Another New post

Thanksgiving

Couple New Posts on the New Blog

World Wind Catch Up
Of Things that Matter Most

New post

What Not to Wear!

Jaidi and Justin: Our Family Pictures Sept 2010

Jaidi and Justin: Our Family Pictures Sept 2010: "Here are the rest of the Family Pictures Jaicie Felicity Collin Jaidi and Justin"

2 new Posts

2 New Posts over on my new blog, jump over and take a look and subscribe so you can see them next time!

Roller Coasters
Be Still

Some New Posts

Just in case you haven't jumped over to subscribe to our new blog...Here are some links to some of our recent posts! Hope you enjoy!

• Children and Cancer
• Residency and Stuff!
• Pugsley-the Puggle
• Felicity's First day of Kindergarten
• Jaicie's First day of 2nd Grade
• Angels and Families
• Kindergarten

Don't Forget!

Don't forget our blog is now located at:

http://jaidiandjustin.blogspot.com/

Hope to see you all there soon!

Needs

I feel the need, now that we are no longer in Lubbock to change my blog. I know we just left...but I have been awake since 1am this morning and can't sleep, so I have been messing around with a bunch of stuff!  Our blog title has always been LubbockClaytons. That was the address and everything. So, we are changing things up a little. Since my name is so unique It makes pretty much any blog address available, unless I have already used it! 

So please join me at our new Blog

http://jaidiandjustin.blogspot.com/

Where we will be adding new posts as soon as we get our computer up and running in our new home! 

We close on our house today and cable/internet/phone should be set up tomorrow morning. See our new blog for updates and pictures! I look forward to seeing you all at our new site! 

Don't forget to update your blog reader accounts if you want! :)

Before I was a Mom...

I got this in an email yesterday, but never got around to posting it. It is really sweet, and came with lots of pictures, but the pictures didn't copy over. Anyway, it is sweet! I LOVE BEING A MOM!



Before I was a Mom,

I never tripped over toys

or forgot words to a lullaby.

I didn't worry whether or not

my plants were poisonous.

I never thought about immunizations.



Before I was a Mom,

I had never been puked on.

Pooped on.

Chewed on.

Peed on.

I had complete control of my mind

and my thoughts.

I slept all night.



Before I was a Mom,

I never held down a screaming child

so doctors could do tests.

Or give shots.

I never looked into teary eyes and cried.

I never got gloriously happy over a simple grin.

I never sat up late hours at night

watching a baby sleep.



Before I was a Mom,

I never held a sleeping baby just because

I didn't want to put her down.

I never felt my heart break into a million pieces

when I couldn't stop the hurt.

I never knew that something so small

could affect my life so much.

I never knew that I could love someone so much.

I never knew I would love being a Mom.





Before I was a Mom,

I didn't know the feeling of

having my heart outside my body..

I didn't know how special it could feel

to feed a hungry baby.

I didn't know that bond

between a mother and her child.

I didn't know that something so small

could make me feel so important and happy.



Before I was a Mom,

I had never gotten up in the middle of the night

every 10 minutes to make sure all was okay.

I had never known the warmth,

the joy,

the love,

the heartache,

the wonderment

or the satisfaction of being a Mom.

I didn't know I was capable of feeling so much,

before I was a Mom

Goodbye Party/Birthday Party!

Our First House

Justin and I spent 2 days in Oklahoma this weekend. We were fortunate to have some wonderful friends who kept our kids here in Lubbock. We were house shopping. With our upcoming move we really wanted to have the chance to get into a house of our own. Well, we found the perfect house.



Our closing date is May 28, and most likely we will leave Lubbock on the 27th right after Jaicie and Felicity get out of school! Luckily Justin is done with training the end of this week. So we have all of May to de-junk and pack and get the house super clean!  It will be an adventure. We loved Edmond, and we are really excited to take our family there and learn to love it even more. It will be a big change, back to the big city life, but we are ready. The kids have a great school to go to and it will all be wonderful!

Anyway, I just wanted to share teh news!  Also, as a side note, we are sending out graduation announcements and need your address if you want one!  So email me your address so I can add it to the list.

:) Have a great day!

Hiatus Update

First of all, here is a recent family picture of us! Thanks to Michelle!

From Family PIctures March 2010

I had not intended on taking a prolonged hiatus from the Blog world. But in December I was put in as a supervisor at work and life has been crazy busy ever since!  There have been a lot of changes and a lot of things coming up that we are looking forward too. My dear friend Ann posted on her blog a fun Bullet Point list of the goings-on in her life. I am going to steal her idea today and avoid a huge really long post! 

