End of summer

We are going through some important stages right now at the house. Emily is learning to sleep through the night without having a bottle, which means that she spends a lot of time crying, which means that Alixa spends a lot of time not sleeping. Bo is getting ready to begin potty training and also recently lost his binky privileges, which means that he spends a lot of time crying/getting out of bed to cause trouble. Jenna has recently begun her final year of non-school school, which consists of a twice weekly co-op of about 10 kids. She is gone for about 4 hours, including eating lunch. Next year she will begin kindergarten, which will be accompanied by lots of Lixi tears. In preparation for that, Lix has spent a lot of time crying and generally bemoaning the fact that her baby is getting all growed up. Between the combination of two kids that are sleeping less and crying more and the fact that she is sleeping less and crying more, please don’t take it personally if you do or say something near Alixa and she threatens to punch you in the face. As of this writing she has yet to follow through with any of her threats, but there is a palpable sense of fear that hovers around Jarom these days, ironically mostly when he has good things to say, such as “Emmy took a four-hour nap for me today” or “Bo has been so nice while you were gone.”

 These aren't functional yet, but soon

The end of the summer was celebrated by Jarom turning 32. Alixa arranged for a party on the water with some friends who have a boat. There was some wakeboarding, some tubing, and general merriment. Jarom continues to try wakeboarding, but still isn’t very good at it, and did take one particularly rough fall that smacked his face up pretty good. I guess that is why they don’t recommend teaching old dogs new tricks. But at least he was able to get out of the water, which is more than Nate or Alixa were able to do (insert face punching threat here.) There were also some highly amusing and very fun tubing battles. After boating for a few hours the group got some dinner and Jarom got some Chipotle gift cards so that he could go out for lunch a few times. It was a great way to celebrate getting old.

I haven't put a picture of myself in here for a while, so here I am

Jarom’s other birthday present is a new bed, which Alixa was kind enough to pick out for him. It is a king sized, which was the major requirement that Alixa had. She has already adjusted to the expanded space and already wants a bigger bed, because she too often comes in contact with Jarom. The new purchase has also caused some furniture rearrangement as the old bed moved into the guest room and the futon got sold to a nice home on a farm outside the city. Kyle stopped by on his way down to Austin to test it out, and the initial review is that it is an improvement in terms of comfort. The new bed makes for fewer monkeys falling off the bed and bonking their head. It also means that we can get other new things like bed skirts, and bed spreads, and everyone’s favorite useless decoration, pillow shams.

These rats don't get a new bed, because this sleepover only lasted about 20 minutes

Emmy is as fat as ever, and recently moved up to rice cereal to augment her enormous calorie intake. She is currently outgrowing her 6-9 month clothes as she approaches the 6-month mark. She is very smiley and loves being around other people. She is rolling over and scooting a little bit, and has recently begun practicing balancing on Jarom’s hand. She still isn’t a very good napper, but the complaints we have against her are pretty limited.

 This is usually what Emily looks like

But not always

Alixa stays busy being a mom and is currently in training for her cruise with Jarom, scheduled for January. She has adopted #nofatties as her slogan and throws it around all the time. To help her on her quest she recently participated in a mud run with some friends, has another 5k race scheduled in October, and usually won’t leave the gym until she has burned 1000 calories. It is all working because she keeps losing weight and looks great. Jarom has been pretty good about going to gym since all of his summer sports wrapped up, and gets there 3 times most weeks. His weight loss isn’t as good as Alixa’s because he is not as interested in dietary change, so we’ll see if he is allowed on the cruise or not.

Done for the day #nofatties 

Bo has somehow turned into a boy over the past month. All he ever wants to do now is fight or play with a ball. He can constantly be heard making fighting noises to accompany his array of karate chops and kicks and leaping tackles. Jenna is his primary foe. Sometimes she is willing, sometimes she is not. We’ve had a lot of discussions about when it is acceptable to wrestle with someone and when it is not. I’m not sure it is sinking in because Bo thinks that any time is a good time to start a fight. His favorite seems to be pillow fighting on the new giant bed. He isn’t very good, but in a pillow fight it is equally fun whether you are winning or losing. He has a new stuffed animal, Binky Bear, and after a rough first week has settled in without his longtime sleep aids nicely.

