Saturday, February 23, 2013

Chocolate!

The kids in front of the chocolate bars' wall
Anyone who knows me, knows that I don't like chocolate. I just don't like the taste (unless it is in a Snickers bar or chocolate milk) and I do understand that this makes me weird! Today, my MOMS group was going to take a tour of a chocolate factory in LA.  I went because my boys seem to like any candy and I thought that it would be fun to see.  The chocolate store (I really don't think that it can be considered a factory since it was so small) was Compartes.  It is a small family run chocolate store that makes and sells very gourmet chocolate.  They are located in Los Angeles.  The store was out of a lot of chocolate because of the past Valentine's Day and they said that they were in the process of making a lot of chocolate orders for the Oscars.

Let's get the tour started.

Here is where the caps of the chocolates go to dry.  They make caps, which they paint the tops of (I can't remember with what).  Then after they are dry they fill them with something yummy and then put the chocolate on the bottom.  The caps looked like the caps from a keyboard.

Nathan did not want me to take his picture
The guy in the hat is the owner of the store!  He said that his parents bought this business when he was 12 and then when he was 25 he bought it from his parents.  He said that he is now 28 years old!  The guy seemed to really have his act together and he was very nice.  He also said that they will be appearing on a reality TV show called LA Sugar on the E! channel soon.


Talking about the chocolate they make


The chocolate squares with nuts and candy they make
We next got to go where the chocolate is melted.  He said that they have this machine going all of the time so that the chocolate never turns bad.  He mostly gets his chocolate from South America because buying Free Trade is easier there than in Africa.  He is the one that comes up with all of the recipes and they use high grade ingredients.

This is where the melted chocolate goes
After the tour the kids had to all get together to take a picture before they got their chocolate sample (nice bribing of us moms!).  We all got a chocolate with carmel in the middle.  The samples are pretty small and go for $2.50 each.  I had my piece and it wasn't too bad.  There was a lot of carmel, which masked the chocolate flavor for me.  Overall the tour was a lot of fun and it was nice to get out of our little bubble of a neighborhood and do something new.

Anderson and Nathan loved the chocolate!

On Compartes website they have this interesting article on Jonathon, the owner, that was recently done by the LA Times.  Also, on the website you can see the designs that they have on the chocolate that I was describing, not so well, above.

-Heather

Sunday, February 17, 2013

His Own Style

I know I don't have a great eye for fashion, but this kid has an even worse one! His outfit for today is a Batman shirt, Lightning McQueen pj bottoms that are a little small, striped long socks, and sandals. He doesn't seem to mind, so I guess I shouldn't either!



Saturday, February 16, 2013

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday to You!
Happy Birthday to You!
Happy 7th Birthday Dear Lucy!
Happy Birthday to You!!!

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

That's One BIG egg!


I went to go collect the chickens' eggs this morning and I found this monster egg in there!  It was so big.  The above picture is it next to a regular sized egg (about the size that you would find in the grocery stores).  I think that in person the egg even looked bigger than the picture.

Nathan had to have that egg for breakfast.  When we cracked it open there were two yolks!  How exciting that we got our first egg with two yolks!  This is one of Foghorn's eggs and she has been known to lay some weird eggs (she has laid shell-less eggs a couple of times).

Sorry about the blurry phone picture!

A quick update about Anderson, he woke up this morning with a lot of the welts gone!  I think that the Benadryl and Claritin really helped!  I was also looking at this blog and it reminded me that  he had an allergic reaction on his forehead the day that we went to the zoo.  I'm now curious to know if it was maybe a reaction to the medicine.  I'll have to try that sunscreen again!

-Heather

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Hives!




Yesterday evening I noticed that Anderson was scratching his stomach and it looked really red.  I went over and lifted his shirt up and I saw that he had a ton of bumps everywhere that looked like bites.  It was all over his belly, chest, and under his arms near his armpits.  The above picture is what I saw.  He had a few "bite" marks on his legs.  I called Christopher right away because I didn't know what it could be.  He suggested that we give Anderson a bath, which I did.  The bath stopped him scratching himself which was good because he was making it worse.  We decided that we would let him sleep on it and if the "bites" were not better in the morning we would take him to the doctor.  I should also mention that we were racking our brains trying to figure out what it was.  We had gone to a new playground and we thought that maybe there were some fleas in the sandbox that got under his shirt and bit him all up.  Or we were thinking it was bed bugs because he had taken a nap in our bed.  I wasn't so sure about the bed bugs because only he had bites and the rest of us did not.  

