New changes...maybe

We might be changing our blog address and changing some things about the way we post. I am in the process of setting up our new blog that does not list our last names or other information. Hopefully I will have it ready to show off to everyone soon.

Egg Hunt

My parents are here visiting and we all took the kids to the egg hunt on base this morning. They both had a lot of fun. They split the kids up into 4 different age levels. Garret was in the 0-2yrs old and Kayleigh was in the 6-8yr olds.

Garret was very particular about which eggs he picked up. It was funny. He was not into looking at the camera at all except for his one moment of a look and smile with Kayleigh. Maybe my Mom got some better pics. For Garret's age groupd all of the parents came out onto the field with the kids, but for Kayleigh's age group they did not allow parents to be on the field at all.

Busy, Busy, Busy

I know I have been a really bad blogger. As well as calling people. Things have been crazy busy here. Here are a few pictures to make everyone happy. All of these pictures are from last night.

Kayleigh will not smile nicely in pictures any more. If she sees me get the camera out she starts acting crazy.

Garret smiling away for the camera.

Garret trying to act silly like Kayleigh.

Talking to Daddy and snuggling with their big puppies they got from Santa this year. They both have to have their big puppies to go to sleep every night and at naptime for Garret.

Kayleigh is doing GREAT!!!

Kayleigh has done wonderful with her recovery. She has amazed all of the doctors and nurses with how well she has done. This picture is from her resting on the couch only a few hours after her surgery. She was released in the shortest amount of time that they can be.

She has been eating what she wanted since right after her surgery. She basically woke up immediately and wanted her slushie. She had to drink water first, but then over the next hour she had a slushie, ice cream, sprite, two pudding cups, and a gatorade. On the way home she ate a cheeseburger from McDonalds. She has done better than anybody could have dreamed.

Garret's third haircut

Garret had his 3rd haircut Monday night. It was way past time to cut his hair. I forgot to take before pictures when it was dry, so look at the post below and you can see how bad it looked.
Before picture from the front.

Before picture from the top and side.

Look how long it was in the back.

Look how long his hair was on top.

After pic from front.

After pic from above and behind.Look how long his hair was. This is one section that I cut off.

Garret trying to get into the pantry

Garret’s new activity the past few days has been to carry the step stool or kid chairs around to climb on to get what he wants. Here are some pictures of him trying to get into the pantry to get a snack. The funny part is that when he climbs onto the step stool he will not climb down himself, so he is stuck until someone comes and rescues him. If he climbs on a kid or adult chair or his ride on toys he will climb down himself, but not on the step stool.

I normally have a baby gate up to keep him out of the kitchen, but last night I forgot to put it back up and he decided he was going to play in the dish water. He is into everything lately. :)

"Oh no she caught me!""What should I do now?"
"I'll try to open it with my left hand."

"Will my right hand work?"

"I give up! Will you please help me down?"

Pictures to come very soon!

More pictures to come tomorrow, now that blogger and startlogic are working again! :)

See below for some more info...

Password issues

Our web hosting company is in the process of changing all passwords. Once I can get into our website again I will take off the password protection for a few days. Once I turn it back on if your user name and password do not work e-mail me at blog@kigerfamily.net or any other e-mail you have for us. :)

Technology can be wonderful, but also a huge headache!

Pictures...and more info

I have been trying to upload pictures for the past two days and for some reason I cannot get them to upload. I will keep trying...

Kris did finally make it to Iraq. He called today, but we were cut off after a few minutes. He seems to be doing well. He is going to be working 7pm-7am, Monday-Saturday. He is suppose to have every Sunday off, so hopefully we can video chat with him on Sundays. He will be in charge of the support section for now.

Kayleigh had an ENT appointment on Monday and he said that her tonsils and adenoids need to be removed. He wanted to do it Jan. 27, but I moved it out one more week. She will be having surgery on Feb. 3. It will be at the same hospital that Garret had his eye surgery.

Garret had his follow up eye appointment on Tuesday and his Dr was very happy with how well he has recovered. He wants to see him again in 4 months. He said that if his eyes stay straight for the next 3 yrs he should not need anything else done.

I think I am getting a cold right now. I have had lots of congestion for the past few days and today I have a bad cough. Hopefully I will get better soon and Kayleigh will not get sick before her surgery. I have increased my vit C intake to help me get better.

Kris is in Qatar

Kris has made it safely to Qatar. He will be there for about 2 days before he continues onto Iraq. The kids and I are adjusting and trying to find our new normal.

