2013 has come to an end and what a year it was!! Scarlett was born. Abram turned 5 and started school. We traveled a little bit (not nearly as much as I would have liked, but I'm hoping that will change this year). Made new friends. Reconnected with old friends. Pursued my singing. It really was a fantastic year. Not anything like what I had expected, but absolutely great!

Scarlett is an animal! She can be temperamental but she has a great sense of humor, is pretty tough, and so easy to love. I regret not taking advantage of Abram's younger years and appreciating every little milestone, however frustrating it might have been at the time, so I am definitely doing that now with both kids.

Abram had a great 2013. He started kindergarten, which he is at the top of his class academically. He gets in trouble for talking or messing around during class, but sitting quietly for most 5 year olds can be difficult at times. He started extracurriculars this winter with soccer and engineering, he loved both and he can't wait to start football next year. He lost his first tooth! And becoming a big brother took a minute to get used to, but I am so impressed at how lucky Scarlett is to have 2 older brothers who are so sweet and so caring.

Happy 2014!

Little Abram is growing up so fast! Where has the time gone? He is officially signed up to start Kindergarten on September 4th. Kindergarten here is a little on the strange side though.  First, the entire 5 year old population has to wait 9 days after the rest of the Kaiserslautern school system to start their first day. Why? I'm not sure, but it might have to do with the other reason the Kindergarten system is different than what I've heard of in the past. The other odd practice is that all of the teachers for Abram's grade make home visits to each of their student's houses before the start of the year. I keep trying to figure out what their reasoning is behind this and I keep coming to the conclusion that they either want to make a personal connection with the families and find out how to best work with each child, or to get an insight as to what the parents are like. Either way, I feel like I need to get everyone dressed in their Sunday best and bake cookies and have freshly squeezed lemonade. Buuuut, let's be honest. That will never happen. Even if we would be settled into the house, I highly doubt I would be organized enough to make any of that happen. I hope she's content with bottled water and store bought pastries of some sort, especially since we will only be a few days fresh in our new house. I'm going to have to kick myself into high gear to make the house somewhat presentable so that we aren't sitting on boxes with bare walls.

First and foremost, thank you to everyone who got in touch with me to send their well wishes and to offer possible culprits. Now that it is Tuesday and the doctor has since reopened after the 4 day weekend, my plan was to being Scarlett in and figure this mystery rash out, but I am giving it another day or two because she had shown a significant improvement in the last couple of days.

We stopped giving her zyrtek Friday night and wanted to see if she would be ok without any allergy medicine until we could figure out if the zyrtek had something to do with her rash. She woke up in the middle of the night a snotty, grouchy mess, so we gave her a dose of benedryl, but that didn't seem to soothe her at all, so at 5am, I put her in her swing and let her sleep a bit. Saturday and Sunday night we gave her benedryl again and she was up and so crabby ALL night. Somehow, it took us three miserable nights to figure out benedryl makes her wired and grouchy. So it seemed our options were zyrtek and a spotted, but happy, baby. Benedryl and the devil. Or nothing and a boogery, grouchy baby that couldn't breathe. Zyrtek it is!! At least until we were able to get her into the doctor to change her medicine.

Scarlett woke up yesterday looking slightly less spotty but this morning was when we saw the real difference. Her nurse called us this morning to check on the baby and agreed with me that it is possible the timing of her improved rash could be coincidental to the timing of when the zyrtek was clearing out of her system, or it could have been an obnoxiously extended virus. She advised me to keep her on the zyrtek and if the rash started up again to schedule her an appointment and we will change her allergy medicine because at that point, it will be obvious that the real cause was her medicine. Isaac and I feel completely comfortable with that plan, and I will continue to update on here if things go awry again.

I want to thank everyone once more for all of your help and concern. It means a lot that you went out of your way to read this and offer up suggestions.