That evening Anderson slept horribly because he kept scratching himself.  He must have been so itchy.  He was scratching the back of his neck and wrists a lot.  These were the only two spots that were available to him.  I put him in some footie pajamas so that he couldn't scratch his tummy and chest easily.  In the morning the rash looked worse so we made an appointment for him to go see the doctor.  

Our doctor walked right in and said that he has hives and must have had an allergic reaction to something and this is the cause.  We talked about what Anderson did for the day and everything that he ate, which happened to be all stuff he had eaten before.  I did mention how he just finished his round of antibiotics the day before this and she said that there is a very good chance that he is allergic to amoxicillin or the dye in the pink amoxicillin.  I guess that there are delayed allergic reactions to antibiotics that can happen after they have been given.  I think that this might be the case.  Although he had an ear infection not too long ago and he took amoxicillin with no reactions, but I also don't remember that one being pink.  

Our course of action now is to give him Children's Claritin once a day until the hives are gone.  This should be about three days.  At the same time we need to give him Children's Benadryl every six hours for a couple of days to help with the itching.  This poor kid has been taking medicine non-stop!  I also have to say that looking at the ingredients on medicines I am really appalled at what is in them!  Dye, preservatives that have been found to be bad, high fructose corn syrup!  It just really puzzles me why medicine that is supposed to make someone get better has a whole bunch of crap in it!  

We were also instructed to put loose clothes on him and try to avoid baths because those could make the hives worse.  If he has another bacterial infection that requires antibiotics we will have to see what we would like to do.

Anderson has been a good trooper!  Below is a video of him at the doctor's office today.  It is hard to see the hives because of the poor quality, but it looked really bad!

Sunday, February 10, 2013

The Past Two Weeks

This month is going by so much faster than last month and I think that is because we are all starting to feel better.


Anderson Update: 
Thursday 1/31 Anderson was coughing like crazy and could hardly sleep.  Then in the morning he was still coughing a lot and he had a fever.  I made him a doctor's appointment for the afternoon.  When we got to the office and was signing in, Anderson was coughing a lot and the receptionist asked us to please put a mask on him!  The poor kid did not want to wear a mask, so I did my best at putting the mask over his mouth when he was coughing.  He got his oxygen levels checked and he was fine.  Then the doctor checked out his chest and she said that she doesn't hear much, but his cough does sound bad.  She had us go downstairs to get an x-ray.  We went downstairs and got an x-ray for Anderson.  He was so good (and so were the techs).  We were in and out in about five minutes.  The doctor then said that on the left side of his lungs it looked like it was the beginning of an infection.  In other words, he had the beginning stages of pneumonia :(.  The doctor said that we could wait it out and see if the infection worsened or got better or we could put him on antibiotics.  She told us that if it were her kid she would put him on antibiotics because of how bad his cough is.  We decided that we would do antibiotics.  Today is his last day on the antibiotics.  After the first full day of taking the antibiotics his cough and fever completely went away which was a relief!

Anderson has also been talking up a storm!  He is saying so many words now and he is putting words together, which is so great to hear.  I knew that he would be talking before he was 2 1/2, but as a mom I still worried because my kid is behind where the average two year old is in speech.  It is pretty cute because we taught him how to say "I Love (Mama, Dada, Nate, Nana, & Papa).  He says "love" as "lub."  It is so precious.  We took video of him saying this and I will have to post it later (it's on Christopher's phone).

Anderson is also starting to participate more in the Parent & Child class that we do together.  He still likes to stay close to me, but he does play more and now when it is circle time he will actually participate in the songs.

Anderson has been a bit stubborn lately.  He mostly just does this with me, but he will want me to be near him, but will not want me to help him out or pick him up.  Whenever I leave to continue with what I was doing he will start screaming and crying.  It is very frustrating because it is like he just wants me to be near him doing nothing.  Whenever he wants to do something on his own he says, "mine!"  It is nice that he uses this word because I know for sure that he does not want my help.



Nathan Update:
Nothing much has been going on with Nathan.  He is still giving us a hard time almost every morning when we drop him off at school.  One would think that he would be used to the place now that he has been going for almost two years.  Also, when we go to pick him up he doesn't want to leave.  The silly kid!  We also made the decision that we are going to homeschool Nathan.  I am thinking that we will do the Christopherus homeschooling program.  Hilarious that is is basically the "Christopher Us" one we will be using.  This curriculum is Waldorf based and started by a stay-at-home mother.  We will probably supplement with Oak Meadow, which is loosely based on the Waldorf philosophy.  Both Christopher and I are getting excited about it and think that it will be a lot of fun.