 It was a big day: tower building and saying goodbye to his binkies

 He loves his "littlecrosse" shirt

Jenna is having a great time with her new school year. She loves learning and doing crafts and all the things that she gets to do there. Her biggest challenge is finishing her lunch in the allotted time. She is also doing some other activities. She has been doing a gymnastics class each Monday for the past month and is having a great time. I don’t think there is an Olympic medal in her future, but it’s a good time. She is also signed up for an art class that will be starting soon. She will be running in her first official race in a few weeks, a 1-mile color run. She has done a little bit of training with Jarom. She doesn’t run the whole thing without walking, but she does pretty well.

  

OBX

The very funny comedian Jim Gaffigan says that if you want to know what it is like to have a fourth child, imagine you are drowning…and then someone hands you a baby. Since there are currently only three children here in this house, that means that we are in the drowning stage. Sounds about right. Having this third kid has been an incredible challenge. And not because any of the three of them have been particularly troublesome. Taken individually, Jenna, Bo, and Emily are all really good kids. Sure they have their challenging quirks, whether it is Emmy’s refusal to take a nap, Bo’s schizophrenia, or Jenna’s inability to eat even the smallest of snacks in less than 90 minutes. But by themselves none of those things are such a big deal. However, putting them together is like assembling some sort of Voltronic superchallenge that can’t be defeated. Alixa is a trooper and seems to be handling the challenge much better than Jarom, to the point that she is still convinced that she would like to have someone hand her that baby while she is drowning. Jarom feels irritable and exhausted and at his wits end 24 hours a day now and can’t imagine a scenario where he would willingly add one more kiddo to the mix. In fact he has such a short fuse these days that he nearly killed his little sister in front of the rest of his family (more on that later.)

So when things are crazy and hectic at home with 3 kids under 5, what should you do? If you said put everybody into a car and drive for 26 hours to stay a week in a house that contains 2 dozen other small children, you are insane. That is what the Winns did, and they are insane. So on the afternoon of August 9^th Jarom and Alixa packed up the minivan, which had been purchased at least partly in preparation for this very trip, and headed east. The trip was split into three legs. Jarom and Alixa alternated driving. Jarom went first. The kids were pretty good and the van was a great set up. It had plenty of space and allowed Lix to sit in one of the captain’s chairs in the back with the little ones. They watched movies and played games on the iPad and took naps and asked if we were there yet. Jarom’s shift didn’t end until about 7:30 am on Saturday morning when they had just passed Knoxville. It was a long, lonely night trying not to fall asleep, and he did have to make a couple of pit stops just to get out and do a few wind sprints, but he stayed on the road and nobody died. They grabbed a quick breakfast at Cracker Barrel and then Lix took her turn while Jarom tended the kids, but mostly took a nap. At about 10 am Alixa informed Jarom that she was getting a little bit sleepy and asked if he could take over the driver seat once again. So the third leg began and went for another 9 hours or so, finally ending up in a torrential downpour while sitting on the highway 12 parking lot that led to their beach house.

