Bring On The iPad

Your first thought may be...what? They spent money on an iPad!? Nooo way. :) This is one of Brads "perks" through his job that he earned by working a lot of overtime on the iPad project for his website...he gets an iPad of his own on loan while he is working for forrent. :) It will be fun while it lasts though! At first I was less than enthused especially since its not ours "forever" but Brad quickly changed my mind when uploading just a handful of toddler games for Lorelei to enjoy...she LOVES it and it kept her totally amused in the car this morning, not to mention different times the rest of the day! :) So much fun!
Unfortunately I took several videos but they are too HUGE to get into Picasa to edit, so this is the only one I ended up with. The program she is using in the picture is actually her favorite. She just touches a picture of the animal and a full screen real picture of the animal and sound comes up, multiple for each "cartoon" picture...this also includes cars, musical instruments, etc. She had lots of fun dancing to the different instruments and even got out her drum to play along. :) The one video that was smaller is her playing the piano. :) IF we figure out how to get the other video's added I'll let you know!

Lorelei all dolled up for trying out a new church this morning. Thanks for the dress Grandma! She is also eating string cheese...guess its a double cheese for ya. ;)

As for the update concerning naps...she has taken an hour nap most days this week. Today amazingly enough she finally did catch up on some of the sleep she has missed...naturally when we don't expect it and don't get to catch a nap with her! She was basically up at 6 and very cranky a little before 9 so we decided to try laying her down for a morning nap...sure enough she slept an hour! Thankfully she still slept another hour and 15 min this afternoon as well! Just glad to have her get a little more rested...hopefully we will start getting better sleep soon, but the teeth seem to be taking their time so if they are the culprit this could be a while! :)



Realized I poorly neglected the update concerning Baby Stahl! Here we have Lorelei posing with baby brother. :) We had our appointment at CHKD (the amazing children's hospital here) on Tuesday and were very impressed with the doctor that will be doing the surgery. He has done somewhere between 5,000-6,000 cleft lip/palate surgeries and also goes over to other countries as part of Operation Smile. He made us feel confident we were making the right choices. The lip surgery will be within the first month more than likely, and he will try to do both lip and palate in the same surgery unless the palate is very severe. There will be other surgeries following that, but this will be the most major one I believe...the timing of the surgery will depend on how he is doing feeding etc. As the speech pathologist told us "we want to fatten them up and get them ready for surgery!" (We met with her after the surgeon and she gave us some advice on how we will be doing the feedings etc.) If everything heals up according to plan etc he will definitely be able to feed just like a normal baby by 4 months...including baby food etc right on schedule, so really the first few months until the palate is totally healed up will be the only time he should have much trouble with feeding. We were also able to meet up with a family (thanks to the surgeon's coordination I might add) who's daughter is now 10 and has gone through all of her major surgeries etc. It was great to be able to talk to them and hear them rant and rave how wonderful these people are...and they have to drive 3 1/2 hrs every time they come! How lucky we are to live so close we can make it in less than 30 minutes!

I assume most of you reading this know we having been looking forward to a move to the Dallas area and hoped it would be happening NOW. However, God seems to have other plans. After meeting with the people at CHKD we realized a move at this time really just isn't ideal. We had given ourselves until July to still look at jobs, but think it will just be too much to try and find a doctor for both myself and Baby Stahl and we need to stay here where we have some very experienced professionals to do his surgery, particularly the first surgery. We are planning to do more research to see what options we have for later, and hoping the right job for Brad will come up after all of the commotion here has subsided...hoping this winter for sure. We are now looking into other rentals we can possibly move into (yuck an extra move!) just so we have a bit more space when Baby comes.

Whew! Will try to stay a bit less wordy next post for you. ;)