Fun in the Sun

Man, we are just getting spoiled with all this sunshine and beautiful weather this month. In order not to waste any of it, we started the weekend off early with an outing to the farmer’s market!

We usually go to the south market, but decided to check out the one on the northern side of town. It has a park next to it and I thought the boys would like to get some playtime in!

The market was definitely smaller than ours and less veggies / more crafts. The biggest difference though was the tiny parking lot - what a pain! I was ready to give up on it, but Matt was patient enough to wait for a spot. I’m glad he did, the boys had a blast and even Natalie seemed to enjoy people watching. :)

Back home for lunch! Natalie got another new fun toy from her therapist - it’s fittingly called a “Q”. She loves to chew on it, but has gotten the little end stuck too far down her mouth a few times and gagged herself (she’s talented!). I generally only let her play with it if she’s not actively eating, so she doesn’t make herself throw up.

But today she learned a new way to play with it by sticking it on her foot several times. :)

The weekend continued to be gorgeous, so I took them out for another park visit today! This park is just up the hill and I always forget about it until the boys remind me about the time they went to the park with the digger. Clearly, you can guess their favorite part of it!

There is a lot of structure to climb on as well, which Thomas is very excited about these days. Henry also likes to climb, but won’t always go as far up as his brother.

Proof of how warm it is outside - we are both in short sleeves! What a great time of year to live in Alaska - it makes up for the loooong winters with such gorgeous summers. :)

This guy is a selfie pro with mommy! He will always take a photo with me and give me a big smile. It makes me so happy!

Henry is obviously missing from the selfie fun. The toot was too busy playing to come take photos with momma. It’s ok, he probably just would have made silly faces anyhow. I’m starting to suspect he is incapable of taking normal photos. ;)

Dinosaur Drawing

We have a membership to the Anchorage Museum and while we don’t make it there very often, we still get emails about fun events they are hosting. They have had events that sounded interesting, but I hadn’t ever made it to any of them until today. They were having a dinosaur drawing event and it sounded super fun - and not just for me!

Nonni loves art as much as I do and Thomas has definitely gotten interested in drawing as well. Plus, who doesn’t love dinosaurs?!?! So I informed Matt he was in charge of the littles this afternoon and signed up for the class. (The recommended age for the class was 6+, so we decided Henry might get bored with it…)

The drawing was only part of the event and a lot of time was spent talking about dinosaurs native to Alaska. There was a pretty epic road trip by artist Ray Troll and paleontologist that led to the current awesome dinosaur exhibit at the museum - Cruisin’ the Fossil Coastline. Amongst the fossil drawings, there is also 10 cheeseburgers, multiple polar bears and even a santa claus.

Thomas was super in to the drawing part of the class. This part was focused on looking at a dinosaur drawing or model and drawing it on your own paper. Unfortunately, they didn’t have enough clipboards, so mine was a super fast sketch once Nonni was done with hers.

But Thomas had plenty of time to work on his and came up with this awesome dinosaur. Doesn’t he look so proud of his toothy dino??

The next part was even more fun though! Each group got parts of a dinosaur skeleton and had to interpret how to put the bones together. Who doesn’t love a good puzzle?!? Of course we had no idea what the final product was supposed to look like, but that was the fun part of it!

You can see Cait & Abby were there as well! Cait was wondering if it was weird for an adult to want to go and I told her we were going with Thomas already. So they joined in the fun!

After we got to see what our dinosaur bones were interpreted to look like by the “experts”, we got to draw our own interpretation from the bones! Thomas and I decided that our dinosaur probably had spikes along the spine, but Nonni went with a smooth back.

Thomas and I showing off our final products! When he was mostly done with his, he asked if I liked it. I said I loved it, but I wanted to call it a Taco-saurus because it looked like a little bit like a taco! He took that feedback and ran with it to make it look even more like a taco. Ha - I love this kid!

It was a super fun class and I hung our drawings on the wall of art when we got home. I arranged them so that the half sun on our pictures lined up - it looks like we did it on purpose, but it was a total coincidence.

We will definitely have to go to more events at the museum as fun as this one was! :)

Multi-Park Fun

July is shaping up to be a beautiful weather month up here. After hanging out in the backyard for the 4th, it made me want to spend a little more time in the sun than I have so far this summer. Thankfully, Nonni doesn’t mind watching her cute grand-daughter so the rest of us can go have some fun!