Oh little Scarlett. How stressful you can be!! In, unbelievably, 4 short days, you will be 7 whole months old. The day after we arrived back in Germany, Scarlett had her 6 month check up. She was 17 pounds and, I think they said, 26.5 inches but I will have to measure her myself to make sure. During her sixth month, she taught herself how to crawl, push herself to sitting up and is pretty stable once she's there, and has pulled herself up to a stand a few times. I do not remember time flying as fast when Abram was a baby!

At her six month appointment, her doctor took quite a long time listening to her chest. She heard, what she believes is, a benign murmur. She is fairly certain that it is nothing, but she is sending us to a pediatric cardiologist to make certain. I hadn't heard of her having a heart murmur until she said it that first time, but according to her referral, her precious doctor heard it back in May as well. After I found that out, I went from a pretty confident that it was nothing state of mind, to freaking out that she was going to need a heart transplant. At the doctor today, I asked her about it, and she said that the murmur sounded innocent enough that many other doctors might have left it alone, like her last one, but she treats her patients like she would her own kids, so she wanted to know for sure. I really appreciated that. Scarlett's cardiology appointment is on 29 August, so I will update when that time comes. 

We were at the doctor today because Scarlett has had a strange rash that has been progressively gotten worse over the past week. I assumed it had something to do with her immunizations that she received last Thursday, the timing could be a coincidence. She got the same shots she had been given previously, so I expected the same kind of sandpaper-like rash on her legs that came with her shots in the past. To no surprise, she got that slight rash, but it was different this time. It had never spread to anywhere but her legs before, but this time it was on her stomach and forehead too. I made a mental note of it, but that was about it. She still has some bumps on her legs from that, but everywhere else had cleared up by Sunday. It was nice to see that rash had disappeared, but in its place, I noticed 2 red bumps. Weird. The next day, I found 11. Tuesday, I found 24. Yesterday, I counted about 90. I hadn't seen this kind of rash before, my ex-pediatric nurse mom of 20ish years hadn't seen this kind of rash before, and it was obviously spreading, so I made a doctor appointment just to make sure all was ok, especially since they were going to be closed until next Tuesday.  The doctor walked in and was taken aback at her poor skin's condition. Upon further inspection, she concluded that she had never seen a rash like that and didn't know what it was. For the next hour, different doctors and nurses came in and out of the exam room to see if they could figure out the mysterious rash. Still no one had answers for us. Some of the doctors would come in and out of the room, checking their resources and trying other tests, but still, no one knew. They tried to fit us in with dermatology, but they didn't have any openings. They almost sent us to infectious disease, but the doctors in that department gave the pediatricians a few things to look for, and without those things present, they didn't feel it was necessary to see us. They ruled out chicken pox, the measles, and meningitis thankfully, but by the end of our appointment, we still didn't have a real answer of what was wrong with my poor daughter but we were going to treat it as a viral rash that should go away on its own within a few days. 

* I started this post on Thursday August 8, and am now resuming on Saturday August 10. 

In the past few days, Scarlett's rash has definitely not gone away, but rather has gotten worse. One of the doctors that were in and out of the exam room called yesterday to check on how things were going. When I informed her of no change for the better, she told me to try giving her a dose of benedryl because she did some research last night and wanted to rule out an allergic reaction to a virus or bacteria that she was fighting. If the benedryl didn't show a significant difference right away, then that wasn't what it was, so there wasn't cause to continue with the benedryl. Not that I was surprised, but it did nothing to help my spotted child. I have done a little research myself, and am wondering if her body is having a hard time handling the Zyrtec her doctor just started her on for seasonal allergies. I read that some people have allergies to antihistamines, which is highly unlikely, or possibly the artificial grape flavor in it. I stopped the Zyrtek last night, but It will take a few days for it all to get out of her system before, I assume, we will see a real difference. Whether we see a difference or not, we are going back to the doctor on Tuesday. If this is a reaction to her zyrtek, then we will need to get on a different allergy medicine and get this allergy to the grape flavor or antihistamine figured out and recorded, or if she's not better, then I am bringing her back in and we aren't leaving until we have answers! Updates to come. 