The week was spent doing things that you might imagine: swimming in the pool, swimming in the ocean, building sand castles, burying people in the sand, playing football in the sand, chasing crabs in the sand, taking pictures in the sand, trying to stand up paddleboard on the stormiest day when the ocean was particularly choppy, playing a round of golf, chasing sand pipers into the surf, getting knocked over by the surf, crying because you got sand in your mouth, flying kites on the windy days, watching movies with cousins, trying to do a live draft with a dozen people for our fantasy football league, sitting in more traffic on highway 12, and trying to get all that sand out of everyone’s clothes. It was good fun. Arguably the best fun happened one evening as the family was preparing to play a board game. Depending on whom you ask you will get different versions of this story. You may check this version for accuracy with pretty much any Winn family member, as they were basically all there. It began with Nate throwing a wet paper towel at Alixa’s face (Nate usually omits that part when he tells this). A few minutes later Jarom tossed that same wet paper towel at Jamie to indicate to her that she can be done playing the cups now. From there it escalated rapidly. First Jamie retaliated with plastic cups that she had been using as musical instruments, but that wasn’t enough so she then threw a plastic water bottle that still had most of the water in it. Upon hitting Jarom’s face the top came off, soaking Alixa and Loni, who were sitting next to him. This upset Jarom and he got up and went around to the other side of the table to pour water on Jamie. I’ve heard this story a few times and while the adjectives change, most of them focus on Jarom’s “crazy eyes”, which must have scared Jamie because she tried to scamper away over the top of the table and ended up getting stuck in the chandelier. Jarom poured some water on Jamie, Nancy screamed at Jarom to stop it, Jamie commented that Jarom was going to end her life, and a general awkward silence ensued. The water was cleaned up, apologies were made, and at least as far as I am aware, everyone is okay now. It was the kind of incident that should probably have been saved for Thanksgiving, but the Winns aren’t usually together for that holiday.

At the end of the week the crew reluctantly crammed back into the van and took off for Richmond. They spent a day there visiting old friends and enjoying a leisurely drive down John Rolfe Parkway and by their old house, where they could still see the trash can that they left behind. It was at this point that Emmy started to really get sick and have great trouble breathing, which led to great trouble sleeping, which meant no sleep for Alixa and bad sleep for Jarom. Not ideal when you’ve got two long days on the road ahead of you. The one positive about the sleepless nights was that Emily did a great job of sleeping in the car while driving. They stopped for the night in Memphis on the way back and could not have been happier to pull into the driveway late Sunday afternoon. Jarom took the kids on a long walk to stretch their legs and tire them out a little bit and everyone was excited to be sleeping in their own beds again. Sadly, the illnesses that Emmy and then Alixa caught on the trip didn’t end when we got back to Texas. Lix has been a wandering zombie all week long as she tries to deal with the three kids while Jarom goes to work and even had a few days watching Kenna and Cali. She still isn’t over it.

And now everyone is getting ready to go back to school. We still have a year before Jenna leaves for official school, but Lix is already turning into a hot mess anytime she thinks about it. She’ll be doing a co-op preschool again this year which should be fun. Emily is rolling over every time you leave her alone, and is starting to look like she has interest in crawling, which doesn’t thrill Jarom. Bo is hilarious all the time, even when he is driving you crazy. Jarom finished up playing summer league lacrosse and had a great time. He and Alixa also finished up their rec league softball season, which was fun even though the team wasn’t a rousing success. Lix continues to drop pounds at an astounding rate, while Jarom holds steady at about 207. The real amazing story in the weight department goes to Emmy, who has moved from the 4^th percentile at birth up to the 90^th at 4 months. Take that, growth chart! Hopefully she’ll start to level off soon, although she is pretty cute for a fat kid.

Disaster averted

For nearly 32 years Jarom has been living under a cloud of uncertainty. He knew that thanks to his father, he had a 50% chance of suffering from Polycystic Kidney Disease, which would manifest itself sometime during his 30’s or 40’s in the form of declining kidney function and eventually requiring a transplant or permanent dialysis. Jarom isn’t really a worrier, and medical science is progressing at a rapid rate, so it wasn’t ever really an anxiety for him, but particularly over the past 5 years he has become more and more curious to find out whether he is a carrier. Well earlier this week he went to get a physical and a referral to get an ultrasound done, which was scheduled for the same afternoon. He went in, lay on the bed, and had the nice lady look at his internal organs. It was a neat experience to be on the receiving end of the ultrasound after having watched Alixa in so many of them. It only took a few minutes and the results are that his kidneys look perfectly healthy and that he shows no signs of PKD. This was a mild surprise and relief to Jarom, who has believed for some unknown reason that he had the disease for as long as he can remember. This was a tremendous relief to Alixa, who has really worried a lot about this and now also doesn’t have to worry about any of the kidlets being carriers of the disease. So I guess now Jarom’s kidney is on the auction block to whichever sibling loves him the most. Nate has opened the bidding at 1 new set of golf clubs. Going once…

