A great weekend!

Flowers from Laura and her mom for my birthday!

Wow last week sure went by fast! Jon had STAR testing and that kept us home and on schedule. We found out that our favorite 1st grade teacher was given her pink slip along with quite a few others at Jon's school. I'm so very sad that she may not teach there! She is the only reason we survived 1st grade and that Jon is reading at a 5th grade level now! I feel sorry for her but I'm just devastated by the fact that she might not be there to help another 1st grader go through what Jon did, or to help parents like us learn to teach our children how to read.

I do have to give the other side of this though, there is a teacher that has been given the pink slip that I really feel was ready to be done with teaching. I will not be sorry to see her go and feel that she'll probably be so much happier now.

I had such a great weekend! Saturday Barbara and I took Jon and the twins to the Roseville Galleria (mall) and spent quite a bit of time playing in the little play area. We then got popcorn and some lunch and took a nice long walk around the mall. The twins did really well and seemed to have a lot of fun. No time for pictures as our hands were really full :-) Jake and Aly are some funny kids! Jake had a blast climbing to the top of the slide where he would stand and just look up... Jon took him down the slide once and Jake of course was NOT happy. He then had to climb back up to just stand there and look at the ceiling. Aly on the other hand would climb all the way to the top and slide head first on her tummy! She did not want any help and didn't wait for us at all! She is my little daredevil! Jake loved the little rain machine--and I could have sworn he was going to take some guys cell phone out of his hands! Jon did great helping the twins learn new ways of going under the toys or over them. He's such a good big brother, I do think he favors Aly though :-) It was a great time but we were exhausted by the end of the day!

Sunday my best friend in the entire world took me out! Barb and I left at 10 with NO KIDS!! It was beyond wonderful! We did a lot of shopping and just walking around, we also had a great lunch at Chevy's. It was so nice not to have to order for the kids or to keep the twins entertained or to clean up the crazy mess after! We came home around 5p and I felt like I could take on all the kids again. Nathan did GREAT, of course! He's such a good dad! He did put together the watertable and let them play on it before I got to see it, but whatever :-) i'm only a tad bitter! I'll have to post the pictures he took later--oh wait he didn't take any! haha. I'm glad they were good for him though!

After Barb leaves we then feed the twins dinner... Well I bought some bowls and made them some yummy spaghetti and gave them spoons!


Their first real attempt at eating with spoons went great! Of course it was nice and messy.

Love to all!

Twins are 15 months old!!

Today the twins are 15 months old! They are keeping us super busy as usual.

Jacob has really taken to walking, he still looks like a little monster but oh so cute! He has been really fussy the past couple weeks and I had thought it was teeth but it has seemed to pass and no new teeth are to be seen, maybe a growth spurt? Anyways now that he's in a better mood hopefully I can get him talking a little bit more. Poor kid can't get a word in with Aly yapping away :-) We're working on "all done" at the moment and I if I sing it he can do it... He sure does love music! It's so funny we'll be in a store or a restaurant and Jake will just start rocking side to side... he hears the music! He's also so calm and mellow most of the time. He'd rather just sit outside and look around maybe playing with a piece of grass. He's such a sweet boy!

Alyssa is of course totally opposite! The girl can not sit still! She's basically running these days, and always towards trouble! She has no fear what-so-ever.. well maybe of some people but not of anything physical. She absolutely LOVES the big trampoline! We put in the big plastic balls and she jumps around and around with them forever. (Jake thinks it's some sort of torture device). She also has quite the vocab. We caught her saying yo-gabba-gabba yesterday, which happens to be her favorite show. She say's "Jakey" and "Ethan" all the time now, usually while hitting them in the head with both hands... She's been saying hi for quite sometime and waving hello as well but she just started saying bye and waving when someone leaves. She loves to say "done" and put her little hands up... She can also sign the word "more" and she signs the word "drink" but her sign of drink is sticking her finger up her nose (I'm not joking at all!) so we try to avoid that!

