he couldn't have the flu mist so he ended up getting the one shot. Izabel is doing great other than her sleeping habits. We have great routines in place and bedtime always happens at the same time every night, but she will lay in her bed awake for so long that she ends up getting less than half of the recommended amount of sleep for age! It's obviously a problem for all of us so we brought it up and the Dr. recommended melatonin. It's a natural supplement to help her sleep and so far it's been working okay. She has started falling asleep a little earlier. Hopefully we will start seeing a change in her soon as she starts to catch up on some rest! For most kids this is the visit before starting kindergarten next fall so she ended up getting four shots. My drama queen was very unhappy and limped around the rest of the day!

Finally, the month ended with Halloween! I like to coordinate costumes which was hard this year because Izabel wanted to be a princess. Disney really needs to work on their selection of boy costumes! I finally figured it out and they were The Princess and the Frog for trick-or-treating. They had a blast and definitely did not want to come home even though they filled up their buckets numerous times :)

Izabel just wanted to get going - not take pictures :)

Our friends Evie and Lily came too