80 degrees, Cousin Maggie and a Baseball bat

Friday Camden was at Pat's (daycare) and she celebrated his birthday. He had a big plastic baseball bat and ball as a present to bring home. Unfortunately, we don't have a big enough yard so I told him we'd take him to the park the next day to play with his new toy. Saturday we awoke bright and early to a gorgeous day of sunshine! We also awoke to a little boy climbing into our bed, leaning over into our faces and saying, "go to the park now?"



Camden had another surprise Saturday as Uncle Mark and cousin Maggie drove over for a visit. The dads took Camden and Maggie out to play in the sunshine and I (Tara) took Shelby to the grocery store and had some time to get dinner put together and muffins baked for our Sunday School group.



Here's an update on our Red Dye experiment. Camden has not had any (as far as we know) since Monday and guess what? He's been polite, well behaved, and FUN! Now, as with any experiment, it is difficult to factor in all of the variables that go with being a three year old, but I am convinced that the Red Dye is a factor on the days when he has the huge tantrums and meltdowns. I haven't seen any of the downright defiant or out of control behavior that I had been seeing and I am so glad!! It begins to make you feel like you don't know how to parent when your kid keeps going off the deep end for seemingly no reason.


Meanwhile...Shelby peacefully slept while the house was quiet! Sometimes she manages a long snooze with Camden around, but in the peace and quiet Saturday she had a nice, long nap. She'll be three months old on the 14th.

Camden and Shelby Playing

It is so cute to see Camden playing with Shelby. Here is a little video of their interactions. It's great to see Shelby give him some big smiles.

Red 40

Yesterday was a great day for Tara with Camden. He was well behaved, didn't have any potty accidents and took discipline well. Why so good one day and so bad another? She was reading on one of her message boards about other moms with troublesome three year olds and some intersting observations they've made. Apparently a common food additive called Red Dye #40 can have negative affects on a childs behavior. Not all kids...but some. We've decided to give it a little test with Camden.

Recently he's fallen in love with Crystal Light Fruit Punch and has been drinking it for almost every meal. It has no sugar or any other 'bad things' I thought we wanted to keep him away from. It does however contain Red40. Yesterday, he had no Crystal Light Fruit Punch and was an angel. We're going to keep him off of anything with Red40 as best we can for the next few days and see what happens. We'll have to be diligent to keep track of what he eats and stay away from Red40....it's in a lot of food.

Here are a few of the stories we read yesterday that helped us decide to give this a try:
http://floridadalton.com/files/RedDyeAwareness.htm
http://lifeaslou.blogsome.com/2008/01/21/red-40-and-cracking-the-bad-behavior-code

We'll report back in a few days and document our findings for Camden. Our plan is to keep him off Red40 for a few days then give him some Fruit Punch (which we guess has a lot of it) and see what happens. Pray for us!! We really want this to be our solution for keeping our sweet well-behaved boy around more consistently!

Trip over the Mountains

We took a trip over Snoqualmie pass this weekend to have a birthday party for Camden at Grandma and Grandpa Cochran's house with family. It was a very fun party with balloons and streamers and dump trucks and dirt cake and cup cakes and drums.

On the way home we started hearing the reports that there was a snow slide across the road several miles ahead and to expect multi-hour delays. By this point it was too late to take an alternate route so as traffic began to slow to a crawl we feared that little Shelby would wake up and be hungry at a point where we couldn't pull over to feed her. Tara said a quick Prayer asking God to help Shelby stay asleep until we could feed her. She slept the entire way home (about 4 hours) The delays ended up only putting us behind 'schedule' by an hour. What a blessing!!

Camden was the perfect little traveler as well. He didn't sleep the whole way but he quietly played in the back seat and didn't make a fuss at all even though we didn't stop at all to stretch our legs (for fear of waking Shelby, who can make her displeasure widely known)


The Dirt Cake


Birthday Boy


The Dump Truck


The birthday boy and mom

A fun time was had by all!