The next step (so to speak) on Norah's path to world domination!

Norah has decided to stand up. Yay, Norah! She has been trying for a while, and in the past week, she has become an expert. She is pulling herself up on the ottoman and the coffee table and in her crib (which of course makes her look like a prisoner), and has started to grab at everything within her reach. How fun. Of course, we take stuff out of her reach, which makes her quite grumpy, but we just tell her that she has to start walking around so she can cause mischief! We're very happy about this, naturally, but now Norah wants to stand all the time! Why this causes grief is because she can't walk yet, so she just stands holding onto things and gets very cranky. She looks at us as if we're to blame for her not being able to walk, and we tell her that she's going to have to figure it out for herself. She was whiny when she couldn't go anywhere, and then she learned to crawl and she was happy for a while. Now she's back to being whiny again because she can't go anywhere, even though if she got down on her hands and knees she could crawl everywhere and be happy.

Of course, she needs to learn on her own. It's fun watching her, because she hasn't grasped the concept of bending her knees to get down yet. She stands holding onto the coffee table and looks down at something she wants on the floor. Still holding on with one hand, she bends at the waist and strains to reach whatever it is she wants. But ... she ... can't ... quite ... get ... to ... it! Once or twice she has fallen forward, but she hasn't crashed off the coffee table (yet). When she does fall, she looks surprised and affronted and cries for a second, then realizes that she's not hurt and she either crawls away or stands back up. She has started to move while still holding on, but that's in the early stages. Soon she will be even more mobile than she is right now, and then we'll have more fun!

Of course, as with everything Norah achieves, it's a bit bittersweet because she is slowly passing Mia's level. Mia, we think, is reaching a point where she understands what Norah is doing and how she can't do it, but it hasn't affected her that much yet. She is still a very happy kid, but occasionally we catch her looking at Norah with a bit of frustration in her eyes. Of course, we always tell her she'll just have to work harder!

So Norah has taken another small step toward complete mobility. I know that parents out there have gone through this with their own children, but it's still groovy for us, so I'm going to crow about it!

Krys: doing some interior decorating!

Krys loves decorating, for the most part. She saw these things on the Internet that are murals you can rub onto the walls. They look like they are painted on and are very neat. She bought one for each girl's room, and a few weeks ago she went at it. They make the kids' rooms look even nicer than they already looked!

In Norah's room, she put up this tree. Check out how neat it is!


Nice detail. It really does look like it's been painted.


In Mia's room, keeping with the whole "fairy princess" theme she has, Krys put up this window with the fantasy scene.


Mia has decided the unicorn in the picture is a cow. Whenever we ask her what it is, she smiles and says, "Dow." I have wondered if she's really saying "Tao," but then we ask her what the cow says and she says, "Moo." It's a four-legged white animal with a horn, so we've left it alone.


Sorry for the break. I kept meaning to post these pictures and then some other news, and then my mom came to town. I will try to get something up this weekend, because we have exciting news!

Norah and her crawl tube!

Krys bought Norah a crawl tube. I have a feeling that Krys and the cats are more jazzed by it than Norah is, but the little one certainly digs it, especially when Mommy is at one end of it and she's at the other and she can look at Mommy through it. That makes her giggle. Of course, almost everything makes her giggle. Daddy's hair catching on fire would probably make her giggle. But that's okay - it's all about amusing the small children!

So of course we took pictures of her. You just can't get enough of the cuteness of the Burgas children, can you????

First, of course, she was not using the crawl tube in the proper manner. Rest assured that she was severely punished for this action. We can't have kids misusing the crawl tubes!


Then she got the hang of it, so the beatings stopped.


I like this picture because it looks like she's coming through a Boom Tube.


Of course, once she gets through it, her attention span quickly shifts to the next interesting thing, in this case, that shiny thing Mommy is holding that makes bright lights appear! It's a shame, really, because Krys couldn't get out of her way and Norah chewed her face off. So sad!


She's been trying to stand a lot recently, too, and this morning Krys watched her pull herself into a standing position. Yay! I didn't see it, but I'm sure she'll start doing it more often now that she knows she can. This is from a few weeks ago, when she started to realize the world was a much cooler place if she could stand on two feet.


So that's the next big thing we're waiting for. She's crawling like a speed demon right now, but I have a feeling that within a week or two she'll be up on her feet and ready to go! I will keep our loyal five readers updated!

The crazy lady at the hospital

I have a bunch of stuff to post, so I might be busy here for a few days. I know, I say that a lot, but I can think of at least four things I want to write about, including this post about the crazy lady at the hospital.

