Inverness, Scotland

 Returning to my trip last year: We spent our second day in Scotland touring the small town of Inverness--the closest town to our castle cottage.  It was strange coming from the heat and humidity of Japan to the cool, dry climate of Scotland.  It rained on and off throughout the week we were there, but the temperature rarely got warmer than sweatshirt weather.

We found a parking garage a few blocks away from the Inverness castle, and hoofed it from there.  The city of Inverness is pretty small, and we spent a lot of time wandering and shopping for souvenirs. 

This local "paper" changed each day and each caption was pretty funny.  It was posted right outside the parking garage

A picture of a random house.  I just liked the look of it.

Inverness City:

Can't visit Scotland and not have bagpipes, right?

I was trying to photo-bomb her selfie--it was kind of a theme throughout the trip.  We all tried to photo-bomb each others selfies.  Nikki, especially, was adept at getting mine.

Cheesy smile from me--Nikki looks less than amused.  Alex and Jamie are oblivious.  To the left is the hillside to Inverness Castle.  It was set right in town, which was unusual for most of the castles we saw.

Taking a picture of the castle

We walked up to the castle and it has a beautiful overlook of the city. 

Inverness Castle:

Selfie with the Castle!

 

 

Just because we are all spazz's, we compared how incredibly pale we all are--and what's crazy is that Emily was the darkest of us all.  I am the third arm down.

Random sticker on a light post--but I like it.  Inverness Castle is in the background.

Some American flavor thrown in--we wandered through a mall and saw these very American restaurants in the food court. 

Walking along the city we found this interesting gem:

Emily found Mountain Dew.  Help us all.  There were a lot of known "candy" items, but there were more than a few that none of us had ever seen or heard of.  Since we are all native Californians, maybe some items are just available on the east coast?

We stumbled upon this graveyard and old church.  The graveyard also had a nice view of the city,

The view:

Spring

We've been spending lots of time outside enjoying the unusually warm spring weather.  It seems as though the days just fly by. 

River is all about spending time outside.  She is funny, just walking around, exploring the yard.  She throws a tantrum whenever it is time to come inside.  She's gotten pretty good at tantrums lately.

Kai is really enjoying school, and I think we are finally getting him back onto a day/night schedule--for the last several months, he has been awake most the night and sleeping the morning away.  He is finally sleeping at night and getting up in the morning time.  Cross your fingers it will continue! 

Zuri is excited about her upcoming birthday.  She has been on countdown mode for the last month.  She has also invited pretty much everyone she comes in contact with to her birthday party.  Funny kid.

Exploration

 It's almost night and day difference in Kai since his surgery.  He still has his fussy days, but overall, he is back to being a happy go-lucky boy.  He is still ambivalent about the puppy, but he's becoming more interested in her.  He even reached out to touch her--which is a big deal.  He stopped sucking on his fingers and stretched out his arm to her, and kept it there long enough for me to get a couple pictures. 

He is very particular with the things he will and won't touch.  Almost everything is on his "no touch" list, but he does enjoy reaching out and touching my tablet briefly--just enough to mess with my games.  ;-)

I love the awareness that he is showing with his immediate environment.  I also love that he is beginning to explore.  It's small things like he will put his hand on mine for several seconds.  If I try to hold his hand, he will pull away, but if I allow him to rest his hand on mine then he will keep it there.  The first time it happened I thought it was a fluke.  The next time I realized it wasn't and it brought tears to my eyes.  My little boy was reaching out--to me.

Small things that make huge differences.

Life Rolls On

One of these days my life will slow down, but right now life is rolling forward at what seems breakneck speed.  Three kids and a puppy.  Oh my.  I have tons to post, and plan on getting all caught up...sometime soon.  In the meantime, if there is a dearth of posts, just know I haven't forgotten, I'm just busy with my precious little ones. 

Good News

Today we had a visit with Kai's neurologist.  I was full of apprehension about the visit because it had seemed like Kai's seizures were increasing, which would mean getting him started on an anti-seizure medication.

I described the symptoms I had been seeing with the doc, and with our combined knowledge, we were able to (mostly) rule out the symptoms as seizures!  Whoohooo! 

Kai has had a couple more valid seizures, however, and one of his nurses reported a possible seizure as recently as last week, so he's not out of the woods completely. For right now, since they don't seem to be occurring more frequently or increasing in duration, we are holding off on the medication. 

Scary stuff, I tell you, but overall, good news!

My Puppy Came

For over a year Zuri has been asking for a dog.  For over a year we put her off for one reason or another.  We had seriously talked about getting a dog last summer after my trip, and less than a week after I got back, Zuri was quick to remind me.   

Mom, you said when you get back from Japan that we could get a dog.  So I did, but the timing just wasn't right.

We were going to adopt a dog from a shelter (read dog, not puppy), because honestly I didn't want to go through the trouble of having to housebreak and do major training of a dog.  We continued to debate on the best time and had agreed (to a point) that later in Spring 2015 would be a good time to adopt.

Weeeeeellll, J has two sisters who own dogs.  One sister had a female, the other has an older male puppy--neither of them neutered.  Guess what happened?  That's right.  Puppies.  Puppies that neither sister wanted to care for.  The clincher?  They would be born sometime in December.  Oh, Christmas present anyone?

So J and I talked and decided to take one of the puppies.  They were an Australian Shepard, Black Lab mix, and most of them turned out all black with a distinguishing white spot somewhere on them.  We debated between two puppies: the one we got, and the other had a big white patch on her nose and going up her forehead and down her chest.  The second was the most distinguishable among the six puppies and we went back and forth on which puppy we would take.  Ultimately, we decided on our puppy because she wasn't as "shaggy" as the other.  With Kai, we didn't want a long haired dog (plus the extra maintenance of long hair).

Zuri got to meet the puppies for Christmas, and she knew that one of them would be hers.  She also knew that her puppy wouldn't be ready to come home until February.  We kept telling her right around Valentine's day, but we wanted the actual day to be a surprise.

J's sister (Alisia) who had been caring for the puppies (she's the one who has the dad), drove up to deliver the puppies all to their new homes (the puppies were all sold in under an hour once she put them up for sale).  She tied some balloons to our puppy's collar along with a cute fabric envelope that said Zuri's name.

J and I met Alisia and Rendall outside and rang the doorbell so Zuri would answer the door.  When she opened the door, she was in shock for a moment, then not sure if what she was seeing was true.  Her question was, "my puppy came?!"  When she realized her puppy was really here, she teared up and was so excited she couldn't wait to hold her.

It ended up being perfect timing because Zuri was off-track and could spend the time bonding with her puppy.  Hence the reason for my lack of posts recently.  Between having all three kids home, a new puppy, and Kai's surgery, I have been busy!  I'm hoping to get all caught up on everything by the end of March, so there might be some marathon posts coming up, along with lots of pictures of the newest member of our family!