** If anyone reading this has any suggestions on what this could be, we would be happy to bring those suggestions to the doctor as something to try. Thank you in advance!**

We just took a, much needed, month long trip to Wisconsin. Obviously a lot can happen in a month, so this blog will probably get broken down into a few different entries.

Traveling was, without a doubt, the most stressful part of this trip. Obviously its always an adventure traveling with small children, but the kids actually did amazingly. I don't have a single complaint about their behavior! The challenges came about in the transportation aspect. The military had a program called Space Available, or Space A, which is basically their form of flying standby, but on military flights, which come at a very, very cheap cost for us. Some of these flights are on commercial chartered planes, and others are on cargo planes, big and small. Since it is summer time, and kids are out of school, there are tons of people trying to travel, and are all hoping to get on these flights back home to see family and whatnot.

This was our first time ever flying Space A, so we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. It seemed like we were trying to catch a plane for EVER but in all actuality, we got on one within two days. Planes kept breaking or flights got canceled or they would change the number of available seats, so it was a very exhausting process trying to get on a flight. We had purchased tickets from Washington DC to Milwaukee, assuming we would fly into Baltimore, as that seemed to be a frequent stop from here, and we have friends staying a couple hours from DC that we were hoping to visit. Flight after flight into that general area got cancelled or delayed or changed, so we finally decided that getting into the States was the first and most important step, so we chose to get on the first flight that we could because changing our domestic flights would be easy enough. We finally got on a flight to Scott Air Force Base, Illinois. From the time we found out we were on the flight until we had to be trough security, we had 30 minutes. In that time, we had to check our bags, change our domestic flights, and get through security. We were lucky enough to get on a cargo plane with only 10 other people and the crew. What an interesting experience! Our seats were nylon cargo nets lining the sides of the plane with the cargo they were shipping I'm the middle of the plane. The seats were actually kind of comfortable, and you could unhook the backs to make for a wider surface that we could lay down on. It was also really loud, which, in our case, was a great thing! Abram could laugh, yell, and talk as loud as he wanted, and Scarlett could tell or cry, all without disturbing anyone! The only complaint that I could possibly come up with was the climate control. If you stood up, you were hot, as the heaters were on the ceiling, and if you say down, it was cold. Very tolerable either way, especially when the you cost for this particular flight being almost nothing.

It was a 10.5 hour flight to Scott AFB, and we didn't really know what we were going to do once we got there, but we were ready to improvise if necessary. I had imagined we would fly into a terminal-type building like they have here, but we went from the plane to a bus that made 3 stops and we would have to just pick one and go! It was narrowed down to the hotel there on base, or the little train stop to St Louis. Our flight out of St Louis was early the next morning, so we decided it would be easier to worry about the majority of the traveling that day instead and pay $10 for train rather than however much a 45 minute taxi costs. First issue. Where do you buy tickets? Found that. Second issue. How do you "authorize" this ticket? We somehow found that without the asshole conductor's help. Third issue. Run to authorize all of the tickets (because why would they put that near the train?) and make it back before the train left. I wasn't about to drag the kids and our suitcases there and back, so I just sent Isaac. He made it back in time, thankfully. Fourth issue. Survive the ride! I never knew this, but St. Louis is a craphole. The very first stop, a, very obvious, druggie boarded and sat in front of us. We suspect her drug of choice was meth. I wasn't sure if Isaac had noticed but the second I mentioned "the blonde girl," he immediately responded, "that crackhead!?" After a 45 minute long ride and 25 stops and seeing some of the St. Louis residents, we were at the airport.

Our next obstacle was finding a hotel. We had befriended a couple that were on the flight with us who had made reservations at the Hilton by the airport with a free shuttle, so we tagged along with them and stayed at the Hilton. As you can imagine, we were in rough shape. I scared myself when I looked in the mirror at the end of the day, but I was a little shocked at the reaction of te hotel staff. They talked to Isaac and looked at us like we had the plague! As my own personal experiment, I did my makeup and wore nicer clothes, and, to no surprise, the staff was kind and helpful and even asked if I needed assistance getting my coffee because I was holding the baby. This isn't new information to me, just a bit of a reminder at how quick people are to judge.

