Michigan Day 3- Zoo Crew

We took the whole crew to the Detroit Zoo this morning. It was fun but really hot! Everyone came home and napped (sort of) and then we went to the pool, played at the park, ate dinner, did baths, and the kids went to bed. Then the adults had some real fun and went to Meijer! I just can't describe how much I miss Meijer since moving to Pittsburgh....it was like Christmas in July. Here are a few pictures from today!

Michigan Day 2

We went to the library today, visited with Al, Jackie, and Cameron, and went to the pool. The boys were exhausted....and so am I! Tomorrow we are going to the zoo and the boys can't wait!

Michigan Visit- Day 1

We drove to Michigan today. It was me and the boys and we drove straight through with no stops door to door 8 am to 12 pm. I couldn't have planned it better if I tried. We did some swimming, went to the park, and hung out with Grandma and Grandpa. It was very relaxing. Tomorrow my sister is coming in with her two kids, so that should spice things up a bit! Can't wait!

Twins

These two look like they are the twins. Too funny! Tomorrow we are leaving for Michigan for a week. It should be a lot of fun!

Table Manners

Today I took the boys to Lilliput play center since it rained all day. They have a little village of playhouses that the kids use for pretend play including a doctors office, grocery store, car repair shop, movie theater, library, fire station, and train station complete with a train table. Wyatt enjoyed the train table a little differently than most of the kids playing with us today. The funny thing is he did the exact same thing yesterday with the train table at Barnes and Noble while I was feeding the boys. I didn't make a big deal about it then because I knew where he was and I could see him. Now I guess that he thinks that is how you are supposed to use a train table! Oops too funny!

Cabin Fever

Wyatt has started inventing new games to amuse us since we have been home this whole week with the sickies!

On the Mend

Samurai is feeling a lot better today. He has his sense of humor back for sure. One more day and Jonah should be in good shape too! I can't wait!

Dropping Like Flies

Now Jonah and John are sick too! Seriously I need a vacation....or maybe a little sick time off myself! Here's a picture of the boys hanging out together.

Stir Crazy

We spent the day inside all day today. Sammy is still sick with a high fever that is barely controlled with Tylenol and Motrin. His fever spiked last night to 105 degrees! John and I cooled him down in the bath tub and got him medicated again and he was finally able to sleep comfortably. It is amazing how hot kids get trying to fight off a virus! I am trying hard to keep Sammy away from Jonah, but we will find out eventually if he was exposed to the same thing or not at some earlier point. Wyatt is the wild card. He gives toys to the boys and I have to watch him like a hawk to make sure that he isn't giving something to Sam and then giving it to Jonah. When Wyatt was sick a few weeks ago his fever lasted for 3 days...so Sam has 1 more day left if he is following the same pattern! We will have to spend time outside tomorrow for Wyatt's sake.... that boy needs to burn off some energy!
Here are two pictures... one of Jonah as cute as a button and the other of Samuel with a cold washcloth on his forehead, poor baby!

Numbers

Today was one of those days! So far Wyatt was sick all last week and now it looks like Samuel will be sick this week.....so Jonah is on schedule to be sick when I go to Michigan to visit. Isn't that great news?

Erie

We spent the day at the beach on Lake Erie at the Presque Isle State Park which is about 1 and 1/2 hours from home. We had a lot of fun and perfect weather. This is my favorite picture from today!

Survival of the Fittest

Sammy is going to have to get a little tougher if he is going to survive here. Jonah's latest trick is to roll across the floor to wherever Sammy is playing and grab his hand and bite him with his two new teeth. Earlier this week Jonah started grabbing and pulling Sam's hair until he screamed bloody murder and I had to come and pry his fingers out of Sam's hair. I have started Sammy on a weight lifting program for 15 minutes a day to improve his strength so that he can defend himself against his big brothers, but he is such a baby about doing his push-ups......

Bookworms

I took all of the boys to the library this week. It was a lot of fun and something that I would like to do on a regular basis! I ended up having to feed Jonah and Samuel in the library while Wyatt played around in the children section. Unfortunately, he didn't stay in the children section the entire time and, instead, decided to spend time in the young adult section of the library. Apparently, shadowing an approximately 10 year old girl is a lot more exciting than reading board books under Mom's watchful eyes. Thankfully she did not make a big deal out of the fact that Wyatt LOVED to pet her long blond hair that went all of the way down to her waist and stand on the pile of books that she had selected and carefully stacked on the floor. She was a sweet little girl who seemed to like the attention from a baby boy who was utterly facinated by her! If she was older I would asked her if she was interested in babysitting since she and Wyatt seemed to hit it off so well. Wyatt is at this strange age where he either LOVES someone or NOT and I can't figure out what makes his mind up one way or the other. It is very interesting watching him decide if someone is friend or foe....like a mini polygraph detector!

Pals

We had my friend Carrie over today. She is 28 weeks pregnant with twin boys and has a 17 month old boy named Zachary. She and her husband, Eric, moved from Columbus last October so that he could take a job at Heinz. So Eric and John work together and Carrie and I play together....oh yeah.....the boys play together too!