• We spent Christmas at home in Lubbock.
• Collin FINALLY passed a hearing test yesterday!
• Collin is NOT going to have surgery for tubes!
• Jaicie 'competed' in the the schools Destination Imagination competition and had a blast and did so well!
• Felicity had to have a hearing test becasue she wasn't hearing well. She failed in one ear, they then pulled eraser size gobs of ear wax out of her ears and she since passed her test with flying colors!
• Justin matched to Oklahoma City at the University of Oklahoma Orthopedics Program
• Jaicie got a perfect report card--except for 1 absence.
• We have begun the dejunking process and recently carted an entire trunk full of clothes to Good Will.
• We have started packing...The process is a long one---Got any boxes to spare? Shoot me an email and I can take them off your hands!
• Collin has discovered cartoons and the TV.
• Collin learned a friends name and now constantly walks around saying Abby in the cutest way ever!
• Jaicie learned to ride a two-wheeler completely on her own!  FINALLY!
• Collin has started picking up on a few more words, but if he knows the sign for it, he refuses to say it.
• We have begun the Mortgage loan process!
• Our house was broken into in January and our TV stolen, along with the cable to connect our TV to the computer and a homemade hand crocheted blanket! ARGH I was so mad!
• Luckily we had renters insurance!
• Someone tried to break in again less than a month later! I was sitting on the couch with the TV on and they ran out when they heard me talking to a friend.
• Did I mention that we are moving to OKLAHOMA CITY!
• My baby brother got married last weekend in LAs Vegas, so we got to take a very fast trip to Vegas for the weekend.
• OH! I got an IPHONE! LOVE IT!
• Next week we are going to go house shopping in Edmond, OK, a subarb north of the city.
• Justin graduates and will be Dr. Justin Clayton in less than 2 months! 44 days to be exact~
• Justin's dad had a very successful liver transplant and is healing in San Francisco right now.
• Collin discovered Honey grahams...2 months early, not quite to the 2 year mark.
• Collin is 22 months now! 
• We are moving the last weekend of May or maybe the first week of June.
• We canceled our cruise---but we are going to take a trip to Sea World as a family instead!
• Our pet Rat Bella died of unknown causes. I only cried because Felicity cried! It was so sad!

I think I am going to call it good with that. This is list is longer than Iw as hoping. But I guess when you go from Dec 6 to April 7 without hardly a post that is what happens! 

Happy April to you all! Wish us luck on all the upcoming changes in our lives..especially the buying a home part next week!  :)

Below are some pictures that we have taken recently...or had taken recently!   Enjoy the slideshow.

Match Day

Just a quick note to let you all know we are moving in June! 

We will be moving to Oklahoma City!

WOW!

WOW

Its been a long time. But I am not going to play the catch up game right now.

I just wanted to post a quick note and say Justin matched. We find out on Thursday where we are going, so keep an eye on the blog Thursday afternoon. But I just wanted to say that we now know for sure Justin did match to some residency. Shall we take a poll?

Atlanta
Dallas
Lubbock
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Providence, RI
Boston
Little Rock
San Antonio
Fort Worth
Wichita, KS
Oklahoma City
Albuquerque

In no particular order, that is our list of possibilities...so where do you all think we will match to on Thursday. Winner gets the satisfaction of guessing the right one...sorry, jobless Justin can't afford a prize for the correct guesser!  :) Post your votes below! Can't wait to see where we will be going!

Catch up...Again

Wow, I can't believe how much I have slacked off on updating my blog! This is insane. I am so behind.

I don't really feel like catching up on everything, so I will just feel in some blanks...some of them!

Justin has now been on 3 interviews and has about 11 more, as of right now. We are really happy with where we are sitting right now with the interviews and have really enjoyed learning about the programs around the country. It will be interesting to see how they all compare in the end. We have been enjoying his time off this month immensely. While he has been gone for interviews, when he is home, he gets to be home and I can't tell you how much I love that! It has been a welcome change.

Jaicie has been...while she has been...there are many things!  She is a good kid and has super sensitive emotions. Sometimes it can be overwhleming, but for the most part she is a good kid. She is brilliant. She took the gifted and talented test yesterday and we will find out results in a few weeks, probably in January. She has gotten involved with the Destination Imagination group at her school and is doing a great job. She comes home from DI happier than any other day. You can really tell that she is enjoying it. She can be a back talker pretty bed, but I am sure that she is just taking after me. (I am sure my dad and brothers and sister agree!, in fact, they probably think I deserve it! :)  )

Felicity is very strong willed. She knows what she wants and does her best to get it. Luckily for her, (or maybe us) her parents can be pretty strong willed too...Liccy is catching on to things so quickly. She has started to figure out putting letters together to make words. She can now spell and write her name completely on her own. She enjoys school and most days, can't wait to get there.