Both of them are doing great with Ethan. They still try to take everything he has and run away with it! At night when their going down I'll bring E over to their cribs to say goodnight and they'll pat him on the back.. sweet huh! Well if only it ended there... Aly then pats his head, a little harder then she should and then eventually pulls his hair. Jake is really sweet he'll pat him on the back and then go in for a kiss..well Jakes kisses turn into a bite usually and yes poor Ethan has already been bit, on the nose once too... oh Jake!

Jon is of course the great big brother and has a new chore of putting the twins in their car-seats when we're out and about! Talk about helping out, this is huge! He has STAR testing this week so no homework which makes him super happy. He has another big project due, he has to build a model of Earth, that should be fun. Thank goodness I have creative people as friends and family because I'd be in a lot of trouble, I'd probably just send him in with a globe.. hmm I wonder if that would work :-) He wanted to pick Neptune (because it was cold and blue) but that was already taken. He's such a good kid.

Ethan is doing great! He's getting so big! Not much new to report :-) He does turn 2 months in 2 days. He has his check-up next week and hopefully I'll have a couple more pictures of him by then and will definitely post about it.

I turned 30 on Sunday... It was a good day. I'm not really a fan of my birthday but Nate and the kids always make it special. I do get treated like royalty and that's really nice. Nate bbq'd a wonderful dinner as well!

I'm so blessed!

Easter

Wow, what a great day! It's been a long time since I've had so much fun. I of course could never have had that much fun without all of the friends and family that joined us in such a beautiful day!

It started early... Ethan slept for 7 hours that night--woohoo! I was up by 6am to start getting everyone ready for the 10am mass. We made it out the door by 9:08am, I was so proud of myself, and I didn't forget anything. Grandpa and Grandma P. (Nates parents) met us at Church and were a HUGE HUGE help during mass. The twins actually did pretty good, I can't complain. It's amazing how loud they can sound in a church. I can honestly say I maybe heard 5 minutes of what was said, I was so busy with one twin or the other. Ethan was great and slept through all of it. Jon of course was good and such a big help as well.

We then came home and I had to get to work! It was nice to have Nate's parents there to help, not sure I could have gotten everything done before hand if they weren't.

Family/friends started showing up around 1pm and the party had started :-)

Alyssa and cousin Roan (who's 3 months younger)

We had some great appetizers! We then gave the kids their baskets. We decided this year that they each would have one basket and we would all fill them. I think we need bigger baskets for next year! But the kids seemed to love them. It was hard to get the little ones to even acknowledge the baskets but oh well.

Michael and Makenzie

Daddy with Jake and Aly

Next came the egg toss. I think this is our 4th or 5th year of doing the egg toss. It became a tradition when Nathan mentioned that they always did one when he was growing up. We love games so it became a yearly event. We had 6 teams this year and I teamed up with Nate--mistake?--maybe! We were the 2nd team out, Nate said my throw was bad but it broke when he caught it--you can decide :-) Nate's parents won the big toss! It was a pretty clean egg toss this year.

We then decided that it was time for the Easter Bunny to get here and hide the eggs. So all 8 of the kids and Grandpa and Grandma P went into the playroom. It was a ZOO in there! The rest of us went on a mission to hide eggs. We had a lot of eggs to hide, close to 200 I think. Now mind you we had kids of all ages... Michael 13, Makenzie 10, Jonathan 8, Kaylin almost 3, Jacob and Alyssa 14 months, Roan 11 months and Ethan 7 weeks (he of course didn't find any eggs :-) ) We then released the kids and it took maybe an hour to find all the eggs. It was so much fun. Jake had no interest in finding any eggs.. he was much to busy whining at everything (poor guy is getting molars). Aly had fun hunting for eggs and even put them in her basket. She did start off by trying to eat them and even had a green tongue from the dye of the eggs! She was a lot of fun to walk around with. The big kids did great and I think Jon won for the most eggs collected. But Michael and Makenzie were having a lot of fun hiding their own eggs for Kaylin to find, too cute! Kaylin even found some that the big kids missed!