The boys have gotten some time on their bikes in the cul-de-sac, but haven’t had a chance to get a decent ride in. So when I offered them the chance to go ride their bikes on the awesome bikes paths, they were both super excited! Though Henry seemed a little less excited once he realized he wasn’t riding in the trailer for the first time ever. He was not sold on the concept of having to hold one and (gasp) possibly even pedal!

You can also see that we still can’t find his helmet. Since I needed my own helmet, he used Matt’s skateboard helmet.

It was halfway through the ride before I realized Matt wasn’t wearing his helmet. Way to set a good example, sweetie…

Also, Henry got over his initial concern and was happy to be on the trailer bike like a total big boy. I bet you are starting to wondering why Thomas isn’t on the trailer bike…??

No more trailer bike for this kid - he can ride his own bike, thank you very much! We were worried he would get tired on us and so I had the trailer on the back of my bike, but we totally didn’t need it. He was a total champ at bicycling! He kept up with us and picked up on the trail etiquette super fast. The trails are packed up here this time of year and I can confidently say he followed the rules of the “road” better than some adults we came across.

A well deserved lunch of hot dogs and chips at the park!

We started a new system this weekend at the house. The boys are having some trouble keeping it clean and it’s been causing some tension between the kids and parents. So the boys and I sat down to brainstorm some ideas of how to keep it clean that didn’t involve getting rid of all the toys to make momma an office (much to my dismay!).

They decided to create “centers” like they have at school and use a clip system to show where they are currently playing. When they want to switch centers, they first have to put away the one they are playing with. We made sure all of the toys had a center to call home and the boys were surprisingly brutal on some of their toys and getting rid of them.

Look how clean! I doubt it will stay this clean very long, but I am hoping it at least stays a little cleaner than it has been!

Since they worked so hard on cleaning their playroom, I decided to take them for another park visit on our outing to get the groceries. I have been telling them about a park with a polar bear slide and they were sooooo excited when we pulled up to the park!

It’s a pretty rad slide, huh??

There was also a lot of climbing structures and my oldest monkey had a blast playing on them.

As we were playing in the park, minding our own business, my boys heard the siren call of an ice cream truck pulling into the parking lot. They, of course, immediately started begging for ice cream. I told them I didn’t have any money, which they correctly assumed to mean I didn’t have any cash. They were very insistent that the ice cream guy would definitely take a credit card!

So we made a deal that I would buy them something if he did. As you can probably guess, he is a smart ice cream man and definitely takes cards.

That was certainly not the case when I was a kid!

Ice cream also didn’t cost $7 for two things when I was a kid either! But they were so excited, it was definitely worth the money. Though I had to get them to hurry up and eat them since we had to pick the groceries up by a certain time (I still love ClickList!) and I wasn’t letting them in my minivan with those drippy things!

This girl had a fun day with her Nonni as well! I’m not sure where her pants went (possibly she got too hot?), but look at her working out her legs with her activity center. Who knew it was so multi-purpose??

Happy 4th of July

We have had a pretty awesome summer so far this year and the weather looked to be just as awesome for the 4th of July. Stay-cationing is much more fun when it’s a nice day to be outside!

I was so proud of myself for getting all three of the kids to wear red, white & blue. Obviously, Natalie didn’t have much choice in her outfit, but the boys were happy to wear their soccer shirts and colorful shorts. I even got mom to take a photo of the kids and I in our holiday best, but I probably should have thought to make them put on their sunglasses - it was super bright outside!

I still give myself an “A” for effort!

But back to the start of the day, which always calls for breakfast-in-pajamas on a holiday morning. (Or most weekend mornings if we are being honest). The boys were super excited that I found some of their old books and wanted to read them to Natalie!

Natalie was enthralled with the reading even more than the books themselves. These were another “take them with you!” gift from Allie when we stayed with her a few years ago. They have fun textures on every page which are great for little kids, less so for her kids at the moment. ;)

Finally dressed to impress! :)

And it was so awesome outside, I even got smart and pulled their soccer nets out. They aren’t getting soccer lessons this summer, but they can still play against each other!

