The White House

Grams arrived on Monday for Christmas after a 2 hour delay at Amtrak. We are so happy to have her here for Christmas. Every morning Quinn wakes up and says \’go see Grams\’. They have such a great time together! Since she is leaving the day after Christmas, we decided to start giving Quinn some of his presents early so that she can have time to enjoy the presents with him.

Yesterday he got an easel from Grams and has had a great time drawing all over it. It\’s very cool because it has a white board on one side, a chalk board on the other, and then a roll of paper in the middle that you pull over the white board for painting. Quinn loves to draw and write so I know he will have alot of fun with this.

Here are Quinn and Darwin checking out the new easel.

Peek-a-boo!

And the little Picasso begins…

He ended up writing all over the board frame, on the inside of the easel, and just about anywhere he could. But, he never wrote on anything but the easel (ie walls, couch, etc).

We went to a local nature preserve for our Christmas card photoshoot.  Now that the cards have been printed and are in the mail, I thought you might enjoy seeing some of the other photos.  I usually take about 200 photos to make sure I get a couple of good ones so I had a couple left over 😉


We\’ll start at the end of the photoshoot with this picture of Don.  He was pretty agile climbing up that tree.  Quinn and I were duly impressed by his show of skills. 

As you can see, Quinn was having a great time.  Nothing like a boy running through the woods…

…or climbing a tree.

Don\’t panic, all is OK. First, we got about 6\” of snow late yesterday in to last night. Around 2 am, we woke up to Quinn breathing really hard and laboring to get his breath. He had a 102 temp. We all got up and Don jumped in the bathroom with Quinn for a good 20 minute steam. Quinn was much better once he was vertical but was still weazing very heavily. Don went outside to shovel the driveway at 3 am while I called the on-call pediatrician. The doctor didn\’t seem too concerned so we gave Q some motrin and stayed up for a bit. We headed back to bed around 5 am and were again woken around 8:30 by Quinn\’s very labored breathing. Back into the steam bathroom and then another dose of Motrin at 9:30. Both Don and I were pretty alarmed by Quinn\’s breathing and decided to take him to Urgent Care which opened at 10 am. We packed up the car with all our safety and warmth stuff just in case we got stuck in the snow and headed off to the Urgent Care. We got there and it wasn\’t open because of the snow. So, off to the ER. We were really pleased with how well the roads were cleaned and had no problems getting to the hospital. This was our first trip to the ER with Quinn and we really liked the expedited service they give to kids. The final diagnosis was croup. Quinn got an oral anti-inflamatory to reduce the swelling of the throat and also a medication via the nebulizer. And we were sent on our way. Quinn\’s getting in a good nap while Don works on the snow and I clean up the house. All is well again 🙂