Cold, Casts and Cuteness

Brrrrr... is it ever cold!  I can't remember the last winter we've had that it's been so cold!  Our wood stove has been working over time.  We have even had to turn the furnace on a couple of times just to get some of the chill out.  Chris has been diligent with keeping a supply of wood at the house (thank you dear :) !  We had a massive snow drift beside our house and Mary Beth had a lot of fun climbing it (it was much taller then she is).  Nathan is not quite as fond of the snow and cold as Mary Beth is.  

But he did ask the other day to go outside, much to my surprise.  I think his real reason was to show Mr. Vis his cast.  Yes, you read that right, his cast.  On Saturday the 2 oldest were playing on the couch while I was feeding Jenna.  Nathan was perched on the arm rest and Mary Beth gave him a little push, enough for Nathan to lose his balance and fall off.  The look of terror in his eyes will stay with me for a long time.  Normally when they fight and someone gets "hurt", all I hear is "Nathan hurt me" or Mary Beth pushed me.  Not so this time.  Nathan immediately grabbed his arm and cried.  There was no blaming this time around (well, not until much later), which made me think that he was really hurt.  I found Chris working outside to tell him what happened.  He didn't think that Nathan's arm was broken but an hour later it was starting to swell a little above the elbow and Nathan was still quite upset.  So off to McMaster they went and about 2 hours later they were home with a cast.  Today they went back and a new cast was put on.

Thankfully Nathan has been really good about it all.  He was very eager to go to church and school to show everyone his cast.  Now Mary Beth talks about "when Nathan pushes me off the couch and I break my arm, I'll get a red cast".  I hope not!  She has very low pain tolerance.

This little sweetie is now over 5 weeks old.  She is a spitter.  None of the other 2 spit up as much as she does.  This makes for lots and lots of laundry.  I'm not really sure what to do about it, or if there is anything that can be done about it.  It doesn't seem to make a difference whether she burps or not.  It just comes out.  I read online that it could be related to me drinking cow milk.  Why do our kids seem to have problems with dairy when they are babies?  Jenna has done a few long sleeping stretches (4, almost 5 hours) but they are more in the evening and not at night.  We will need to work on that!  She usually loves her soother, which most of the time is great but last night was annoying.  For an hour I was getting up every 5-10 minutes to put it back in her mouth :(  I think she has her nights and days mixed up as she is often wide awake after I feed her in the very early morning hours.  There are many times she'll be crying in the night an hour after nursing and I'll find her laying in a cold puddle of spit.  So gross!  I hope that will end eventually.