Aly and an egg she found... Kaylin finding eggs... Kaylin, Michael and Jon.





Jake hanging out... Me and Aly.... Jon in search!

After that was over, Ron (my cousin Meg's husband) started up a whiffle ball game. We've never played and boy was it fun! We didn't really have teams and after Ron hit the whiffle ball over the fence (1st hit) we then had to use a big plastic purple ball. I even got a couple hits and scored twice I think. I laughed so hard and had so much fun, I think we all did! I did trip Jon when he was rounding 2nd, he wasn't pleased but it got a good laugh :-)

Joey sliding into 3rd.... The boys lost the ball...

Those that weren't playing held babies, or jumped on the trampoline or cooked, or just sat around chatting and eating ymmy food.

The fans...


Dinner time was upon us soon after! Nate bbq'd some GREAT shish-ka-bobs and we had a big ham and lots of yummy salads and rolls. We of course also had some great desserts. My cousin Megan made my mom's Carrot cake which was so so good! Mom would have been pleased.

All the kids made it through the day and we put them to bed not long after dinner.

I can't get over how everything just fell into place yesterday making it wonderful. I'm sure my mom helped with that. She would have turned 60 yesterday and we joked that it sure would have been fun to tease her about it! Although she would have gotten me back since I turn 30 next week. I still say on a regular basis that Ethan was her little present to us, and he does still have some of her red hair.



Ethan and his precious smile.

I'm sitting here eating some of LaLa's yummy German Potato Salad and enjoying having the windows open. Did I mention the dogs ate WAY too many eggs and they really don't smell that great today?!?! Jon goes back to school tomorrow and I'm looking forward to having things go back to normal around here. Well as normal as things get with all of these great kids.

Ethan is 6 weeks!

Aly and Jake love to look out the window!

Ethan turned 6 weeks old on Monday! He's such a great baby. We all still have our own opinions about who he looks like but I think he looks like Jon. He has a great smile which we are now just getting to see more of. He has a dimple just like Jon. We all know he's going to be a tough little guy cause his brother and sister truly beat up on him.

So we have our new mini-van and we LOVE it, well I love it. Isn't that all that matters :-) However trying to figure out the arrangement for the carseats has been like working a puzzle. We're able to put all 3 of the carseats in the middle row, which I would LOVE since I could easily reach back and deal with kids. However we put Ethan in the middle and the twins just attack poor Ethan. One goes after the blanket, the other goes after the pacifier, then the bottle and then they pull at his clothes, his feet, and they then put their books/toys on him. 2 minutes and Ethan is a crying mess and the twins find it funny. So now Ethan has the middle row to himself (well unless Jon is with us) and the twins have the backseat. It's a little harder because I can't get to the twins as easily but Ethan needs me more.

We had a great moment the other night. Nathan and I were putting the twins to bed and I had put Ethan in Jakes crib while we got the twins dressed after their bath. I picked E up and Nate and I were saying goodnight to Jake and Jake leans over to Ethan and starts to pat his back. It was so sweet!

Aly is also saying Ethan, although I'm the only one that's heard her say it! For the life of me I can't get her to say it in front of Nate. She also sings along with Dora Backpack backpack--to Aly it's more like ba-ba ba-ba. It's too cute!

The Mothers of Multiple sale was this last weekend and boy were we busy! I did a lot of shopping and also worked the sale Saturday morning. I got some great deals and tons of new clothes! I also sold a bunch of clothes and equipment.. that felt good!

We're looking forward to Easter and spending the time with family. We still don't know if At&t will be striking but we heard rumors it might start Friday. I really hope not but I'll keep everyone posted.

Jon is out of school this week for Spring Break and of course it's been raining so he's been on his computer a lot and also helping me out. I really wish it was nicer out so I could send him outside.

Happy Easter everyone!!