Laina has grown very attached to the babydoll I grew up with. This is big for us because our girls never really played "house" as of yet. However, they're really getting into this imaginative play this year. My parents got Laina a stroller as one of her gifts for Christmas and she pushes it around like the proud little mama she is! :)
We've been doing a lot of bird-watching because these guys are the most colorful thing we've had this month! We love cardinals and talk about my grandma all of the time as we watch them because they've always been her absolute favorite. This cardinal is the one who has stolen the show this year though - we noticed that one side is red like a typical male, but the other side of the cardinal is brown, just like a female. Thanks to Google, we found out that these birds are called Gyandromorphs - something happens to the egg that makes the bird equally male and female!
You can more easily see the color distinction here:
We learned that gyandromorphs have a call, but no other birds respond to it, which made us very sad. We decided this bird must be lonely, so we make sure to fill our feeders to the brim to keep it coming back! We found out they're incredibly rare, so we think it quite special that this beauty chooses to come to our little feeder!
We headed back to the pediatric opthalmalogist to check Laina's eyes. This is the third surgeon we've seen and we're still not done. She's already had two surgeries on her eyes and there may be another in the near future. The fear is that her eyes still aren't working together and now it's causing problems for her at school. If her eyes continue to work separately, one eye could lose its vision. The activity she's doing here focuses on her depth perception where she points to a butterfly's position with her 3-D glasses. This was the first appointment she struggled to do this, saying "I don't know" for many of the pictures.
From this appointment, we were referred to "the best" surgeon in Madison where she will be evaluated. He is incredibly difficult to get an appointment with, so we were initially scheduled for an appointment in the late fall of this year. However, after reviewing her file, the office called and she has an appointment in April. I am so grateful we are getting her in and can hopefully get the answers we need sooner rather than later. She is such a trooper.
These guys were troopers this day too. Short is never a word to describe Laina's eye appointments! This was the first appointment I had all of the kids with me, but they kept themselves busy with knitting, coloring and "capping" a marker.
Maurah and I played around with new hairstyles...
While Laina added some new selfies to my phone...
We started Cole's basketball season at the YMCA with his incredible coach and team...
Maurah and Hayden learned how to play chess and pulled out our board any free moment they had...
The girls received a "bride's" dress from my parents. The headpiece I wore from my wedding was out, so Laina was excited to put the full outfit together...
Winter means snuggly movie nights in this family...
Cole had his first band concert. The kids did great!
Check out this handsome trumpet player...
We celebrated after with custard...
I have a leadership class this semester and one of our assignments included listing struggles that school leaders are saying they are facing. The list is really quite overwhelming and I'm sure it doesn't cover everything...
However, we walked into another class that afternoon and this quote was the first thing we were faced with. It definitely gave us fuel to be the ones who make some changes to that overwhelming list above. It reminded me that I have more power than I think, and that can be wielded in my classroom in some pretty meaningful ways:
Finally, Laina had an epic last week of January with her book club...
And with losing her tooth! She always writes the Tooth Fairy letters and that fairy is the sweetest and writes Laina back! I loved this interaction between the two of them:
And for January - that's a wrap!
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