Plastectomy

I have a defunct blog, and it pains me to know that. It was all about saving money... and it has been 5 months since I wrote on it. I'm just not sure that I can keep it up the way I would like now that we are back from Russia. I hate things that end poorly.... I like good closure, and my frugal blog was not that. I'm keeping it open and maybe I'll find the time again.

In the meantime, Chris and I have been doing a Total Money Makeover. I have read a lot of Dave Ramsey's materials and listened to him online. But we both decided that we wanted to do a study together of the book. So for the past several weeks we have been reading the chapters out loud to one another in the evenings. It's actually been interesting and has opened up discussion. We also sat down and wrote out our budget.... together. That was huge too. The together part! It wasn't easy, and we had plenty of "discussions" but we did it.

I can't tell you how much smoother things go when your husband is on board, and actually takes the lead. It's amazing when we actually share a vision for something, because we are both fired up to see it come to fruition. Anyway.... we are getting gazelle intense about paying off our debt completely. Seriously gazelle intense... as in what can we sell to make it happen. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime we also had a plastectomy ceremony last evening with the boys. We got all the credit cards out...many of store cards we had put away and didn't use. We got four pair of scissors and each person got to pick a card from the fan deck. Snip, snip snip...... We have one card left and we froze it in a big chunk of ice. That way if we ever feel the impulse to buy something on credit, we have to thaw it out completely and hopefully the impulse will have passed! When we have our 3-6 month emergency fund in place we'll probably cut up that last card too. :-) Anyhow.....This is the result of our plastectomy.

Babbling Video

Below is my first attempt at a video on blogger. I hope it works! This is what I mean when I say ds3 is babbling. I can't WAIT to understand exactly what he is saying. He was having one interesting conversation....... that's for sure!

Speech....

I want to quickly thank all of you that have been praying for ds3's speech. While we have a long way to go.... we are starting to see improvement. He said two words when he arrived here two and 1/2 months ago. They were "paka", and "da" in Russian. I'm proud to say that he has almost 60 words now. Sixty!!! Yes, I am happy about that.

He's been babbling for several weeks now, and I'm just waiting to be able to understand what exactly he is meaning when he carries on a conversation with me. lol! It's really babble/jibberish right now. Of the words he is saying, he isn't enunciating them, he drops the endings to words a lot. But I'm just proud of how far he has come. We were told he would be speech delayed and he still might require early intervention services, however he's come a long way.

One video which I bought on Amazon which he loves is called Baby Babble. It's for children age 8 months to 30 months. It's been very helpful, exposing him to basic words and even sign language. The video is done by two pediatric speech pathologists and uses many of the same techniques done in therapy or practiced at home. Now, I'm not a speech therapist, and I'm not diagnosing my child or yours. We just got this to help him along before we go back to our doctor to see if he needs early intervention speech therapy. So far we love it!

Bath Time Fun!!

Ds2 loves to come in after his little brother's bath and help him play with all his bath toys and bubbles! You can tell how much ds3 enjoyed the bubbles!! :-)