Collin is my little guy that is growing far faster than he should be. He is now 18 months, we will take him in for his check up hopefully tomorrow. He has finally taken off walking and running and climbing and anything else he can do with his feet. He loves our Christmas tree, especially the bells on it. He started speech therapy 2 weeks ago. Right now, he has really taken a hold of signing. We now have him signing more, eat, drink, all done, mom, dad, please, thank you, milk and I think a few others. He has started to sign them on his own, without even being prompted, which is what his therpist wants him to do. He is also saying a couple things--num for yummy, mom and dad, and of course no! but he really doesn't say much. We are hoping that he starts talking soon. We took him in for a hearing test, which couldn't rule out minor to moderate hearing loss. We know that it isn't anything more than that. But we have to go back in in 6-8 weeks, so in January, to get it all re-checked. It is possible that he had a bit of a cold and that is why the negative pressure was there. He also didn't hear the low tones on the test. Hopefully in January we will find out that his hearing is perfectly fine. But we want to make sure that we find out now if he does have a problem so we can figure out what we need to do to help him, learn sign language, surgery, or whatever it is that is necessary.

As for me, I am doing really well. I got a promotion at work recently.  I am now one of the assistants at the Bodyworks Kids Club. As of now, I am really enjoying it. Justin told me this week that he was glad to see how happy I have been lately. I get to attend 2 more of Justin's interview trips with him. And we will be going on both sans children. It will be so wonderful!  :) I am looking forward to our trips, even though, it will mean sitting around waiting for him to finish interviewing, it means that I can see a couple of the cities that we may end up moving into!

I think that about covers the catch up. This week will be lots of fun! A trip for Justin and I and all sorts of fun stuff!

Hope all is well with all of you!

Shout Out

I just have to take a minute to send a serious shout out to my dear sweet husband (who probably won't even read this). Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 29 for the first time! I keep thinking of Grandma Thornock who has been 29 a few more times than I :) Anyway, back to my birthday-- First of all, I got to stay in bed later than usual, as he got up early to attend to the kids! When i finally dragged myself out of bed at 8:30 ( I know, how sad is it that 8:30 is sleeping in for me), I came into the kitchen to bacon, sausage and eggs and a belgian waffles cooking on our brand new belgian waffle maker. The old waffle maker that we had I got my freshman year of college before I moved away from home. Which makes it more than 11 years old. It cooked its last waffle a long time ago. We had been debating getting one for a while. And I got to wake up to belgian waffles without even asking for it!

I knew that Justin had things planned for me, but he wasn't telling me anything. turns out he planned a very nice romantic dinner for the two of us at home, without the kids. The girls went to a friends birthday party, and Collin conveniently went down for a much needed nap (he was sick all weekend). Justin and I enjoyed a candle lit dinner all cooked by Justin, including 5 courses! It was wonderful. We picked up the kids and came back home and spent a couple hours hanging out and then once the kids were all soundly tucked away in bed, we enjoyed watching Push.

I feel so utterly spoiled by Justin. He has always been a hopeless romantic. There has never been a time when I doubted his love for me. He is the perfect husband. I couldn't ask for a more perfect match for me. So, to Justin, my dear, I love you, and thank you for all you do for me!

Good News

It occured to me today that all though we got good news this week, I hadn't posted it on the blog...

I am ecstatic to report that Collin had a CT scan and a hearing test this week and both came back clear. He passed his hearing test and the CT Scan was clear. Though Collin is still behind on his walking and talking, there is no problems with his brain that is causing it. There were worries with his head size that hydrocephalus and a couple other issues could be present. But that CT scan was completely clear.

I had many people tell me that their kids didn't walk til they were 18 months. Collin not walking was not the problem in itself. The concern arose because of his head size and the changes on the growth chart percentiles. When his head size jumped a bunch of lines and then continued to, it was a cause for concern. His head growth has normalized now and hopefully it will continue to.

As of right now, we are going to begin working with ECI, specifically for his language development delays. Next Tuesday we will meet with a speech therapist with the Early Childhood Intervention program that works with children with devlopmental delays. Hopefully, she will be able to help us figure out why the delay is occuring and get Collin talking and hopefully (in a round about way) walking (though she is not specifically going to be working on that.

On a slightly different note, Collin has grasped onto signing pretty well lately. There are very few words that I know how to sign, so it is very little. But as of right now, we can identify him saying more, all done, thank you, and drink. He has also begun waving hello and goodbye, giving hugs, and blowing kisses. It is a work in progres...hopefully, we will both be able to pick up some more sign language. It has helped us give Collin what he wants. It is nice to be able to communicate back and forth with him.

