After an appointment in Bellevue Thursday, Hattie and I stopped at the Temple and walked through the gardens. She loved it, I loved it, it was gorgeous.
Currently playing: Squeeze- Frank- Peyton Place
7.3.2009
And finally, a day with Hattie. Or finishing catching up.
Posted by kelsimad under Church, Family, Fun[2] Comments
7.3.2009
Now that school is out and the sun is here, we have been out enjoying ourselves.
Wednesday we went to Juanita Beach Park on Lake Washington.
Have I ever mentioned before that I love living here? Well I do!!!!!!!!!!
Currently playing: Death Cab- Transatlanticism- We Looked Like Giants
7.3.2009
The last few weeks have been chock-full of happenings, I finally got all the pics processed and thought I better update here as well.
During the last week of school…
Ethan’s grade had a field day.
The kindergarten had a field trip to the park for fun and snacks.
Here’s Grayson with his buddies.
Forest graduated from Elementary school. AGAIN. 
In Auburn, 6th grade had been in a middle school. Redmond’s elementary is K-6.
Forest with one of the two student teachers he had this semester.
And with the principle, who retired this year.
Currently playing: Death Cab- Transatlanticism- Tiny Vessels
7.3.2009
Our better halves Week 26- 52 1/2 weeks of 2009
And…
top half
half dead
Listening to: The Sundays- Reading, Writing and Arithmetic- A Certain Someone
6.25.2009
I think I’ve written before about my biggest pet peeve. I HATE LITTER!!! Why can’t people put trash in a trash can? Why do smokers think those little butts are no big deal to throw on the ground? I just don’t get it.
Saturday, Hayden, Forest and I helped out with an Eagle Scout project at a local park. We were pulling out blackberry bushes and then planting native plants. And as expected, there was plenty of trash down under the blackberries- carpet, linoleum, barbed wire, a piggy bank.
Week #25- 52 1/2 weeks of 2009
Outakes:
I actually took these after we got back home. This apple was sitting on a drain where we park.
Blaring in my ear so I don’t have to listen to Home Alone for the umpteen-millionth time- Death Cab for Cutie- Plans, most of it cuz I’ve been lurking around blogs between sentences. Wanna’ go ride bikes?
Technorati Tags: Litter,Give a Hoot,Photography,Boy Scouts of America,Eagle Scout Project,52 1/2 weeks of 2009
6.21.2009
Hey Mom, have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a…
Posted by kelsimad under ADD, Family, Health and wellness[3] Comments
Forest’s best friend from Auburn came to hang out with us yesterday. We drive him back down tomorrow. Kyle is a great kid, he’s very respectful and courteous. He always seems comfortable in our home but never to the point that would be annoying, if that makes any sense. One of the things that I have always like about Kyle is his patience and kindness with our two youngest. He puts up with their need to wrestle and pester him and he’s always very helpful with them.
Having Kyle here this time though I realized something. As good as he is with the little ones, he has no patience for Hayden. Hayden barely has to open his mouth and Kyle is telling him to shut up. I can hardly blame him. Hayden can be very hard to take at times. I guess having Kyle here has just made me think more about how others see Hayden.
I’ve never really written about Hayden on here. He is diagnosed with ADD and PDD-NOS. “Not otherwise specified” because doctors don’t quite know what to make of Hayden. He communicates very easily with adults as long as they are willing to listen to what’s on his mind and show just the smallest amount of interest. I can’t even count the times I’ve been approached by a youth leader who is fascinated with him and loves his ideas and his ability to articulate them. Teachers are always impressed with his range of vocabulary and again by his articulation. On the other hand he finds it very difficult to engage in a two-way conversation. He can answer questions easily but I can always see that he’s desperate to bring up a new topic, something he’s been thinking about at great length, all day.
Kids his own age are a whole other story. He knows that he has very little in common with most 14 year old boys. He has no interest in sports, dating, music, clothes, etc. And as much as he loves video games, he really only wants to talk about his ideas for video games. He says that other kids think he’s an alien. In 6th and 7th grade he had a really hard time with a few boys who would very inconspicuously pick on him everyday. He was pretty happy to move to Redmond because he liked the idea of no one knowing him and being able to just quietly go to school unnoticed. He did have a few run-ins with a couple of the kids in our complex but they seem to have let off after I talked to them. I am grateful for the one friend he has met. A girl in our ward who has Asperger’s lives just up the hill from us. They walk together everyday after they get off the bus. I’m grateful for that 5 or 10 minutes they have together to talk about insects and animals. Hayden is always quite happy on his own but I’m always happy for the few social moments he does have with peers.