Thomas is usually the one scoring the goals, but Henry is by far the better one at celebrating his goals! =D

Eliza also came outside to hang out with us. She was smartly staying a safe distance from the soccer ball, but she wanted to be kinda in the action. Also, she needs a haircut so bad - she is a shag monster!

Since it was predicted to be so beautiful out, we invited over company - and I think this was the twin’s first outing! Kathryn and I were on the same page with the clothing colors for the holiday. :)

Henry was showing off their sandbox to Ben. It got a little moose damage over the winter, but overall is hanging in there quite well. Ben was probably trying to figure out where to build one for his boys. Or he was jealous of all of their cool toys in there. It’s hard to say for sure…

Look, I got a photo of Aunt Jo! =D

(And Aunt Heather, but she doesn’t usually hide from the camera.)

Aunt Jo actually sent these giant bubble things as a Christmas present for the boys and I hadn’t ever gotten around to blowing them up. I tasked the aunts with blowing them up and they clearly had a lot of help/supervision…

We made them wear their bicycle helmets to do the sumo wrestling bit. Safety first!

I couldn’t find Henry’s helmet, but luckily my kids have giant heads and mine fits him when it’s cinched down.

I asked Thomas to hold my camera for a minute because Matt challenged me to a sumo fight. We managed two hits before we realized we are too old to be slamming into each other. Also, it was probably a wise idea to make the kids wear helmets…

And Thomas took this photo without me realizing it. His camera skills are improving!

The boys went back at it and all was fine until I heard *a lot* of yelling from outside. I guess Henry got tired of being pushed around and found a smarter way to fight back. Ha!

No fireworks for us this time of year - it’s just too sunny even at midnight! But I wanted the boys to have something fun and bought them these red, white & blue glowsticks. They clearly loved them!

Hope everyone else had as beautiful a 4th of July as we enjoyed up here! :)

Taco Tuesday

Tuesdays around this house are always Taco Tuesday, but they aren’t always the day before a major holiday. Since this one was, I decided to take a vacation day and hang out with the boys and the rest of the family in town.

When the boys asked for a snack, I remembered that I had bought them peanuts forever ago after a fun trip to Texas Roadhouse. They were pretty excited about getting to shell their own peanuts, but there was no way that was happening in the house!

It was so nice outside, that I took Natalie out to enjoy it. In the shade, of course, but she still seemed pretty excited to be getting some fresh air! Nonni bought her these cute rompers the last time she went home. The downside to it being so nice and warm this summer is that the house gets unbearably warm some days. Plus this girl gets hot fast when she’s mad and this adds up to a very sweaty girl most days. Nonni came to the rescue with some cute new outfits that are cool and still button up!

My other baby girl was also happy to be hanging out with her momma in the nice weather. She’s gotten ridiculously fluffy, so she’s probably overly warm too. But she looks so wild and carefree with a long coat, how can I get her groomed now??

Taco time! I told you we have a pretty liberal definition of Tacos around here. I jokingly put these empanadas in the Tricera-tacos, but the boys really wanted plates. No sense of adventure!

Finally getting some use out of our patio table! Unlike their momma, these boys hardly ever wear their sunglasses even when it’s bright and sunny. So I nicely gave them the “shady” side of the table. ;)

Side note - check out the boys’ awesome space taco socks. I bought them a pack of random socks at target and these socks were buried in there. How awesome are they?! And unsurprisingly, they wear them almost every Tuesday.

May Taco Tuesday live on forever!

Daytrip to Talkeetna

The summer is almost halfway over and it is starting to feel like it’s wasting away. I usually plan out of town activities for almost all of our 3 day weekends over the summer and this year we haven’t gone anywhere. I think it’s pretty understandable given the circumstances, but when Matt’s mom and sister came for a visit, I thought it was a good excuse to try a daytrip with everyone!

I didn’t manage to get a photo of all of us, but it wasn’t from a lack of trying! I took Grannie and JoAnna over to the sign and neither one of them would take a photo. I knew Grannie was bad about letting me take photos, but Aunt Jo may have been worse. Well you know I wasn’t going to waste a chance to make someone take a photo of me with two of the kids. It’s rare I get more than a selfie with them most of the time!

