Busy weekend!

Its been busy here! We had our Annual Friends dinner on Friday night. We figure this was probably the 10th or 11th year it's been done. We met up at Giuseppe's downtown. It was fun. The food was good and we sat in the perfect room. We weren't surrounded by other people and the way we were positioned, we could be as loud as we wanted! It was great! Plus we got to spend lots of time with Little Esten, so that was nice too.We took the girls to my parents house for the evening. When we came to pick them up, they were so happy! It was WAY past bedtime, and they were still awake, but Kasey was BEAMING! It was obvious they had a wonderful time. It was so cute!

A few months ago, Hubby's calf started bothering him. Mostly when he was on it all day when he was teaching. The doctor checked it out and said it was probably strained and to take it easy on it. A few months go by and suddenly it really starts bothering him again, pretty bad. So, he went back to the doctor, but saw a D.O. in their office who deals a lot with sports medicine. After a thorough exam and lots of pushing where it hurts, it was determined that Hubby has micro tears in his calf. The doctor gave him this cream that he has to apply 4 times a day to the area. It apparently is an anti-inflammatory in cream form. He has to do this for 2 weeks and then see how it feels. We are still in that 2 week period and he says it is still pretty sore. Next may be some physical therapy.

Speaking of physical therapy, Courtney will be going back into PT. We are going to be running out of insurance covered visits for her occupational therapy soon. Kaiser only allows her 20 visits per year. And the year is renewable at the end of May for her. We will run out of visits at the end of January. That is quite a gap for her to go without therapy. We don't want that to happen, plus she still needs PT. So, she had to get evaluated again. She is 50 months old, but she comes in at a 30-37 month old level for her physical abilities. But she is pretty able to function normally in society. But of course some PT wouldn't hurt. And it will keep her in some sort of therapy. So, we will start that up Mid-January. I am hoping to get her back into Hippo therapy, but I am not sure we will be able to work that with our schedule. We will see.

If you remember, Courtney has also been lactose allergic for some time. It's been a while since we have let her try milk. She has always been ok with yogurt, cheese, etc, but to give her straight milk was a problem. The other night when we were at Noodles, she saw a chocolate milk carton and really wanted chocolate milk. I went ahead and let her try it just to see. Guess what, no complaints of pain! So, over the last few days I have given her a serving of regular milk just to see what happens. No complaints!!! She usually complains of stomach pain. So, she may finally be past it! I am slowly going to switch her over! It will make life a little easier if that is indeed the case! Kasey still can't tolerate regular milk, but it gives me hope! YAY!

So, I got a new advent calendar for this year. I got one of those boxes that have little doors for the girls to open. I did something a bit different. I bought a lot of travel sized products to use with the calendar. Every evening I hid whatever the box is going to ask the girls to find. Such as last night was: find 2 blue mouthwashes for our donation box. Then once they find them, they put them in our donation box. At the end of the month we will drop off the donation at ESM at our church. Hopefully this starts to instill giving into our kids. Ok, Kasey may be a bit too young, but hopefully Courtney starts to get it. We talk about why we collect these things and who will get them, etc. The calendar doesn't have all donations though, there are some fun ones mixed in there too. The other night we got: let's go out to dinner and Daddy chooses where. He chose The Elephant Bar because we had a large gift certificate for them. I just looked, tonight's is: let's go out for ice cream! Whoo hoo!

Saturday morning we had zoo preschool. We learned all about snow leopards. After we did our craft and learned all about them, we headed to the snow leopard exhibit. When we got there, they weren't out yet. So, we got to walk around and go to the leopard house! We got to be inside with them! Well, they were in cages, but it was so cool to be so close to the 2 snow leopards and 1 amur leopard.Snow leopard

Later that night we went to the Festival of Lights downtown. It's the winter parade I guess you could say. It was cold, as I guess it should be for a winter parade. We bundeled up and headed out. We picked up dinner on the way and put it in a cooler to try to keep it warm! While we were walking in we ran into our friend Kim and her girls. They had some saved seats, so we joined them. Here are the girls all bundled up:

Kasey stayed in her stroller to keep her contained....

One of the floats.

After the parade we ducked into a cafe for some warming up and to hopefully let traffic subside a bit. We had cookies and juice while the girls had fun together. It was fun.

The fun of the holiday season is upon us and I couldn't be more excited!