ADD because Hayden pretty much lives in his own world. He has a very hard time attending to tasks in class. But I know he hears most everything he’s taught because of the facts and knowledge that he will spout out all the time. Without medication it’s impossible to get him to complete any task without walking him through every step till he’s done. But the medication only helps so much. He still flunks every class but PE & Art.
Hayden loves anything to do with science and wants to invent. I tell myself, “just get him through high school. Once he gets into college he’s bound to blossom.” That is my hope at least. He has so much to offer if he can just get through this educational system that doesn’t seem able to help him.
Hayden starts high school next year and I’m dreading it so much!! His councilor tells me that they will probably start out the year with a new evaluation to get him in special ed. Which I hate of course but by doing that he can be put in an organization class to help him keep track of his assignments. Sad that a kid has to be labeled in order to get the help he needs.
I heard once that children with ADD tend to be about 25% behind developmentally, meaning Hayden acts more like a 10 year old. I see that each and everyday but it’s still hard to not expect more responsibility from him. And I think sometimes it’s hard on Forest who picks up most of the slack as a big brother. He very frequently tries to big brother Hayden. That of course drives Hayden crazy but they still make a pretty good team. They have always been complete opposites and so have always gotten along like peas and carrots.
I love my Hayd, he’s such a kick to be around. I love his ideas, I love his imagination. I feel very grateful that even with all his issues, he seems immune to all the other issues of adolescence. I’m glad that’s all out there for those who don’t already know Hayden. His peculiarities are such an integral part of my life that it’s hard to not blog about them more.
Oh, and at 14 years old he has an enormous Bionicles collection which he will spend hours building with.
Listening to: Death Cab for Cutie- The Photo Album & Narrow Stairs (because I’ve been too long winded this time.)
edit: thinking back, this may come across as if i’m coming out of the add-parent closet or something. that’s not the case at all. when i started this as a myspace only family read so i never had to explain anything about my kids and their rainbow of issues. with other people reading now who may or may not know my kids i just wanted to introduce hayden so that i can write about him and our adventures in raising him without worrying about how it may not make sense to everyone.
6.12.2009
well lunch now.
Week #24- 52 1/2 weeks of 2009- Light and Shadow
When we lived in Auburn we had a favorite park on top of Lea Hill. We loved Auburndale Park because it was a small neighborhood park that we almost always had to ourselves. It had a small playground, a big grassy field and then a paved trail that wound through a wooded area which took up about half of the entire park.
Well I think we found it’s twin in Redmond, and it’s also up on top of our hill. Aaron and I took Grayson and Hattie up to it for lunch today. It was beautiful. The park is surrounded by a densely wooded area. The floor was covered with ferns, the canopy made up mostly of Big Leaf Maples and the sun shone through in small patches. It was exactly what I was hoping for for my weekly shot.
Outakes:
Listening to: Morrissey- Kill Uncle (the whole thing), Vauxhall And I too because I got distracted while writing this.
Technorati Tags: Photography,Morrissey
6.11.2009
i seem to go in spurts with my different hobbies. so the last week or so i have been sewing.
we have always lived in apartments and with the exception of auburn, not usually much more than a year. i gave up years ago on having a nicely decorated house. well for whatever reason i feel this need to make things for this apartment. i don’t know why.
mom gave me this bulletin board that she had for years. i’ve wanted to cover it for a while. so when i came across a great tutorial and then this gorgeous fabric collection, I just had to. the lighting is bad so the picture is blurry and since it’s covered with papers now it’s hard to see, but it’s still so fun.
then a year or so ago i got this cute little ottoman from someone on freecycle. the original fabric was horrid but i loved the shape. i had already ripped the ugly skirt off when i took this picture.
i reused some big pillow covers that were no longer in use to make a slipcover for it. Now I can just take it off and wash it if i need to.