I did win on where we ate lunch though and those of you who know me will not be at all surprised - the Talkeetna Roadhouse! It feels like it’s been forever since we’ve been here, but it’s still as tasty as ever. And now all of the kiddos have been there as babies, even Thomas was there for his first Thanksgiving when we were up visiting. Of course, Natalie is a little young too get any tasty morsels, but she was happy enough with her meal of milk.

She was also highly entertained watching the antics of her brothers and dad. After being cooped up in the car for 2+ hours, they wanted to let off a little bit of steam. Thankfully the Roadhouse is family friendly enough that a little tickle fight in the corner went completely unnoticed.

Of course, the phone offered by Grannie won out over tickling. So Matt started using Natalie to attack Thomas. Thomas was paying absolutely zero attention to who was tapping on his ear…

He whacked back thinking it was his dad and was a bit “uh-oh!” when he realized he had almost whacked his sister. Thankfully Matt has good reflexes an no impact actually happened, but Thomas still felt pretty bad! And his dad didn’t hesitate to say “Remember when you hit your sister?” the rest of the day. So mean!

Even though her daddy was using her to attack her older brothers, this little girl couldn’t be happier hanging out anywhere else. She loves her dad the best! He’s the most fun! :)

Part of the reason I get nervous about traveling these days is her feeding difficulties and extra equipment. The other part is having to pump several times a day, which never seems to correspond to her feeding schedule. So of course I had to pump at some point while the rest of the gang roamed around Talkeetna and I was stuck in a warmer than expected car. Sigh - the things we do for our kids!

Also, this is the photo Jo texted me from their walk down to the river. Glad to know our stroller can do some moderate off-roading. And I have to admit that it was several times of looking at this photo before I even noticed Henry. Ha - I am not the most observant…

But I finally reunited with the group and got to hang out on main street with the kids to enjoy the beautiful day. It may not have been the best summer for travelling, but the weather has certainly been awesome this year!

And the trip was pretty much a success, so maybe, just maybe I will be up for more short trips. We’ll see…

Just a Few June Randoms

The poor neglected fancy camera is probably crying in the cabinet. But that doesn’t mean I’m not as photo obsessed as ever. So here is what was notable for the rest of the month of June!

The neighborhood garage sale! It was smaller than usual this year, but it was a gorgeous day for a walk either way. Natalie got a super adorable doggie backpack for her feeding pump and I got to test it out while we were out garage sale-ing. It worked pretty well and was much easier to deal with than the usual carabiner clamp on the handle that I have been rigging up on the stroller handle.

The absolute best part of the garage sale was this one house that had tables piled high full of books that looked like elementary school reading books. And the best part was the sign that said “Free!” I let both of the boys pick out a handful, while Matt and I did the same. I think we ended up with at least two duplicates, but who cares? Books!!

Post hospital stay check-up with the pediatrician. She was pretty excited to see mommy in the middle of the day. I’d be lying if I didn’t say the feeling was mutual. :)

I picked Thomas up from camp one day and he wanted to show off his masterpiece that he was writing. To be honest, it’s about the same spelling as the actual Captain Underpants books since they are supposedly written by fifth graders. In case you can’t quite interpret it: “Tra-la-la. The Captain Underpants tried to fly, but he could not fly.” Can’t wait to see the illustrations that go with the book! :)

Our weekends are pretty much the same, so a slight deviation from the usual errand running makes the boys pretty excited. Case in point - we left the house a little early to go pick up groceries (Click-List!) so we could spend about 10 minutes at a new park. They protested a little at leaving so soon, but were overall still happy about it.

Another lunch date with Henry! Maybe I can convince him to go somewhere beside Subway next time… ;)

Part of our lunch date was to go buy him some jeans at the mall. He hasn’t worn jeans since he stopped wearing diapers because he much preferred elastic pants once he was in charge of putting them on. But he’s been wearing the knees out on all of his pants recently and I convinced him that he needed some tougher pants. He seemed excited about buying them, but we’ll see if he wears them or not…

5 Months!

Given the madness of going back to work and another hospital trip, this month genuinely felt like it flew by…

Suddenly she’s 5 months!

And sooooo adorable! Repeating her chair lean from the previous month, but she is definitely getting stronger and closer to being able to sit up on her own. And still trying to eat anything that is close enough to grab!

