A Decade of Parenthood

Our "oldest child," Pepper, turned ten years old this week (on August 12th)!
She spends most of her days sleeping-- either in her dog bed or on a blanket perch on the couch.
As I mentioned during our hiking post, she's gotten lazy with her walks and hikes, but we still walk her three times a day.  She does not like hot weather.
She loves snuggling, greeting us when we come home, snacks, and running on our local beaches.
She has had some health issues, mainly itchy scaling and skin allergies in recent years, and is on immunosuppressive and immunotherapeutic treatments, but has stayed remarkably healthy.
We don't know how much longer she'll be with us, but she's certainly loved having us home more during this quarantine, and she's also kept us less lonely.

Iver wrote this during "Pet Day" at school:

(apparently, Pepper is blue. Iver also isn't really a fan of her, while Niall sure is!)

Our youngest child also just turned two and a half.  Niall, who looks now and acts like such a "big boy," is a hilarious bundle of observations, words, sentences, attempted jokes, songs, and crib-escaping, at which he is now a repeat offender. This past week, he was up most nights once (either at 1 or 5 a.m.), having jumped out of his crib despite being in a sleep sack, crying that he needed to pee (and not wanting to use his pull-up). We're happy he is showing interest in nighttime potty training (something that we didn't really expect for another couple of years, as Iver wasn't night-dry until about two years after he was day-trained at two); however, it's so painful to get up at night now (I often cannot get back to sleep for hours after a night waking), because *all of our kids* have been reliably sleeping through the night for a long time. We know we have to either take the side off of the crib or transition him to a bed and ditch the sack. We hope he'll still sleep well with the changes and either be dry or not be a repeated room-escaper-- wish us luck!

And then there's this guy, our "middle" child, who's so old that he's outgrown the baby blocks, which don't include high numbers. Iver was able to do the math to figure out how many months old he was and make himself a sign!

Here's a snuggle with *all* of my kids