Kayleigh has started her count down on her calendar. She is counting down 200 days until Daddy’s gets home. We do not think it will be 200 days, but it is much better for Kris to come home early than late. He will be gone for 4-6 months. We are planning on at least 5 months, but coming home early is always a good thing. 200 days is 6 ½ months. Kayleigh starts selling Girl Scout cookies for the first time tomorrow, so she is very excited about that. Our troop is also going to take donations and send cookies to Kris’ squadron in Iraq.

Hotel Kiger

I feel like we have been running a hotel in our house for the past two weeks. A friend of ours that works with Kris ended up putting his stuff into storage on Jan. 1, so he did not have to pay rent while he is deployed. He was going to stay in a hotel, but we offered to let him stay in our guest bedroom. He moved in on Sunday, Jan. 4 and stayed until that Friday. Well on Friday he left to go to work and then went to stay with his family that lives 2 hours away.


On Friday night the Wellman family arrived to stay the weekend and to tell Kris good bye. We had a fun weekend with them. They left on Sunday afternoon and Dave came back that evening to stay until they had to leave at 2am this morning.


In a way it was good to have other people here for the last two weeks because it kept us busy, but now the house seems really quite with just the kids and I. There will be no one to talk to in the evenings and hang out with.

We made it through good bye...

Kris had to be on base this morning at 2:30am. Yes, an awful time of morning when everyone should be sleeping. He said good bye to the kids when they went to bed last night, which is why Kayleigh had a very rough night. She ended up in bed with me shortly after I had finally went back to sleep after saying good bye to Kris at 2am. I know that the next few days will be very hard for both of the kids. Kayleigh at least understands that he is gone even though she does not like it. It will be much harder for Garret to understand where Daddy is. Since Kris has been home more often in the last few days he has become a Daddy’s boy when Kris is around. I don’t know if the plane has been delayed or not, but I am refraining from calling a friends phone to find out. Hopefully it is not delayed because the second good bye is always worse.

Emotions

There are lots of emotions going on in our house right now. Kris will leaving in a few hours and going to bed is very hard for Kayleigh tonight. So far we are almost at the 2 hours mark. No fun in our house. How do you explain to a 6 year old why Daddy’s work says he has to go away. It will be about 24 hours before Kris will arrive in Qatar and we do not know how long he will be in Qatar before he goes to Iraq. From what other people have said it will be 1-3 days.


But the good news for all of you that read our blog Is that regular updates will begin again. I will have to update for Kris so that he can see pictures and videos of the kids.


I might update again in a few hours when I wake up to tell Kris good bye. It depends on if I can go back to sleep or not. I hope I can because I need more than 3 hours of sleep to function, especially since I am still going to be open for childcare tomorrow.

Last night was an eventful night...

It started off a little before 5pm I decided that I needed to call the eye doctor about Garret’s eye. It had begun to get red on the inside of his right eye (which is the part of both of his eyes that was red from his surgery) and he had a white/blue bump in the same area. I was told to call back in about an hour because the office that his doctor works in was closed for the holidays (which I knew) and that if I called back after normal clinic hours I could talk to the on call ophthalmologist and maybe save ourselves a trip to the ER. Kris was not concerned about it to begin with because he could not see the bump. We decided to keep our plans to go out to dinner. When we got home the kids took a bath and Kris was finally able to see the bump. So we called Primary Children’s Hospital to talk to the on call ophthalmologist. They had an issue getting the page to go through to her, but once she received it she called us immediately. She discussed what we were seeing in detail with me over the phone and decided that she wanted to examine Garret’s eye.

Thankfully we have some great neighbors that were willing to watch Kayleigh for us because we knew it would be really late when we got back home. So we dropped Kayleigh off and drove to PCH. We were lucky and the doctor was ready for us when we arrived at the office, but Garret was not a very cooperative patient. I couldn’t blame him because it was over an hour after is bedtime. She was a really nice doctor but she was not his normal doctor, so after she examined Garret she called his regular ophthalmologist to see what he recommended. They decided that it is probably the end of a stitch coming through his eye, so we are back to giving him his antibiotic eye drops 4 times a day and his Dr wants to see him next week. I am not sure was will happen when he sees him next week, but if it gets worse we are suppose to take him back to PCH.

Primary Children’s Hospital is a great hospital for kids because that is all that they see (the adult hospital is right next door), but the downfall is that it is about an hour drive each way from our house. It is not fun to make the drive, but I am very thankful that we have such a great children’s hospital in driving distance from us. We had the opportunity to see a different DR closer to our house for Garret’s eyes, but we chose to make the drive to have the best Dr for him.

