End of the school year

I can't believe that Amy is no longer a kindergartener. She had a great year. She is reading so well and is very good at math. We absolutely love her school and so does she. I am going to do a bit of bragging, but she placed in the 99th percentile on the Iowa standardize test. She received a scholarship for next year since she did so well. We are very proud of her. She also won 3rd place in her school's art contest for her picture of a piano. (I will upload a picture when I get the camera hooked up.) Congratulations Amy!

Amy's dance recital

Amy did such a good job in her dance recital.  She knew her routines very well and did a great job.  We are very proud of her.  

Dead mailbox

Someone ran over our mailbox on Saturday May 29, 2011. Ours was as flat as a pancake (left). The person that did it never stopped. I just hope it caused a lot of damage to their truck. Our neighbor saw that it was a black truck. Now we get the joy of going to the post office to pick up our mail. We are going to have to order the post since haven't found any place that carries the kind that fit 2 mailboxes.

Orange Chicken and potty training

Potty charts, stickers, little songs or dances are the usually means for potty training a child, but not Parker. He was actually potty trained with the bribe of orange chicken from Panda Express.

Both of my kids were difficult to potty train. Amy was about 10 months and Parker was 15 months. While I was gone in April to Chicago for an Audiology conference David decided to bribe Parker with orange chicken. He loves, loves, loves orange chicken. The deal was that if he pooped in the potty he could go to Panda and get orange chicken. Well it worked. Parker was completely potty trained by the time I came home from my trip. He is even good through the night. I was so thankful for orange chicken. David is a little sick of it though. Parker still can't get enough. We never ask him where he wants to eat if we are going out, because we already know the answer. I told David that I should have left town a long time ago so he could get the job done.

Spring break activity

During spring break this year Amy really wanted to do something with her best friend Megan.  We decided it would be fun to go to the zoo.  

Ocularcutaneous albinism

Last Tuesday we took Amy to the opthamalogist. Our eye doctor in Kuna had suggested a couple of years ago that Amy may have a type of albinism that affects your eyes. I mentioned it to her pediatrician at her checkup last fall and she thought that it would be a good idea to have her looked at by a specialist before giving her that label her whole life.

So we took her to see the pediatric opthamalogist in town. She confirmed to us that Amy has Ocularcutaneous albinism. This type of albinism affects your eyes, hair and skin. She has a mild case of it. Many times they have nystagmus (eyes that jerk back and forth), eyes that look red from slits in the irises, very poor vision, and no pigment in the hair or skin. Amy has gold hair (like Rapunzel as she says), creamy white skin, no nystagmus, blue eyes and fair vision. She will most likely never have sharp vision because a part of her eyes that brings the sharpness to vision was not fully developed. The doctor said that if you were going to have albinism then having someone like Amy would be the way to go since it is mild. She will also have to be very careful of being in the sun and will have to where sun screen. (Really, that is not a surprise.) Also she is sensitive to light, but she uses transition lenses so that seems to help.

She is still our beautiful Amy. I can't help but think there are probably a lot of people out there with this and don't even know it.

Tooth Fairy visits again

Amy has lost a lot of teeth now. This time she was wrestling with her dad and the tooth was lost. She was so worried that the tooth fairy wouldn't know that she had lost her tooth so she wrote this letter on her white board and put it by the front door. She spelled tooth 3 different ways. I thought it was cute. The tooth fairy did come. Her tooth was found a few days later and she tried to double dip the tooth fairy. I told her that the fairy would know, but she still tried.

Amy without any front teeth.

Parker keeps wiggling his teeth, but to his dismay they are not loose yet. He had to get his picture taken as well.