Holding a gecko 

 Almost ready to roll over

 Laying on Wilbur

 Trying out the swings for the first time

In addition to finding out what life threatening diseases we don’t have the past few weeks have been very fun filled. The Texas summer of 2013 has been very pleasant, with temps only nipping into the 100’s a handful of times so far. There have been lots of days in the 80’s, and that is great for all the sports that are being played. Jarom and Lix are playing softball with some friends from their old ward in a local rec league and love it. They had a recent double header where Lix even one-upped Jarom on the field. She played first base and caught everything that went her way, including some very hard hit line drives, while Jarom was in left field and nearly caused the team to lose the game by dropping a routine pop-fly and then slipping to the ground as he tried to pick it up. Lix commented that it may have been the least athletic thing she had ever seen him do. She also said that he still looks very fast in the outfield even though he is old, so he’ll take it. Alixa also recently attended one of his summer lacrosse games and enjoyed watching him play, although she said it was very difficult to get over the smell of all the old pads that were there at the field. Jarom’s lacrosse team still hasn’t lost a game, and he’s been getting a goal or two and some assists in most of them. He is NOT used to the contact and the bangs and bruises that follow. The worst looking of his wounds is from a teammate's shot that missed the goal but caught Jarom right in the back of the thigh.

Day 1,2,3, and 5

It has also been a while since Bo’s last haircut and he was starting to look pretty scraggly. But he despises haircuts and screams bloody murder the entire time, so it was easy to put off giving him a trim. When we finally decided we couldn’t wait any longer the decision was made to cut it as short as possible so as to give us the most time possible before doing it again. So Bo got a haircut that is just like Jarom’s. For the first day or two he wouldn’t really touch it because it felt funny, but once he got used to it he decided he likes it. He does look like he just got out of chemo, but he’s cute no matter what his hair is doing, and now Lix doesn’t ever have to comb it. And hopefully we won’t have to deal with it again for a few months.

 

Bald guys unite!

 Giddyup

 Go Cougs!

Jarom and Alixa celebrated their 9^th anniversary by leaving their kids with some wonderful people and heading down to Austin for a weekend getaway. Jenna got to have a sleepover with Kenna, Bo got to have some one-on-one time with Mimi and Opa, and Aimee and Adam Hendrix got to remember what it was like to have a 3-month old with Emily. From all the reports the kids were pretty good, which was great news to get. The couple took off early Saturday morning and got to Austin in time for lunch, which was eaten at Torchy’s Tacos food truck. The food was top notch and the experience was fun. Then Jarom dropped Alixa off at the hotel so that she could sit by the pool and not worry about anyone drowning or having to go to the bathroom and he went to play a round of golf. They both enjoyed a few hours of solitude. That evening the hotel was gracious enough to deliver some chocolate covered strawberries and champagne to their room. The champagne was a waste, but the strawberries were delicious. The weekend included a trip to downtown Austin to walk down 6^th street, which is known for its bars and being a great example of Austin’s general weirdness. They stood in the middle of the street and listened to about 6 bands performing simultaneously in different bars. It was beautiful. They watched a million bats leave their roost for an evening of insect hunting, which was pretty cool. They rented a kayak and Jarom paddled Alixa around the Colorado River for about an hour, which was at least as awesome as it sounds. They went to round rock donuts to get some treats and hiked all the way to the top of Mount Bonnell to take in the scenic views. But mostly they enjoyed sleeping in until almost noon with no kids jumping on the bed and crying for a bottle and asking for breakfast and needing their diaper changed and complaining because the other one pushed them and…you get the point. It was nice. But they were very glad to see the kids when they got back, and very grateful to the people that enabled them to enjoy such a fun anniversary weekend.

Learning about hunting with Adam 

 Food trucks

Watch out for that...