After we got back to town we dropped Garret’s RX off at Walgreens and picked Kayleigh up. Kris dropped the kids and I off at home and went back to get the RX, only to find out that Tri-Care would not cover it. This did not make sense because I actually got the exact same RX at the beginning of November from Walgreens and Tri-Care covered it. I called Tri-Care after we got the kids in bed and they were looking into it when our power went out.

With the power going out Kayleigh was almost asleep, but the boom of the power going out and then silence woke her up and caused her to panic. So we got her calmed down and finally got her back into to bed. I gave the kids lots of extra blankets because when the power goes out the heat also go out. I did call the power company and they were not sure what caused the outage, but they already had crews on the scene. They estimated that it would be back on at 2am. We set the alarms on our phones to wake us up in the morning and went to bed after midnight. The power did come back on at 4am. The temp had only gotten down to 65, so it wasn’t too cold in the house and the heat immediately came back on.

Needless to say we are very tired this morning. I don’t see us making it until midnight tonight, but we are supposed to go to a friend’s house for dinner tonight. I think Kris has already told them that we will not be staying until midnight, because of the kids, but now I am sure we will not be and we will probably be asleep at our house as well.

Videos and Pictures

I have been trying to upload a video for over 9 hours now and it still says it is uploading…maybe in the morning it will be done and I can post it.

As I wrote in the Christmas morning post I lost about 250 pictures last night while transferring them to my computer. I am very upset about this, but we will survive. Thankfully I cannot remember what all of them were, so it is a little better not knowing what pictures I lost. I do know that all of our Christmas morning pictures were lost and most of the pictures of the kids and Kris playing in the snow a few days ago. I do still have a few of the pictures from the snow and the videos that I took.

Christmas Morning

Christmas was fun this year, but really seemed to surprise us with its arrival. We did not decorate very much this year, but we did enjoy lots of time with each other. The Wellman family was going to come down the day after Christmas, but part of the interstate was closed due to all of the snowy weather, so we were not able to see them for Christmas. We will eventually get together with them and celebrate Christmas even if it is at Easter (like last year) or even later.

Garret really did not care one way or the other about opening presents this year. We would help him and start the paper and even let him see the toy inside and he was fine with that and did not try to open the presents anymore. We figured this would be a crazy Christmas with him wanting to open everything in site, but we were wrong about that. Kayleigh ended up opening most of his presents, she had no problems tearing off the wrapping paper and opening everything up.

Kayleigh was very excited to receive a Leapster TV and Wii this year. She has had lots of fun playing both of them. Garret received lots of cars and trucks to play with and loves all of them. We also received a Wii Fit, but we have not had the chance to play it yet.

We enjoyed our time together this year and that was the best part of Christmas. We did miss celebrating with our extended families in North Carolina and Georgia.

Well...I had some cute pictures of the kids from Christmas morning and just realized that they were deleted. I am not very happy about it right now because I just realized that about 250 pictures were deleted. So, we have no pictures from Christmas morning and many other things. :(

The past month

Wow, it seems like the past month has flown by for us...

We started out the month with warmer than normal temperatures and have ended it with about normal temps and snowfall. We used to like snow, but that was because we on had snow on rare occasions in North Carolina. We no longer like snow, in fact we dread it. When it snowed in NC basically everything shut down and you got to stay home and enjoy time together as a family and play in the snow. In Utah, everything continues as normal, no matter how much snow we have. Kayleigh is enjoying playing in the snow for now and Garret seems to enjoy it as well. They have enjoyed us pulling them around the front yard on the sled. Kayleigh did have her first sled injury this past Sunday. I guess she was not holding on and Kris pulled a little too fast and she flew off of the sled. She busted her lip and got a nasty bruise below her stomach when she flew off of the sled. She is fine today, but she is not happy that her purple and red bruise did not disappear overnight.

The last weekend in November was Thanksgiving and we enjoyed our time with the Wellman Family.

The first weekend in December we went on a retreat for deploying families and had a great time.

Garret had surgery on both of his eyes on December 10, and seems to be recovering great. His first post-op appointment was December 18, and the doctor said everything looked great. We have another post-op appointment on January 20.
Kayleigh had her dance recital/revue on December 20 and did great as usual. The videos from her two dances are below.

Christmas was fun this year, but really seemed to surprise us with its arrival. We did not decorate very much this year, but we did enjoy lots of time with each other. See the post below about Christmas.

