Born May 25th, 2008
2:59 pm
6 pounds 13 ounces
Length 19 3/4 inches

Lilypie Third Birthday tickers

Monday, October 25, 2010

Moving to Family Blog

This is sad to say, but this will be the last post to Kinley's blog.

Kinley's story is far from over, but due to the upcoming addition of our second child we thought it would be best if we started a family blog.  Don't worry though, we will keep this blog active and continue to blog about Kinley on our family blog.  Our family blog is www.themelcherfamily.blogspot.com.  We are still working on getting the web page set up, but posts will start going up very soon.  (SPOILER ALERT: Kinley's baby brother was born October 7th.  Yes, we are already behind on posting about it.) 

We would like to thank everyone who has followed and shared in Kinley's life to this point.  Please feel free to follow her on our family blog.  Her story has been an absolutely amazing one so far and we know that it will continue along that same path.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Bounce House

FYI - This is going to be a picture heavy post.

To help Kinley with the upcoming transition of adding our second child to the family, we bought her an early Christmas gift.  It is a bounce house.  The plan is that the bounce house will give her something to do while we are overwhelmed taking care of her little brother.  We got the idea from our close friends who bought their 2 year old a bounce house for his birthday.  It is an indoor/outdoor bounce house, but our main intention is to use it indoors since it will be winter soon.  The bounce house is made by "little tikes" and we ended up ordering it online since not too many retailers carry them in stock.  I believe we bought it through babyage.com because it had free delivery and we found an online coupon for 10% off.  Little Tikes has many different styles of bounce houses.  We ended up going with a triangle bounce house that has a slide on one side.  We felt it was the best option to fit in our house.  Below are a bunch of pictures from the first day Kinley was able to play in it.

Please let me play!






















Your Baby Can Read

To help with Kinley's speech development we have purchased the Your Baby Can Read box set from Bed, Bath & Beyond.  One of our main motivations for purchasing and trying Your Baby Can Read is that one of the boys in Kinley's playgroup is using it and he has a very extensive vocabulary.  Our second reason is that we are willing to try anything to help Kinley increase her vocabulary and hopefully catch up in her speech development.  Buying the entire set from the Your Baby Can Read website was too expensive for us, but we were comfortable purchasing the smaller set using one, of our many, 20% off coupons to Bed, Bath & Beyond.  Our set came with 4 DVDs, 4 word flap books and 4 sets of flash cards.

Kinley enjoys all 3 parts (DVDs, books and flash cards) of her box set.  The DVDs are pretty short and not very fancy, but they work really well in the car.  Her pronunciation still needs a lot of work, but she makes attempts to say most every word.  She especially likes the songs on the DVDs.  She attempts to do the hand motions to "Itsy Bitsy Spider."  She touches her head during "Head, Shoulder, Knees and Toes".  She might do more body parts, but the song simply goes too fast for her to keep up.  And she claps, stomps and yells hooray to "If You're Happy And You Know It."  She likes the books also, but the flaps go all different directions depending on the page and sometimes Kinley gets frustrated.  The flash cards are especially nice because they have inserts that slide out to reveal a picture of the word on the card.  Kinley has fun sliding the cards. 

Overall we are very happy with our purchase of Your Baby Can Read. Kinley still has a long way to go with pronunciation and verbal communication, but it has gotten her vocalizing more and has also greatly increased her vocabulary.  Now when we read books to Kinley she loves to point to, and say all of the objects she knows.