Grandpa Heinrichs

My last living great-grandparent has passed away. Lawrence Heinrichs was my great-grandpa - my dad's mom's dad. :) I didnt know him all that well. When I was younger, we used to see him fairly often (at least a couple times a year). However, for the last 15 years, I've seen him a total of I think 3 times. I went to his 90th birthday party a few years ago and we went to see him about a month ago when we heard his health was deteriorating. It was so neat to see him last month because I got to take my kids to meet him. Some other family members were there visiting, so we actually had 5 generations of my family there together at once. We got some pictures of all 5 generations (my kids, me, my dad, my grandma and Grandpa Heinrichs). I'll post one as soon as I get them from my lovely husband. :) Even though I didnt know him all that well, I feel a sense of loss and I know that a lot of people will be missing him dearly. He touched a lot of people in his 95 years of life and always showed a lot of love to everyone he knew.

Grandpa's bio:
Born: June 8, 1912 in Paris, Arkansas
Died: November 24, 2007 in Texarkana, Texas
Survived by his wife Grandma Hazel Heinrichs, daughter Grandma Charline Thompson, son Larry Heinrichs and other children that I did not personally know, lots of grandchildren, even more great-grandchildren and several great-great-grandchildren!

Mr. Smarty Pants

I keep getting stories from Owen's teachers about how wonderful he is, so I wanted to share some of them here because he is wonderful of course!! :)

Last week, his afternoon teacher at school was so excited to tell me some of the things he had been doing. One day, she was asking the kids to draw lines on a piece of paper. She said Owen was one of just a couple of kids that listened at all and he didnt just draw a couple of lines - he drew 15-20 parallel straight lines! She's excited that he's on his way to writing. Very exciting! :) He's such a big boy! Then another day, she went on and on about how smart he is and how well he does puzzles. She said she got the puzzles out and the other kids were just eating them and throwing them around the room, but Owen sat down and did 4 of them in just a couple of minutes. His Sunday school teacher commented on his love of puzzles too. He's definitely my child! I LOVE puzzles and always have since I was his age. At home, he has a few 25 piece jigsaw puzzles that he does all by himself in just a couple of minutes. He usually needs a little bit of help the first time or two when he gets a new puzzle, but after that, he's on his own. I did a 100 piece puzzle that Aunt Mary let him borrow last week and now he likes to take apart a corner of it and put it back together on his own. He hasn't gotten brave enough to try to do more than 10 pieces or so at a time, but it's so fun to watch him figure it out. :) I love having such an awesome little boy!

Good news on the potty front! Owen has decided that it's okay to potty for other people! He went all day at school yesterday without an accident because he actually went for his teachers. What a relief! I think we're pretty much done with the whole potty training challenge now. We just have to get through nights without wetting now. He actually usually wakes up with a dry pull-up, but the one night I let him wear his underwear, he pee-ed all over the place... And of course, he wont sleep on his bed that has a nice mattress protector on it... he sleeps on the living room floor. Thankfully, I thought to put down some extra towels and stuff under the blanket, so not much soaked all the way through to the carpet! I'm SO excited that I'm down to 1 kid in diapers again. It's so weird to have to remember to take him potty though! What a big big boy! :)

Thanksgiving lunch with the kids!

Today we had Thanksgiving lunch at the kids' school. I had a fun day because intead of just dropping them off, I just stayed at school and hung out with Owen until lunchtime. It was fun to see what his class does all morning. I was gonna hang out with Ella too, but she ended up sleeping pretty much the whole time I was there, so I spent the time with Owen instead. We had turkey and smashed taters and some vegies and it was yummy! Owen didnt want to stay when we left him after lunch, but hopefully he took a nap and had a good rest of the day.