We are trying to get a lot of things done around the house before Kris leaves for the big sandbox. When we talk about Kris’ deployment around Kayleigh we always say he is going to the desert. When someone asked me a few weeks ago where Kris was going and I said Iraq, Kayleigh immediately seemed to panic, so I very quickly said “Daddy is going to the desert”, so for all of you that talk to Kayleigh on the phone and in person please do not mention Iraq. I am sure that the next two weeks will fly by for us as well and then we will adjust to our family of 3 for 4-6 months. As long as Kris returns for our big trip to Disneyland in August we will all be happy. We know for sure that he will miss Valentine’s Day, his birthday, our 10 year anniversary, spring break, and Easter. He might miss or he might be home for Memorial Day and Garret’s birthday.

Before Christmas I found out that 3 people that I know had female friends pass away that were around our age and mothers. It was very sad for me and made me cherish my time with my children and husband even more. Two of the women I did not know at all, but one I felt like I had grown to know through her blog that I have read for over a year. It was very sad for me when I read that she had passed away on December 23. She has two very young boys that will grow up without a wonderful mother. It has made me value my time with my children and husband even more than I already did.

Snow fun with Daddy and the kids

Here are the only pictures I have from the kids and Kris playing in the snow this past weekend.

Garret's Surgery

Garret has done GREAT since his surgery. He has not had any complications at all and has seemed to heal much quicker than expected. We have to give him eye drops for 2 weeks to help to prevent any infection and we have to keep him from rubbing his eyes. Except for those two things he is completely back to normal. He only tries to rub his eyes when he is ready to go to sleep or if he is just beginning to wake up. His eyes seem to be lined up and we have only seen them cross once since his surgery. It is common for them to cross for the first few weeks after surgery, so we are not concerned about it. He has a follow up appointment with his doctor on Thursday and then another one on January 20.

The Retreat

The retreat we attended for military and familes that will be deploying soon was WONDERFUL!!! We all spent a lot of quality time together and we were able to relax a little while we were there. We spent some time with one of Kris' co-workers that also attended the retreat and had fun playing some board games with them. They do not have any kids, so they came to our condo most of the time. I did take a few pictures, but the camera is in Kris' hopefully I will remember to get it out tonight and upload some pictures on here.

Our Thanksgiving

We had a great visit with the Wellman family. We did not really do anything special, but we had a lot of fun hanging out together. They just bought a new hot tub and had it installed the day we arrived, so Crystal and I tried it out on Wednesday night and Crystal, Chuck, Kris, and I all enjoyed it on Saturday night. It was our two families, plus another couple that they know for Thanksgiving dinner.

Crystal had to work on black Friday, so she was up early to be at work by 4:30am. Crystal did not have a choice as to what time she woke up, but Chuck and I chose to get up early and fight the crowd at Wal-Mart. We arrived around 4:20am and waited with the rest of the crowd. We were able to get most of what we wanted, so all in all it worked out good for us.

Friday and Saturday nights the adults played some board games and had a lot of fun. Friday we played Taboo. Saturday we played a trivia game that we all were horrible at, so it lasted less than 5 mins, but then we played a game called True Colors. It was a lot of fun, but definitely a game you only want to play with people you are close to because some of the questions you may not really want to know the answers to.

The kids all had a great time together. As usual they all act like siblings which is good and bad. By the time Saturday around 9:30pm got there, the lack of sleep for the girls caught up to them and it was misery for an hour or more for us parents, but by 11pm they were happy and best friends again.

We did not take many pictures and the ones we did take of the kids Sunday morning are with Kris, so unfortunately you don’t get to see any pictures right now, but hopefully they will be up on here soon.

Up coming plans for us...

We will be heading up to Idaho to celebrate Thanksgiving with the Wellman family on Wednesday. We are looking forward to spending time with them and just relaxing.

The weekend after Thanksgiving we will be going to a retreat the military has for families that are going to have someone deploying soon. We will be staying at a resort in Eden, UT, Dec. 5-7. We have heard that it is lots of fun and worth the time and money to go. They will have lots of activities for the kids and the adults, and they provide childcare.

Then the week after the retreat will be Garret’s eye surgery(see the post below), the next week Kayleigh has her dance revue, then Christmas and New Years weeks, and then Kris will be leaving for the big sandbox around that time.

I plan on taking lots of pictures in Idaho and on the retreat. Plus I have asked Santa Claus for a new video camera that records onto a hard drive, so it will be easier to upload onto our website. It is on sale the Friday after Thanksgiving, so hopefully between now and Friday I can convince Kris that it will be a good purchase for us.

