Week ending October 15, 2006: This week Chloe had her 1st dental check-up. She’d already seen Alex do it, so she was really excited. She’d say “Mom, is it time to go to the dentist now?”. She did really well at the visit and had no problems with her teeth. Alex wanted his teeth checked again, so the hygienist let him get in the chair and opened another set of sterilized tools and checked his teeth for him. Last week I wrote a lot about things Chloe said, and not much about Alex. It is easier to write about Chloe because she is so verbal and I don’t have to find my own words to describe the things she does. Anyway, Alex’s skills seem to lie more in the visual/motor areas. For example, he got a remote controlled bulldozer for his birthday and the controls have 4 buttons and 2 joysticks. I was intimidated just looking at the controls because I thought they’d be hard to figure out. After two days of trial-and-error I asked Alex if he could back the bulldozer up and he did it without blinking! I didn’t have to figure out the controls because Alex had already done it. He also has a toy train and the drive linkage keeps falling apart. I fixed it for him the 1st two times for him, and now he puts it back together himself. Fixing the toy involves putting a little tiny pin through a little tiny hole, and then snapping another piece onto a little tiny knob on the other end of the pin, and he does it all by himself. Also this week we took the kids to Luray Caverns and Skyline Drive. Alex liked the cave, but Chloe kept saying “can we go upstairs now?”. We drove about 20 miles on Skyline Drive and then parked and hiked to a waterfall. We brought back-pack kid carriers. The kids were really excited about riding in the back packs, so we carried them all the way down hill to the falls. It was pretty steep, so we were really glad when the kids walked about ¾ of the way back up the hill before getting tired and asking to be carried again. The traffic getting around Washington, DC was so bad that we ended up spending over 8 hours in the car that day, but the kids were well behaved the whole time. On a final note, we went to their Great PopPop Hague’s 91st birthday and had a good time and cake.