Everyone looks so excited about photos this month!! They aren’t all looking at the camera, but hey - I will take what I can get!

I asked Thomas to hold up her 5 month card for a photo and she straight up stole it out of his hand. He thought it was hysterical and I think he was a little surprised how fast she got it from him.

Then she decided to play a little peek-a-boo with the card and the camera.

I decided to put her in a normal onesie and pants outfit for the photo session and the boys were obsessed with the fact there was a cupcake on her butt. Henry insisted on holding her so I could get a photo of it and Thomas decided to jump in the photo at the last second. It was a mess of a photo, but also a bit hysterical while it was happening. Natalie wasn’t terribly impressed with Henry’s positioning…

But she was pretty content to chill in her big brother’s lap. Henry loves to hold Natalie any chance he gets, so I let him hold her once we were mostly done taking photos. I thought it was pretty funny how giant his feet looked compared to hers. He’s definitely not the baby anymore!

But we had to get a few more photos of little miss since it’s her big day! The boys wanted to get Grape Bunny and her Pinkie in the photo with her. She’s finally bigger than them! Pretty sure that those are both from the Aunts, so hopefully they like that she was pretty excited about both of her stuffed friends!

We also thought we would try one of her bigger bows, but we all decided it still looks too big on her. Though the contrasting color was nice!

I finally put her down on the floor on her pillow to get a little tummy time while I straightened the room up post photo shoot. The boys were busy playing with all of her toys that were now on the floor and she was totally entranced with watching them. This girl loves her big brothers! :)

And I love all three of these crazy, adorable kiddos. :)

Weekend of Parties!

Somehow, we ended up with invites to three parties this weekend. Mom figured we could use a little bit of fun after the crazy week and offered to hang out with Natalie, so we told everyone we would try our best to be there!

The first party was for one of Thomas’ classmates who also happens to be the son of a coworker. We’ve been to their house several times and the boys immediately took off to play as soon as we got there.

As a side note, their mom also offered to drop Thomas off at summer camp all last week while Natalie was in the hospital and Matt was out of town. Her two oldest were also going there and they live in the same neighborhood, so I don’t think it was too much extra burden for her. But it was a huge help to me!

The party had a western flair to it and the boys had a blast demanding I take their photos while they used all the fun photo props. I love Henry’s cheese-tastic smile on this one. :)

Then off to a party at one of Henry’s friends from daycare (also the son of a coworker - it’s a small town!). We loaned them our bouncy house for the party and all of the kids had a blast running around in the yard going crazy. That’s always dangerous at our house, but they don’t have dogs so their yard doesn’t have poop hiding everywhere. ;)

Of course, Thomas found this nerf gun and was entranced. He’s been doing archery at summer camp and it was a pretty similar firing mechanism. Surprisingly, he wasn’t asking for me to buy him one as soon as we left. I think they were both pretty exhausted already…

Final party of the day was actually back at the first house. Not only was there a birthday, they also had a moving party. The dad is getting transferred to the Midland office and they decided to just celebrate everything today! Come to think of it, the move to Texas might be what inspired the cowboy theme of the party…

Matt doesn’t always love going to coworker parties with me because we don’t really have many coworkers in common and he usually doesn’t know many people. But at this party, he managed to find himself! He found a coworker’s husband who is also into hunting and they spent most of the party (in their flannel shirts and camo hats) talking about various hunting trips.

I’m not sure he appreciated the twinkie-ness as much as I did. :)

Since the party was so close, we obviously walked there. On the way home, we decided to take a short cut through the green space behind our house. The boys thought bush-whacking was the coolest walk back home ever. I didn’t exactly have on the most appropriate shoes for it, but it was pretty fun!

In the Hospital, Take 3?

Well it’s not like this was a total shock, since Natalie had been showing pretty clear signs of being sick this weekend. She threw up (or refluxed - the line between the two is blurry) all but one of her feeds on Sunday and had a horrible night. Since Matt is gone, mom offered to help if I needed it. I think I finally tapped out at 3AM and she took over.