There’s only one top stitch on the belt because I made it 3” wide and when I put it on it was just too wide. So the belt is folded in half. I need to fix that. I put a bigger button in the middle on top and covered it with the red fabric.
Then I made pillow covers, still using some of the old navy pillow covers for the back and reusing the zippers and piping from them as well.
I had to improvise a little because of the amount of fabric I bought. But I liked how they turned out with the stripes, more interesting than just solid blocks.
And finally, last night and this morning I worked on recovering an old desk chair I picked up from a thrift store a year or two ago. When I was looking to see if I could take it apart to recover it I found a label on the bottom dated 1951. It’s a great chair, so much better made then now-a-days.
try to ignore the popcorn crumbs on the floor.
6.6.2009
i just about missed this week’s shot as well. but today provided the perfect opportunity.
the last two days have been a little bit of and emotional roller-coaster. aaron came home about 2 hours early from work yesterday because he had been “escorted from the building.” he made a seemingly small mistake that nintendo has zero tolerance for. when he left for lunch he forgot to eject the rom that he was testing in the wii and therefore didn’t check it back in. when he came back they said, “see ya.” eeeek!!! he sat down and wrote an apology email, hoping he would be one of the very few and very far between who get a second chance.
he and the boys left for the father and son’s campout. hattie and i had a blast together while the boys were gone. we walked over to a store called paint away! at redmond town center. we painted a pink kitty with purple ears, then had hot chocolates at starbucks, bought her a new pair of sunday sandles and came back home to do pedicures and watch stranger than fiction. (don’t worry the one bad word was soft enough and at a point where she was talking and i skipped as soon as ana started kissing harold, missing the bedroom scene.) we had such a great time, i had almost forgotten about aaron’s problem. i went to bed and prayed that nintendo would show some mercy!!!
this morning thane called to let me know that he would be shipping out either tonight or tomorrow morning for germany and then to kuwait. we are not an emotional or affectionate family, so we were both showing a strong face telling each other “i’ll email now and then, take care and i love you.” but i could feel my throat and chest getting tight as we talked, and it sounded like his was too.
the boys came home and told us all about the great time they had. i had picked them up a stack of scary story books from the library so they stayed up till 2am reading those. then after breakfast they played games all morning, boxing, wrestling, dodge ball, tug-o-war, capture the flag. ethan whooped on several boys much bigger than him in wresting and boxing but got smacked in the face with a ball playing dodge ball, by one of the bishop’s counselors.
then aaron told me that nintendo had officially let him go yesterday afternoon. i spent the rest of the day thinking about what i had read a couple of weeks ago when preparing for my talk on adversity.
in the midst of trying really hard not to wallow in self-pity i realized today was the 6th of june. six years ago my dad passed away from pneumonia after three years of dementia brought on by parkinson’s disease. it was heart breaking but at the time a relief to know that he was whole again, to know that the next time i saw him he would remember who i was.
when it happened, aaron was in germany waiting to get home after being deployed to kuwait. we were living about four hours from home and i had everything ready to leave the next morning to go home to see my dad. if i remember correctly, he passed during the night and mom called me early the next morning. i knew exactly what the call was as soon as it rang. i’ve felt guilty the past six years for not being there when it happened. it was so hard though to see him towards the end. i just wanted to remember him laughing and joking and grabbing me around the waist as i walked by his recliner so he could tickle me until i squirmed off his lap.
for the first couple of years after he died it was hard to remember the healthy him. but not now. now i see him shuffling around with a grin on his face, poking us all in the ribs, joking around and giggling, taking kuryn to get ice cream, watching rodeos with hayden, hanging out with uncle john and lonny, taking us camping or for drives up on the mountain, go to scout meetings dressed in his scout uniform with his oa sash, wrestling with odie (his pitbull) on the trampoline, sitting on the swing with granny in her front yard, teaching me how to change the oil in my car… i could go on and on.
i miss my dad incredibly but i take comfort in the knowledge that he still lives, that he is busy doing the Lord’s work and that i will get to see him again someday.
6.6.2009
i’m so mad, i got so busy with things last week that i completely for got to take my shot for the week, which was supposed to be a night shot. i took other ones but not that one specifically.
