The kids have been sick on and off (mostly on) for weeks now. Mostly just the annoying colds and occasional cough, but Morgan had a pretty good cough going on for about 2 weeks. It finally went away sometime over Thanksgiving, and on Sunday it seemed we were finally going to be healthy for a while. Well, that lasted about a day because by Monday night Morgan had a fever, and wasn’t feeling very good. She had a fever most of the day Tuesday, and when it continued to get to 101.5 on Wed morning, I called the doctor. I brought her in yesterday, and turns out she has an ear infection in her right ear, most likely caused from the drainage she had from her cough. I was trying to remember, but this could very well be the very first time that one of my kids has been on antibiotics, if you can believe that! Jackson has never had an ear infection, and I did take him to the doctor one time in Slovakia for a persistent cough, but I honestly can’t remember if he gave me a prescription for him, or just told me which OTC medicine to get. So I realized yesterday how thankful I am that I have only had to deal with the annoying cold for these past 2.5+ years!

Morgan also got weighed while at the doctor, for the first time in 5 months. At the end of June she was 12 lbs, 12 oz, in the 5th percentile. I was so curious to see what she came out to at this visit. I had guessed somewhere between 16 and 17 lbs, as I had compared her to other kids her size. Well turns out she is a whopping 16 lbs, 11 oz - in the 3-5 percentile for 11 month olds. So it just confirms that we can continue to call her our little pipsqueak.

So Gavin has mentioned before that we have construction going on both in front of and behind our house. The construction behind our house has not really affected us at all this past month, as whatever they are doing is much quieter than in the months of August and September. Out the front of our house a developer is building 2 houses across the street. Our house is up on a hill and we have a huge window that covers most of the wall of our living room, so we have an absolutely perfect view of the construction going on just out the window (and I’m learning how to build houses as well!).

Well, just last week the view out the front window changed to include the ‘comfort zone’ (aka, green porta potty).

We aren’t sure why they felt the need to put it front and center on the property, but they did, and it is the first thing we see when looking out the window. And since I spend a good portion of the day in the living room, I see people coming in and out of the porta potty all day long. But the funniest incident happened this past Monday. It was a much needed rainy day, and while the kids were napping I was catching up on emails and such. I looked outside to see a DeKalb county police car slowly coming to a stop in front of the construction zone. As I watched, the policeman opened his door, got out and went into the ‘comfort zone’, reappearing less than a minute later. He took a quick glance around to see if anyone had been watching, got back in his running car, turned around and drove away. If I only had had my camera handy.

About 3 weeks ago we had a friend of ours take some professional-type pictures of our family. The goal was to get a good family picture, and a good one of Morgan, because when Jackson was 9 months old we had a professional picture done of him. I wanted one similar of Morgan to hang on our wall. So many of the pictures turned out great, it will be hard to make a final decision. Here are a few of them below:

The only one of the kids where they were both looking up (Jackson wasn’t so keen on getting photographed that day):

Thanks Julie for the great pictures!