The last few weeks have been a little bit dangerous around here. First there was the disappearance of Sonic, which still makes everyone around here a little sad. Every now and then Bo or Jenna will be eating or playing on the couch or some other random activity and they’ll think of something and comment on how Sonic is still missing. Then there was the day that Alixa went to get a pedicure, which you might assume is a perfectly safe activity. But some jerk went around the parking lot and installed all these dangerous poles with pictures of people in wheelchairs on them. And wouldn’t you know it, Alixa was walking from her car into the salon and was brutally attacked by one of these mean-spirited pieces of metal. It opened up a pretty serious gash right above her eye. It took a little bit of glue and bandages, but in the end it probably looked worse than it really was. The lesson for all of you out there is don’t ever let your guard down. And just last week we had a storm blow through that lasted about 15 minutes but tore up some shingles from the roof and knocked down 4 sections of the fence and loosened some other areas. So right now the back yard is a little bit of a construction site. Bo is always quick to remind his dad that the fence is still down, lest he forget to make the needed repairs. It’s been raining pretty heavy the last few days and Jarom isn’t real motivated to work out in the rain, so the project is on hold.

The 4^th was a great day around here. Any day that Jarom doesn’t go to work is a good day for Bo, who has lately been very attached to his dad. It’s cute, but not really ideal for Alixa when he is at work. The whole family spent the day swimming and generally enjoying the unseasonably cold day, which was perfect. And in the evening Lix and Emmy stayed home while Jarom, Jenna, and Bo headed down to the pond with some lawn chairs to watch the show with some friends. The show didn’t start for about 45 minutes after they got there, so the kids ran around and generally behaved the way kids should when staying up late on a pleasant summer evening. The fireworks were great, although they were a little louder than Bo would have liked and he got scared. As they climbed back into the car to go home Jarom turned the key and got nothing but clicks. The Ogdens were kind enough to lend them some battery power to get started and get home, but the battery did need to be replaced. And despite staying up several hours past their normal bedtimes the little kids had a great time and were pleasant, and Lix got to sleep in a little extra the next morning.

Alixa has been spending a lot of time lately preparing to get away. She is trying to schedule an anniversary cruise sometime next year for her and Jarom’s 10^th year. She has also set up a shorter escape for this weekend to Austin to celebrate year 9. Jenna is going to have a sleepover with Kenna, Mimi and Opa are going to stay at the house with Bo, and Emmy will get to hang out with the Hendrix clan for a few days. I’m sure it will be nice to spend a few days with no kids and no responsibilities, and it sure is nice that there are people around who are willing and able to take all the rats off their hands. That trip will probably be a good vacation to prepare Jarom and Alixa for the 24-hour drive they’ll be making with the 3 kids next month. That one won’t be nearly as fun and relaxing.

Jenna continues to improve her swimming. She usually doesn’t use any sort of flotation device anymore, and can cover a pretty large distance between holding on to things. Bo does very well too, although he definitely still needs his floaties. Jarom took them both to the pool recently and took them off so he could run around in the kid pool, which is like 2 feet deep. Bo kept jumping around like he had his floaties on and repeated went under and didn’t seem to have any idea how to right himself. So Jarom had to jump in and help him stand up. Emmy continues to be very smiley and very cute. She can’t roll over yet, despite what you may have heard from Alixa. But she will probably be able to soon.

Jarom’s parents recently returned home from serving a 3-year mission for the LDS church in Salt Lake City Utah. I guess his mom decided that she was going to do some organizing when she got home because one day last week 3 boxes showed up on our doorstep with all of Jarom’s childhood memories in them. They were full of report cards (all A’s), achievement awards and ribbons (too many to count), and newspaper articles detailing what an amazing kid he was. There were some red flags though. One of Jarom’s 2^nd grade assignments documents provides some useful insight into why he grew up to be so emotionally detached. It asked what he didn’t like about himself and he said “I’m lonely.” Then it asked what animal he would be and why, to which he responded, “A dog, because I would know that I was loved because people would pet me.” Ouch. I guess at that point in his life Jarom’s mom was busy with the other kids. Maybe that’s why he became the way he is today.

And now an assortment of videos from the past month for you to view or ignore as you please.