Yesterday I received a phone call from Phoenix Children's Hospital. The last time Mia saw her neurologist (Friday 5 May, two weeks ago), he suggested she get another EEG. She has gotten a few since her accident, just to check her seizure activity and see if her medication needs tweaking. This is another of those. He said the scheduling department would call to set up an appointment. That is why they called.

I knew we were in trouble when the crazy lady (CL) referred to Mia's neurologist as a "she." He's quite a manly woman, apparently. That may have just been a pronoun mix-up, but it signaled the craziness to come.

The CL said that she had the Sixth of June open (she had some appointments next week, but my mom will be in town and we'll be very busy, so Mia couldn't make it). Fine and dandy. She had a 9:30 a.m. appointment, but I told her Mia would not sleep if the EEG was done at that time of the morning. Long-time readers will recall the importance of sleeping during an EEG (anyone who knows anyone who's had one will know this, too). So CL looked in her appointment book and asked when Mia usually goes down for a nap, and I said about one in the afternoon. She said they had an appointment for that time, so I said that was groovy.

At this point, CL had not done anything truly crazy, and I should have simply gotten off the phone and all would have been well. The last time Mia had an EEG, however, she had not slept and it wasn't terribly successful. So I said, "I can't guarantee that she's going to sleep." Boy, was that a big mistake! CL told me that she had to be sleep-deprived before the procedure. I told her that Mia had gotten EEGs before and I knew she had to be deprived of sleep, but I still couldn't guarantee that she would sleep. This woman seemed to think that if you tell a brain-damaged three-and-a-half-year-old to sleep, they will simply drop off. If you tell a non-brain-damaged three-and-a-half-year-old to sleep your chances of success are sketchy, and with Mia, those odds go way up. CL said to keep her up until 10 the night before and wake her up early. I said she usually goes to bed around 8 and we'll do our best to keep her awake, but if she falls asleep we're not going to smack her to wake her up. CL said to keep her active, and because I didn't want to lose my temper (I wasn't angry throughout this exchange, and was laughing a lot as I explained this to her), I didn't point out that Mia is often inactive because she can't do a lot. I repeated that if she wants to go to sleep the night before, I'm not going to keep her up. She asked when she wakes up in the morning, and I told her we'll wake her up at 5 or so, and that made her briefly happy. But then I said that even if we keep her up until 10 and wake her up at 5, there's still no guarantee that she'll sleep in the EEG room. I said, "You put all that goop in her hair and attach all that stuff to her, and she has to sit up through it all - it's a lot to deal with." She kept repeating that we needed to deprive her of sleep, going so far as to compare it to a surgeon telling someone they can't eat before surgery. I said denying her food is one thing, but if she is literally falling asleep at 9 o'clock at night I'm not going to stop her. She mentioned something about writing a note to the doctor that the parent was not going to cooperate and deprive her of sleep, which almost (almost!) made me lose it. I laughed again and said I would do all I could to keep her awake, but that's still no guarantee that she'd sleep. It was like I was a wayward student and they were going to put something in my permanent record: "Father refuses to help doctor track his child's brain activities." Sheesh! Does this woman even know anything about children? Every day Norah rubs her eyes and whines because she's tired, and then we put her in her crib and she rolls around for an hour struggling to stay awake. Kids are weird.

So I finally told CL that I would do everything within my power to get Mia to take a nap during the EEG, and that seemed to placate her. I got off the phone and just stood in wonderment at the conversation I had just had. Is it any wonder some people go up in bell towers with high-powered rifles?????

Mia the stacker

I've been meaning to post these pictures of Mia for a while, and I keep forgetting. She has been sitting in her chair and stacking blocks recently. This is somewhat of a big step, as when she stacked in the past, it was rather haphazard. She would put the blocks on top of each other but they were precariously stacked, and when they reached three or four high they would fall. Recently she has begun to be much more careful when she puts the blocks on top of each other. She doesn't let go until she maneuvers the block so that it won't topple. Once or twice she has stacked them so high that she couldn't reach the top. These pictures do not show that, because when I took them she couldn't quite manage it, but they're still pretty neat.













I like that last one. Ta-da! says Mia.

Moving fast with Norah!

A fun anecdote from the annals of Norah the Crawler:

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting on the floor watching Norah play, as is my wont. She crawled into the dining room and made a right turn to go into the kitchen. I said "What are you doing?" in my cutest possible voice (which isn't really that cute) and crawled a few inches toward her. She giggled and took off, zipping into the kitchen. When I followed, she kept turning around, giggling, and crawling away. It was quite the cute scene.

Norah has discovered that she can get to different parts of the house by crawling. So now I anticipate my role for the next year or so: simply following her around so that she doesn't get into trouble. That is my job. Won't that be fun?