Owen has finaly decided to start going potty for at least one of his teachers!! Miss Sharon is one of his newer teachers and I guess he really likes her. He's gone to the potty twice now for her. I'm ecstatic! He's been totally potty trained at home (except at bedtime) for several weeks now, but we were having a really hard time with school because he wouldn't go for his teachers. Hopefully that's turning around now. The only thing is that he might be moved up to Miss Crystal's class soon now that he's going potty. I'm torn on that idea because it would be nice to have him with the older kids who are all potty trained, but I'll be really sad if he gets split up from his friends that he's been there with for a year and a half now. They are all good friends and I'd hate to split them up. I'll be thinking that over for the next couple of weeks.

For fun, here are some of Owen's favorite songs to sing lately. :)
1. Jesus Loves Me
2. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star
3. Bringing Home a Baby Bumble Bee
4. ABCs
5. Itsy Bitsy Spider
6. Mary Had a Little Lamb

There are some others that he sings at school, but I dont know them, so I dont know what they are called. There is one where they do the sounds of the letters and another one about not sticking fingers in your nose or something. It's so cute to hear him singing! I love it. The other day he told me that he sang Jesus Loves Me to this cute little girl in his class named Alex.

Mommy's had a rough day...

I try not to make this a complaint blog, but I've had a rough day today and could use some prayer! This has been a really rough year at work with various things going on that have led to lots of people quitting. It's been tough to deal with, but we've pressed on none-the-less. Today, my boss gave her 2 week notice. I'm so happy for her new opportunity in the job she's pursuing, but it's a big challenge for my team here at HP. I worked with for 2 summers as a co-op and started working for her right out of college. She has been my boss for 5+ years now and has been the best boss I ever could have dreamed of. She has let me work from home while the kids were babies. She gives us all so much flexibility and always fights for us in any circumstance that she can. She's our advocate and our friend and we're gonna miss her so dearly. She has made this a fun place to work even amidst difficulty and turmoil and we thank her so much for that. It's going to be a difficult transition for our team and I'm thankful for any prayer as we go through it.

Happy Birthday Ella!!

Well, it's official! She's 1!! We had a great time at her party on Saturday. She scored big-time on the clothes and thank you every one for not buying lots of toys!! :) I hope everyone that came had a great time and thank you so much for coming to celebrate with us! It means so much to us to have friends to celebrate with and we love you all so much! :) I know I always say this and don't often follow through, but I'll try to post pictures from the party! :)

Lots of news!

We've had a fun couple of weeks and I should have blogged some of this sooner, but it's been a busy couple of weeks!

First of all, Owen wore underwear to church on Sunday!! He's been doing pretty good about going potty at home, but has never worn underwear out of the house until Sunday. When he woke up in the morning, he wanted to go pee-pee in the potty and then really wanted to wear his underwear, so I let him. I tried to get him to wear his plastic ones over the regular ones in case of an accident, but he doesnt like those, so he didnt want to. But he did great! Not one accident the whole time we were gone from 8am-3:30pm!! Amazing! He still wont go at school unless I help him, but hopefully that will come soon. I can't wait to stop buying quite so many diapers!!

The kids have been so cute together lately. As I think I've mentioned before, Ella is a climber. She LOVES climbing up on stuff and standing on top and letting go. It's cute, but terrifying to think that she's gonna be able to climb higher and higher every day! Her favorite thing to climb on is Owen's little chair from IKEA, but lately, she's figured out how to mount Owen's little fire truck and Thomas train and ride them around. She still can't really get it to go forward very well, but she's great at going backwards. :) Mostly, she loves for people to push her around. The other day I was pushing her around and it wore me out so I told her we had to take a break. Then Owen started pushing her around and it was so cute!! I dont remember which one she was riding, but we got a video that we will post. It's so adorable. I love that he's interested in playing with her. He also loves to make her laugh and it's so funny some of the things he does to get her to giggle and it's funny what things make her giggle. :) I love watching them grow up together!

Ella's birthday is Saturday! I can't believe she's already 1!! It seems like just a couple of weeks ago that we found out she was on her way. She's such a delight and becomes more and more delightful every day! She's such a happy baby (or almost toddler now!!) and she just makes us smile all the time.

I'm sure I've got more to write about, but I can't think of it now, so I'll write more later!