Now that Nathan is back at school he got another cold, but this one has been pretty minor.  Although, Nathan has been telling us that he is sick so he needs to watch a movie!  Lately, Nathan has wanted to sleep everywhere, but his bedroom.  He has slept in the guest bed and our bed.  It will be nice when he is back to his bed.  At bedtime (almost every single time) after we have done the whole bedtime routine and read him stories he has to go poop!  We don't know if his body's clock is set to go poop in the evening around bedtime or if it is another stall tactic from him!

Christopher and the boys enjoying the seals at the zoo

Christopher Update:
Christopher has been keeping busy with work and building a new chicken coop.  He got notified by his boss that he was going to be going to Japan soon for a week.  He is very excited, but I am very jealous.  I would love to go to Tokyo!  It is also going to suck to be a single parent for a week, but I've managed in the past.  I'll just have to make sure that I keep all of us busy to make the time go by faster.

Christopher has been doing excellent on working on improving his mobility.  He found this guy named Kelly (not sure exactly of the name or the spelling) on the internet who is a doctor of Physiology.  Kelly does a lot of workshops that he posts online that you can purchase.  Christopher has been doing some of the stuff that he has been saying to get better mobility and to learn how to do exercises correctly.  He has also been doing a video on how to strengthen ones back muscles for better posture.  I've tried this one and it really does target the lower back muscles!  Christopher will also be turning 40 soon!  We haven't figured out what to do for his birthday, but we do want to do something to celebrate this big birthday!

Heather Update:
I believe that I am getting the cold that Nathan brought home.  My head is super congested and I am feeling tired again.  I have been on this crazy reading kick lately and I love it.  I have barely been watching TV and have just been reading.  In January I read about a book a week.  I decided to make it my goal to read about 50 pages a day.  It has also helped that I have enjoyed most of the books that I have read.  I have a feeling that I might be coming to a point soon where I will be burned out on reading, but so far it's all good!

I finally got a haircut!  It has been forever and I really needed one.  I just got a trim and some layers, so nothing major.  I was told by the hairstylist (a new one that I really liked) that I had really good, strong, and beautiful hair.  I get told this a lot by hairstylists and I think it has to do with the fact that I hardly ever blow-dry it or use other heating styling products on my hair.  But I have to say that when my hair is blow-dried it looks so nice afterwards and it doesn't look like I am rocking the homeless look! :)

Other Updates:

Christopher, Nathan, and Rhonda

We went to the zoo last weekend (we hadn't been in so long) and they have a new attraction where you can go behind of the scenes and feed and pet the Rhino.  Nathan was scared of the Rhino, but Christopher had fun.  Anderson is too young to do it, so he and I played at the zoo's playground. Christopher said that the Rhino is named Rhonda and she is 40 years old.  He said that her skin was really warm and soft, which he was not expecting.  As you can see in the picture, Nathan did not want his picture taken.


Speaking of the zoo.  On our day out we put sunscreen on the boys because it was a warm day.  Later that night Anderson's forehead and side of his face was all red.  We thought that maybe he fell, but then we realized it was on a lot of his face.  We think that he must have had a small allergic reaction to the sunscreen.  It is a little weird because it is a bottle that we have had and he didn't have a reaction before and he only had a reaction on his forehead and the side of his face, but we put it on all of his face and arms.  In the above picture you can see the redness.

Anderson with the new coop

We are finally having our backyard done!  The landscape company came in and removed all of the bamboo in our backyard.  They are doing the cement work now.  This coming week they should finish up the cement work and then start landscaping the back.  We are so excited for it to finally be done and we can't wait to see what it is going to look like!  We decided that when our backyard was being done we would downsize on the chicken coop.  It was a little bigger than it needed to be and it is super heavy.  We wanted to make something smaller, so Christopher has been working on building a new coop and a run.  Luckily, he started the coop a couple of weeks ago and that is all done.  He just had the run to build this weekend.  Had he not started the coop earlier we would have been scrambling trying to get it done because we didn't know when the contractors were going to be here.  I'll do another post of just our backyard when it is all done.

Christopher's sister Karen came and visited us.  The boys and us really enjoy having her here.  It also seems like the time goes by so fast when she is in town.  We are looking forward to her next visit with Danielle in a few months.

I think that is about it for now.  I will leave you with a cute picture of Anderson with a green juice mustache :)



Have a great week!

Heather