Garret's eyes

As some of you noticed in the last few posts Garret's eyes don't always line up correctly. We finally were are to see the Pediatric Ophthalmologist last week and Garret will be having surgery on both eyes in 2 weeks. He will have his pre-op appointment on Dec. 8 and his surgery will be in the afternoon of Dec. 10. It will be outpatient surgery, so no overnight stays for us, which is a good thing. We are very hopeful that this will completely correct his vision, but we will not know for a few weeks after surgery if it worked or not. If it does not work they will repeat the surgery. The surgery has an 80% success rate. The studies that have been done have shown that each child has an average of 1.8 surgeries. We hope that Garret will be one of the lucky ones that only has to have 1 surgery.

Question for other parents?

What do you do when a babysitter will be at your house for lunch or dinner time?

Do you have a meal already prepared for them, leave money for them to order pizza, have food that they can cook, have stuff to make sandwiches with, or something totally different?

Eventhough Kayleigh is almost 6 1/2yrs old we are very new to the world of having a babysitter. But, we are determined to get a babysitter and go somewhere with out the kids m0re often or we will go insane! :)

Blog makeover contest

My friend Anelys is having a contest on her blog for a few free blog make over. Here is a link to the post about it.

http://momto3littleflowers.blogspot.com/2008/11/giveaway-totally-free-blog-makeover.html

She has her own graphic design business and does great work. If anybody needs someone to help makeover your blog or any other graohic design work you should check her out.

Her business website is: http://www.3littleflowers.com/

Her business blog is: http://3littleflowersblog.blogspot.com/

Her family blog is: http://momto3littleflowers.blogspot.com/

Yummy, Chocolate Pudding!

Yummy, chocolate pudding….well specifically chocolate truffle pudding!

The chocolate truffle flavor of pudding is a holiday flavor that Jello is selling this year. It was pretty good. Garret is such a food thief that he was actually carrying the box around crying because he wanted to eat it. He has never had pudding that we can think of, but he was determined that he wanted what was in the box. Thankfully it only took a few minutes to set up before it was ready to eat. The first night we all took turns sharing our pudding with Garret, but the next day for snack I let him feed himself. He was so cute, as you can see in the pictures. I let him eat messing things and just clean him up, but Kris hates to let him eat anything very messy, unless he is going straight from the table to the bathtub.

Pudding pictures

Test

Testing to see if this works

Our life

….is way to hectic and never seems to slow down. We are barely keeping up with each other. Every time it seems to start calming down something else happens.

Garret started walking on October 9 and was running within a few days. He is constantly on the go and into everything. His new fascination is trying to play in the trash can…GROSS! Life is never dull with Garret around. Garret has an eye appointment on Nov. 20, we hope to hear that his eye will be an easy fix and not require surgery.

Kayleigh is still doing great at school. She received her report card at the beginning of the week and received almost all As. She is still enjoying Girl Scouts and taking dance twice a week. She is a little upset with us right now because we refuse to sign her up for cheerleading or basketball.

We already are having a hard time getting everything done and there is no way we would be able to handle two more nights of practice a week and a game every Saturday morning. Last year a snow storm would start every night right after I would leave to take Kayleigh to cheerleading practice, so we don’t want to have to deal with that again and since Kris will be deploying soon, it would only be me doing it all!

I have been going to physical therapy twice a week for my back and it has helped tremendously. I asked him this week if I could start going only once a week, to try to help to calm our life down. He was fine with that and said if I start getting worse that I can always start going twice a week again.

In 6 weeks I have changed almost every child I have in FCC. One family PCSed, and another family had financial issues and could not afford childcare anymore. I went down to 1 child fulltime and 1 child part time, but I am back to 3 fulltime and 1 part time, plus Kayleigh and Garret. This change has occurred in the past two weeks, so things seem crazy getting used to the two new little boys I have in care now.

Kris is finishing up his last two classes and should be finished with his degree around the end of the year. He is still scheduled to deploy at the end of the year.

Well that is a very short update on us. I am actually beginning to feel motivated to take pictures and blog again, so check back in a few days and you might even see a new post.

Groovy Hair Kayleigh and Garret

Kayleigh's school celebrated red ribbon week last week and Friday was Groovy hair day (and Halloween) and they could pay $1 and wear regular clothes instead of their uniforms. She decided to use her last $1 from the tooth fairy to pay to wear regular clothes. She wore her new Hannah Montana shirt and jeans.

Groovy hair Kayleigh and Garret.

Groovy hair girl!Hi Mom!

I really like this picture, but I'm not sure why.