Does any one have any tips on good places to go to learn sign language for free (ie websites, or books, or something). I have a couple more signs that I have learned and I am working with Collin on, but for now, our signs are limited!

Anyway, I just wanted to share our good news for the week. We couldn't say how happy we were to hear the news that his CT scan was clear. We were not interested in having to have him go through Brain surgery to fix any problems! :)

And I have to send out a special thank you to all of you that prayed for Collin. I cannot begin to tell you our gratitude. Prayers are clearly answered. I cannot attest to that even more in my life this week. So thank you for your prayers, and please let me know if I can ever return the favor!

Prayers for Collin

I know that this is not always the venue to ask for prayers, but right now, I feel like it would be best to ask. It isn't a huge deal, but it could end up being.

Collin's development has been delayed. It is very likely it is simply because he is a boy and he develops a little slower than our girls. And that is perfectly fine. But regardless, he is not 15 1/2 months old and doesn't walk or talk. He has mastered walking as long as he is holding on to something. When holding onto a hand he walks very wobbly, but if you let him go, he immediately drops to the ground. His talking consists of mamama, dadada, nanana...none of which is specific to anything. Obviously there are a lot of factors in all of this. It is very possible that he has a large heavy head (which he does) and as such, he can't hold it up well enough. But it is also possible that there is something else all together.

Here is where the prayers come in. Justin sat down with Collin's pediatrician because of his concerns for Collin. They came to an agreement that if Collin is not walking unassisteed by the time he turns 16 months, then we will do a CAT scan to make sure there are not other problems inside his skull. We hope to not have to do the CAT Scan at all. So we ask for your prayers for Collin's development to catch up just a little bit.

Again, it is possible that this is nothing. And I realize that there are plenty of kids who don't walk until they are 18 months. There is concern though, given Collin's delays and head size and shape. So please keep Collin in your prayers, and maybe throw in a prayer for peace for his mom and dad too! We could use it a little!

October 4, 2009 is the day Collin hits 16 months.

Residency Applications

Applications are in! Well actually, they have been in for a little while now. We submitted 40 applications. 35 of the programs have downloaded all the available documents for the application. NOw it is a lot of the waiting game. A lot of the programs don't send invites for interviews until NOvember. We have heard that there are some that invite the end of September, beginning of October. But there is no guarantee when invites will come. It is crazy to think though, that in about 8 months, Justin will be graduated and officially be Dr. Clayton. It has such a nice ring to it! Dr. Justin B. Clayton. Wow! I can't wait for that day. we have our favorite programs, and we have our not so favorite programs, but they are all in places we would be more than happy living. I have worked on gathering information on each of the locations. We have cost of living comparisons, and houseing comparisons and lots of other info. As Justin gets interviews, the list will continue to grow. There are some things that I am holding off doing too much research on until he gets interviews. Schools for the kids, locations to live in the city, jobs for me...those can all be researched once our list is being brought down a little bit. But I am excited. It is a new adventure in our lives. Thinking about all the places we could end up is wonderful. Boston, Rochester NY, Rochester MN, Lebanon NH, Dallas/Fort Worth TX, Houston TX...and so many more. All of them are wonderful places and I look forward to the upcoming months and to finding out where we will end up.

I can't tell you how proud I am of my dear Justin. He has worked so hard for his career and continues to do so. Aside from working to do well in his classes he has worked his butt off for his family. I carry so much gratitude for him and all he has done for me and for our beautiful children.

I love you forever Justin, Always and forever!

I am so Behind!

There is a lot that I could blog about today, but mostly, I want to share the pictures from the completion of my most recent project.



It took me a couple of weeks to get the sanding all done. It started out as a dark brown dresser, but it was old and beat up. I sanded all of the finish off and replaced the side panels. Once everything was done and put back together, I stained it with a beautiful maple finish. After a few coats of laquer, that is the finished product. It is no sitting in Collins room, filled with clothes. It is my big accomplishment. I am pretty proud of it, if I can gloat for a minute.

Anyway, the project was a lot of fun and has led me into other endeavors. I am currently working on drawings and stuff for a new headboard. Actually, just a head board, since we have never had one. I am kind of excited about it. It is going to be one of those cushioned head boards and it will have a wood frame, probably stained in maple like Collin's Dresser. The measurements are all done, and I think I have figured out all of the designs and everything. My good friend Julie is going to make one form her house too, so we are going to work on it together. My only challenge now is choosing a material that will coordinate with my blue bed. We will see how material shopping goes. I guess we will see how it goes...