Our flight from St. Louis to Milwaukee went without incident, thank goodness, as well as our car ride from Milwaukee to our home cities. I have to give a big thanks to Southwest Airlines. Everything about using their services was easy, particularly changing our flights. Thankfully, our car ride and flight to DC, when it was time to head back, were also very easy.

We had 24 hours before trying to get on a flight to Germany, so we were again faced with options. The ease of getting a ride 30 minutes down the road to Baltimore to stay in a hotel for the night, or rent a car and drive a couple of hours to our friends house in Virginia. Without hesitation, we drove to our friend's house. It was too short of a visit, but so so nice to be able to see them!!

The next morning, we got ready and headed to Baltimore. To get there, we had to drive through DC. Wow. Not at all what I had expected! In my head, I only envisioned a bunch of wealthy politics and business men driving around in those black cars you see on TV. Obviously there is more to DC than what you can see from the highway, but my initial reaction was that it is kind of dumpy. Maybe we will go back and actually see the sights.

We were fortunate enough to get on the first flight out of Baltimore on a large United flight. According to the schedule, it was supposed to go to Italy and then Germany, but it is so easy to travel by train in Europe that we would have probably enjoyed riding the train and seeing Italy, Switzerland, and Germany on the way home. It would have only been an 8 hour car ride back, but I don't know how that would long it would have been by train. We got to the airport at 5pm, signed up for the flight and then went to the USO for the next 3 hours of down time. The USO is an amazing organization. They had snacks, comfortable chairs, outlets, a kids room, a place to store our luggage while we waited, and those are only some of the perks of the little lounge in the airport. They do so many great things for military members and their families. I told Isaac that after we are old and retired, I'm going to voulenteer for them, and if he's not dead, then he can come with me.

At 8:20pm, we found out we were able to make that flight and that it was going to Germany first, so that was convenient! We got in line to check our bags and get our boarding passes. Lucky us, we were standing in this line for an hour next to an old drunk guy! I had such a headache by the time we got through that line because he would not stop talking. He continually talked about the same 4 things over and over and over again. I was polite at first but by the tenth time he told me how much we would regret living on post (we are moving on post in a couple of weeks) I had to move so that Isaac had to deal with him. Once we got through security again, I saw him using his carry on as a pillow, passed out by the window! When boarding started, Isaac asked if we should wake him up. As much as I wanted to let him suffer his own consequences, the same way that he made me suffer in line next to him for an hour, my conscious won and agreed with Isaac that we probably should wake him up. After some minor maintenance issues, we were in the air by 12:30am. It was such an easy flight. We got a meal shortly after take off, we all slept for 5 or 6 hours, woke up for another meal, and then landed!!

The great thing about Space A, other than the price, is that after Isaac retires, we will be able to use their services for the rest of our lives! Can't wait! They have flights to places all over the world, and even stateside too if we have a lot of time on hour hands to make that work.

Advice for flying Space A:

Don't buy domestic flights until you are stateside, giving you more flexibility to get on the first available flight out.

Dress in layers in case you end up on a cargo plane.

Sign up for multiple destinations, just in case! Ex- There was a flight to Germany out of the naval base by our friends house, but we were too nervous to risk not making the flight because we signed up only the day before. The longer you are signed up, the more priority you have to catch a flight. It doesn't matter if you never show up for the flight because after 60 days, your name is removed from the list. So if you are leaving from the DC area, I would sign up for Baltimore, Andrews AFB, Dover, Norfolk, etc.

That is all tht I can think of at the moment, but if anyone is curious about the process, just ask!

