Beautiful

I love being a Mom. These beautiful kids (and, their Daddy) are my life.

Rockin' and Rollin'

We had a dance party this evening. Everyone was dancing and playing an instrument.

And, for some reason, all of the kids ended up with their shirts off. Oh well, this is our life. We love it.

Glue

My little sweeties have discovered the joy of glue. Today they painted the glue onto paper plates with a paintbrush and then put colored cotton balls on their plate.

Sticky, messy, creative fun.

Evan funnies

Evan has been telling interesting stories lately. The one about his "cord" is pretty standard. Here is a play by play as he told me the story while I typed it:

There is a cord in my head. It helps me to heal. It is not orange, it is yellow. I saw it because Grammy helped me and Grandad, too. Grandad just pushed and pushed and pushed me so I could go inside my body and see my cord. Grammy just held me. There is lots and lots of water in there with my cord. The cord helps me heal up and grow all my skin back. God just put it there to help me with that kind of stuff.

At our church's family worship service, the leaders were talking about loving Jesus and Evan said, "I don't love Jesus because he makes the thunder and lightening." (Maybe we should stop telling him that things that scare him are made by God...)

While I was at a gas station pumping gas, Evan was waiting for me in the car. When I got back inside the car, we had this conversation:

Evan: There is a number 10 on that gas pump.
Me: (checking to see if he was right) Yes, there is! How do you know what the number 10 looks like? Good job, buddy! You are so smart! You have really been learning a lot of new things lately.
Evan: I know. It's okay to let me be smart. I know what 10 is.

Measuring Heights

We have been making marks on the wall in our bedroom to mark the kid's height. We started marking Luke's height when we first moved into this house 5 years ago.

Dan has been in the mood to paint and keeps talking about painting our bedroom. I was hesitent to paint our room because I didn't want to paint over the little height marks on the wall.

When I came across this idea, I knew this has solved our problem! I got a $1.48 board from Lowes, stained it, and used a black paint pen to mark off inches and feet to make it look like a giant ruler. I sprayed it with clear seal to protect my paint work. Then, I transferred the marks on my bedroom wall to the new ruler. Dan screwed the new ruler into the wall in the (already painted) hallway.

Now we are ready to add the kid's heights as they grow, grow, grow!

Maiya's Birthday Party

Ladybug cupcakes and cookies made by my awesome friend Lindsay!

Making "bugs" out of styrofoam balls and lots of craft stuff. This was very fun!

Maiya loves all things sensory, so we had a tub or rice and lima beans (spray painted red) to play in.

Red chocolate dipped pretzels.

Ladybugs on top of crackers.

She loved having the attention on her as everyone sang Happy Birthday.

10 Years

Dan recently celebrated 10 years of working for the same company. He has been so blessed to work with great people and for a company that values their employees.

Congrats, Dan!

Organizational Stuff

Luke has started back to school and we are trying to get our lives back on track and a little more organized. One of the big issues/arguements that we have every afternoon after school is getting Luke to unwind, get his homework done, and his chorse finished.

In order to help lessen the arguements, Luke and I sat down and created a chore chart to keep track of what chores he has done each day. Along with that, we have a build-a-burger that lays out the steps he has to do each day when he gets home from school.

The burger is just the bun when he gets home from school. The first thing he does is have a snack (the ketchup) and then he moves the snack ketchup up to the top bun. Next, he sits and does his homework and moves up the homework cheese. He then moves up the chores "meat" and finally "gives Mom a high five" and finishes up the bottom bun to make the hamburger complete. It's kind of silly, but it gives me the freedom to not have to argue because all I have to do is point to the burger and remind Luke that he agreed to this process. 

The way we have come up with cutting down the arguement about which chores is we made a list of chores that Luke could do independently and I wrote them all on one end of a fat craft stick.

Every day before he gets home from school, I look around at what I need done around the house and put 3-4 chore sticks inside the "Chore Choices" container. Luke has to choose 2 sticks from these options to do each afternoon. This give me a little power to get done what I need to get done, but also gives Luke some power to choose his chores. He can't see the chores listed (that side is inside the container), so he can't pick the same ones over and over.

This is working for us right now. Hope it continues!

Lasagna Cupcakes

I made lasagna cupcakes for dinner and they were yummy!

Make your normal lasagna (I use ground turkey meat, ricotta cheese, and jar spaghetti sauce). Mix it all up and then line a muffin tin with one wonton wrapper (if you want to cut it to make it a nice little circle, go for it, but I just pushed it down in the bottom). Put one big spoonful of lasagna mix into the wonton. Add another wonton. Add another spoonful. Do this for all of your muffin spots. (My mixture made about 24 cupcakes.) Cook them in a 350 oven for 15 minutes. Then, top them with your choice of shredded cheese and cook for 5 more minutes. Remove them from the oven and let stand for 10 minutes before serving.

You could also make your own awesome garlic cheese bread and save the money on the frozen, fatty, processed stuff. Good dinner.

Evan's Hospital Visit

Evan has been complaining of a "tummy ache" since Saturday. We chalked it up to needing to use the bathroom and encouraged him to drink water and eat grapes. Early Sunday morning, he woke up with a 103 fever that lasted all day Sunday. By Monday, he was moaning in pain and begain vomitting. We took him to his pediatrician who did a quick exam and realized that poor Evan was in some serious pain. She decided that we needed to get a closer look at his "tummy ache" so we got in our car and drove downtown to the pediatric ER. Since his pediatrician called ahead, we were taken right back to the children's unit and they immediatly got Evan set up with an IV and some morphine to make him more comfortable. He didn't like getting the IV put in, but the morphine did it's job and he was much more relaxed after about 15 minutes. He layed in his bed watching Nick Jr. on their TV. (Thank goodness for Nick Jr!)

In the time that we were there, Evan had blood taken, gave a urine sample, had xrays done, and had an ultrasound. He was very specific about where his pain was coming from and the doctor's thought it sounded like kidney stones. After all of the tests were done, they discoverd that Evan has some kind of stomach virus and also has some pretty bad constipation. We were so thankful that this was something with an easy fix.

After feeling silly with his morphine working...

Evan charmed all of the nurses on the staff and got all kinds of stickers, toys, and games. He was told he wasn't supposed to eat or drink, but when he said to a nurse, "Excuse me, when is it going to be snack time?" she melted and snuck him in some graham crackers.

They called his IV a "straw" and he hated it at first, but then didn't want to take it off when it was finally time to go home. We got to keep some blue tape as a souvenir.

As an added bonus, because they are cute are a few pictures of Evan and Maiya playing with rubber gloves when we went to the doctor for MY sickness today.