Labor day and a hard goodbye.

Labor Day weekend. Friday Nate went to work and I decided to let the kids play with markers and color. Here are a couple pictures. Jake did awesome and really seemed to enjoy it. Aly on the other hand preferred to eat and SUCK on the marker rather then draw with it. Thus the pretty markings on her face.



That afternoon I guess I had left a marker in their playroom and I found them drawing on themselves. Here are the beautiful markings :-)





Saturday we went shopping... really not very exciting. Sunday however was a BLAST! I had my Aunt Linda, cousin Joey, and the Jacoby family--Cousins Megan, Ron, and Kaylin (3y) and Roan (16.5 months). The weather was beautiful, and the kids were all great!! Nate bbq'd some wonderful food and we just sat around eating and playing outside.
The kids love the trampoline and Aly is always the first one on! The girl can go forever!


She also has some great balance, it's pretty funny cause the boys (Roan and Jake) joined her and Kaylin and could not keep standing. They had such a hard time, the girls were just way too busy for them.


The bigger boys played catch and frisbee and it was a lot of fun to watch. We had the all too familiar ball stuck in the tree and got another ball stuck (trying to get the other down) and a pogo stick broken because Nate kept tossing it in the tree to get out the two balls. Finally Ron saved the day by climbing the tree and getting the original ball.



I also have to add some pictures of Aly with her tomato. Roan, Jake and Aly all had them but boy did she like hers!


Ethan just hung out in his little excersaucer and was so very sweet. He also took a nice long nap during the day so that was very helpful! It's so nice being able to hangout and not have to hold a baby the whole time.


Nate and I have discussed numerous times moving out of state and days like Sunday remind me why I want to stay here. I am so very blessed to have the family that I do. We may not be big in numbers but we sure are big in love and support, oh and a bunch of really precious BABIES!!!!

The second half of this blog is not easy to write and if there are any men reading this it might be hard to read :-)
My breast pump died. Let me rewind a little bit. I decided when I found out I was pregnant with the twins that I would exclusively pump. So having Nate as a husband I went out and did ALL of my research. I wanted the 300$ pump... but having Nate as that husband of mine, I chose the 150$ one... I pumped for the twins until they were 5.5 months old and I had to stop because I was pregnant with Ethan and my milk just dried up. So I of course knew I would pump with Ethan and have done so for 6.5 months. It died the other day and Nate went out and bought a manual pump which just does not even come close to working as well as my Medela Swing pump. I am so very torn by this whole thing. It's no secret that I've seriously gotten abusive with my pump and have a very strong LOVE/HATE relationship with it. But when it died, I cried. I get teary just thinking about it. At 6 months I did cut down a pumping session so I was only pumping 3x a day and that helped me so much! I think I'm just mad because I didn't get to choose when to stop, my pump chose for me. Which may have also been a blessing because every time I wanted to quit I had a huge wave of guilt rush over me. Now I know that I shouldn't have any guilt, hell all Jon got after 5 weeks was formula. And so did the twins, I can't explain it. So every time I pump I see less and less milk... It won't be long before I stop all together. I do have a LOT of milk in the freezer and am hoping that can last another month but at some point it will end. My sweet husband even offered to run out and buy me another 150$ pump but I of course hugged him tight and said I'd be okay. I can't believe that this is so tough for me. I hate this pump... well maybe not as much as I thought I did.
Let me also add that I'm so incredibly proud of myself for going this long... For the first 3 months I pumped every 3 hours around the clock!! That's 4 hours of pumping a day... I then went to pumping 4-5 times a day until 6 months. Pumping has been such a huge part of days... finding the time, the place, making bottles, freezing milk, timing the pump for when we had plans or I had to be out for more then 3-4 hours. Things got very tricky. I also had a horrible Lactation Consultant at Marshal Hospital that looked very poorly on pumping. She gave me such a hard time when I had the twins and when I had Ethan and saw her again she didn't even offer me the pumping stuff. Pumping is JUST as good as breastfeeding and NOBODY can convince me otherwise! But it was all worth it and I did it!! I could not have gotten this far without the wonderful support of Nathan. Every morning he gets up with the kids and changes diapers because I'm pumping.
So long, my yellow pump...