Baby sister is growing like a weed. She is now five and a half months old. I can hardly believe it, but I am loving this age! She cut her first bottom tooth on May 27 and about a week ago, her other front bottom tooth cut through the skin. She loves all food except rice cereal. She gags and throws it up when she eats it, so we steer clear of that. She loves applesauce and sweet potatoes and today she persuaded me to break off a crumb of the cracker I was eating to share with her.

Physically, she is dominating the baby world. She rolls both ways, and has been for a long while, like a champ and somehow works her way across the room. She always seems to get herself stuck under the coffee table and will yell until we get her out. I don't give her much longer until she is crawling. When she is on her stomach, she pulls her knees up and under her body. It's very exciting how quickly and easily things are coming to her, but with her as our last, planned, baby, I really wouldn't mind if she slowed down a bit so that I can enjoy the babiness while I can.

Abram was a huge, chunky baby. He started at 8 pounds even, and at 5 months he weighed 20 pounds. Scarlett was born a bit larger at 9 pounds 4 ounces and now weighs 16 pounds 4 ounces. She certainly isn't a tiny, skinny baby, but she also isn't an Abram sized baby! I would say she is just right.

Abram is playing bowling on the Wii. He knocked down all of the pins and said, "Ha! Yes! I beat your ass!"

In the past I have misheard things he has said thinking I heard him cuss, so I asked him to repeat what he said.

He replied, very innocently, "What? Is ass a bad word?"

Isaac burst out laughing in the other room while I had to control the amusement on my face to verify "ass" as a word little boys don't use. He apologized and then resumed beating some ass on the Wii.

I need to vent for a second.

Do I mumble when I talk? Do I speak a weird language that no one around me understands? Do I whisper when I talk? Do I stutter?

The answer to at least one of those questions has got to be yes! It's the only explination as to why people don't listen to me! I've been awake for 3 hours and the only person that has completely received everything that I said was the lady at Subway! Scarlett's doctor definitely didn't. Isaac didn't. The lady that made my coffee sure didn't. Abram did, but chose not to do what I asked.

Rant done. I will continue to not be heard for the rest of the day. Is it bed time?

I spoke too soon. Abram still loves and plays with Scarlett, but he finally saw one of the downfalls of having a little sister.

Abram went to bed in one set of pajamas, but came downstairs in the morning wearing a different set, so I knew exactly what had happened. He doesn't change his clothes in the morning unless I instruct him to, so I knew that he had had an accident at some point in the night. I asked him why he changed his clothes to see if he would tell me the truth or try to cover it up. I was very happy that he decided to tell me the truth, because he knew I wouldn't be happy, but we have been stressing the importance of telling the truth and I'm glad he seems to be taking those talks to heart. He stood in front of my dancing around what he was trying to say for a few minutes and he must have gotten nervous about the consequences he faced because he started getting pouting and crying a little bit. Scarlett saw him do this and started laughing and laughing. It was hilarious. He got soooo mad at her and yelled at her to stop laughing at him which only made her giggle more. He stomped off up to his room. He was NOT happy. I tried calling him back to talk to me but he was too mad.

I know this is only the beginning of her making him mad and I'm sure it will continue to be a source of comic relief for me... for a few years at least.

I'm getting yelled at for not blogging. Sorry!!!

Abram is really great with Scarlett. There isn't much more or anything different he could do with her. If she cries, he is there trying to make her happy. If I ask him to hold her, he complies. So far, he is a really great big brother.

With the good always comes the bad. Maybe bad is the wrong word. But he is a big brother and sometimes he treats Scarlett like one of his toys. Today he was making her hit herself with her hand and told her to "stop hitting yourself." He was just playing and he wasn't making her hit herself hard, she didn't seem to care, but I asked him to stop anyways. I also asked him to keep her company while I got some stuff ready and this is what I came back to.

The only times I see him get frustrated with her, is if she drools in him. He got mad one time because she kept touching buttons on the tablet while he was holding her. I thought it was funny. The only other thing that bothers him is when she cries because he says it hurts his ears.

All in all, they make a great duo and are constantly making each other laugh and smile. Can't ask for much more than that.