I called the pediatrician Monday morning and we got an appointment to get her checked out. Since we got the Owlet (fancy bluetooth baby O2/heart rate monitor) for her a few weeks ago, I even printed out the last few nights of her O2 stats to show how she is struggling to keep her numbers up. We have a normal O2 monitor she uses as well, but we added the Owlet for our piece of mind and because it tracks her data every night and we can see it historical trends. The other one is really only good for real time information. Either way, they were both going off a lot last night.

I probably looked like a crazy mom, but at least our pediatrician is well aware of her issues and appreciates the fact that I am a scientist at heart and having data makes me happy. He chuckled when I pulled the graphs out, but only because it was so fitting for me. He did appreciate the extra info as well. He sent her down to x-ray to decide for sure the best course of action.

Which, of course, was getting admitted back to the hospital. Sigh… I wasn’t thrilled about it, but as awful as last night was - at least we have some backup in keeping an eye on her. And hey - she got her old room back, so at least that is familiar.

(This was the photo I sent Matt to tell him we got admitted. I think my feelings were fairly clear!)

They did the usual slew of tests when they admitted her and this time she tested positive for Parainfluenza 3, which is the #2 cause of serious respiratory illnesses in young children. RSV is #1 and thankfully she got vaccinated for that one!

Thankfully she’s not sick enough that she needed the high pressure air this time, just low flow oxygen and some breathing treatments. And she seemed unfazed by the Albuterol as long as she had her binkie!

Aunt Heather even came to the rescue and picked the boys up for me. She made an exciting night of pizza making and hanging out so they didn’t even seem to mind that I was missing.

And my amazing mom even offered to spend the night at the hospital so I could sleep. There’s a lot to be said about having family around!

Look at her not even caring about her vitals check. It’s all old news to this girl. And she improved enough overnight to not need the extra oxygen!

Some improvement, but was definitely not feeling great. On the bright side, it meant I got extra snuggles!

I brought the boys by to see their sister and check out her room. Neither one of them were sick, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to bring them by. It certainly made their day! Thomas even made sure that her board was updated with her name. :)

Of course, it was Tuesday and you all know what that means… Taco Tuesday! I was trying to keep things as normal as possible and that means Taco Tuesday must be celebrated! And yes, I know those are quesadillas, but our interpretation is pretty liberal when it comes to Taco Tuesday. Pretty much anything that is remotely Tex-Mex counts. And these guys looooove the quesadillas at Taco King!

Well I spoke too soon on her not needing oxygen. This is about what happened last time. She would do great during the day and then overnight, she would need some extra oxygen support.

Also I think she looks very skeptical here. Like how on Earth could her mother make her do tummy time while she is clearly ill enough to be in the hospital?? Her therapists were pretty proud of her not slacking off though!

As I previously mentioned, I am officially back at work, which makes her being in the hospital much more challenging. Our IT department hooked me up with a laptop to work remotely, but there was a pretty important meeting this week that I didn’t want to miss. Thankfully, Mom was happy to hang out with her while I was at work.

Understandably, my stress levels are a little high this week and I was totally planning on grabbing an ice cream out of the vending machine to treat myself. Luckily for me, there was some event downstairs as I was leaving and they were handing out ice cream! Score!

They decided to try some breathing medicine that was delivered via inhaler. I was super curious how they get a tiny baby to use an inhaler and I was not disappointed with the clever-ness of this device. She was less impressed with it, but it works whether they are calmly breathing or throwing a fit!

She’s gotten much more into her toys since the last hospital visit so we made sure to have a selection to play with. I think mom was the smart one who hung them off the IV pole, but it was a perfect spot for her to look at them when she was chilling in bed.

More tummy time! She didn’t seem to mind it quite as much when she had such a cute baby to look at. Though the really impressive part was her timing on blowing this giant snot bubble as soon as I was snapping her picture. Gross!

The boys came back for another visit and discovered the giant white board behind her door. Thomas decided to draw her a family portrait. I’m not sure why Henry doesn’t have any hair, but I loved it. Unfortunately he is his own worst critic and wanted to erase it right away. Thankfully he let me take a photo of it.

But that wasn’t the only excitement! We stopped and got her balloons to brighten up her room. She loved them so much! We managed to tie them off so they were at her eye level and she stared at them and whacked at them when you put them in arm’s reach. She was obviously starting to feel better and actually got to come home the next day!

Only 5 days for this bout - our visits are getting shorter! I’ll take that for a silver lining. :)