Helping Out

The boys sure have Wyatt wrapped around their little fingers. Whenever they drop a toy he pulls up a chair to pick it up and give it back to them again... and again....and again!

Culture and the Arts

I thought about getting a 1/10 size violin for Wyatt for his 2nd birthday! I think that it would be fun to teach him how to play a little and spend some time together doing something fun at the same time. He is at the perfect age to try something like that since he is in the copycat stage big time right now. It looks like it would cost about $100 for everything, which isn't a bad investment if I can get the other boys to give it a try as well. My only real concern is Samuel since he is so freaked out by loud unusual noises. And I'm sure that there would be a lot of those for a while, but I guess that I could get some tiny earplugs.....
Jonah, meanwhile, has a future as a conductor. Seriously, check out the concentration that he is using to conduct those flowers!

Happy Birthday Cameron!

We love you big man!

The Gerber Baby

I am still not sure if Samuel was switched with someone else'e kid after birth. I can ignore the fact that he looks different than the other two and has a complete different personality and voice than Wyatt and Jonah, but not liking food has made me start to question his genetic makeup in a whole new way!

Christmas in July

The boys Cristmas present from Grandma and Grandpa Rodgers came early, so we had to test it out!

The Little Things

I had my surgery today and everything went well. If I didn't know any better, I would think that all I did was take a nice medicated nap at the hospital! My doctor must be pretty good. The funny thing is yesterday a nurse from the hospital called me to get some of the pre-admittance questions out of the way and two of the questions took me by surprise... 1. Am I an organ donor? and 2. Do I have a living will? Here I was thinking that a D&C was a simple procedure that was going to take about 15 minutes tops! It got me thinking about things obviously and I was a little freaked out last night before bed for a while. Isn't it funny how you look at things differently when you are going under general anesthesia? When I got home John asked me if they gave me some caffeine in my I.V. because he said I was acting perfectly energized and happy not like a typical surgical patient after a procedure. Hmmmmmmmm........ Well, I love coming home to my boys everyday... but especially on surgery days! The magical healing power of three boys under the age of two could fix just about anyone for several reasons:
1. At any given point of the day there is someone that you could cry right along with or laugh right along with depending on what kind of a mood you are in....all emotions welcome!
2. Emotions can change from one extreme to another in the blink of an eye..........once again, all emotions welcome!
3. There is always someone to nap with almost any hour of the day
4. Laughing babies......what more do I need to say about that?!?
and
5. Giving a chubby naked baby a bath is almost clinically therapeutic (kinda like petting a dog).

New topic
I am requesting prayers for 2 people in need:
1. Uncle Ronnie is in the hospital with some heart related issues. We are praying that he will be home again in the next day or two.
2. My friend Laura (who is pregnant with twin boys) is having some issues with pre-term labor and is on bed rest. We are praying that she will keep incubating for three more weeks (to make it to 36 weeks) so that her boys can come right home from the hospital with her and do not need a NICU stay---I am pretty confident that she will make it!

Mom came to stay for a couple of days to take care of the boys while I went for the surgery. She is up to her old tricks of trying to force kids to take naps with her. I think that Sammy had her beat this time by talking loudly the entire time that she tried to sleep next to him...he's a smart cookie (Al and I used to wait until Mom fell asleep and then sneak out of bed and enjoy having the whole house to ourselves until Mom woke up)!

Hats For Grandpa

Happy Birthday Grandpa Bill!

The Bigger They Are the Harder They Fall

The big man woke up today with a fever. John brought him downstairs this morning and said that he felt really really hot, so we checked his temperature and sure enough it was 100.7! We gave him medicine and got the temperature down, but he was off all day! He wanted to be held all of the time and cried a lot for no reason, poor guy. We stayed home all day and stayed pretty low key. I had him sit on the couch with a blanket most of the day and he played with a few toys including his cell phone, but didn't act like himself all day. I can't, for the life of me, figure out where he could have picked something up since we were on vacation and nobody that he was with is sick?!? Weird! Anyways, the bad part is that my surgery is this Thursday and Mom is coming to take care of the boys, so it will suck for her if anybody is sick. Let's just hope that this is a 24 hour bug that Jonah and Samuel do not pick up!

Sweet Little Devil

Jealousy has reared its ugly head lately. Wyatt can not stand to share my attention with Jonah and Samuel. I think that his comes from having Daddy, Grandma, and Grandpa’s undivided attention while we were on vacation. He has begun to sit on the boys when they are laying on the floor and bounce up and down on them, take toys away from them, and yesterday he covered Jonah’s head up with a blanket and tried to sit on it! This is really the first major bout of jealousy that I have seen from Wyatt since the twins were born and it is really hard to deal with. Part of me wants to yell “stay away from them, don’t even come near them”, but I am sure that saying that would only make things worse. So I resort to my “show me how you touch the baby with gentle hands” routine about 300 times a day. I don’t know if it is getting through to him or not. Sometimes though, I catch him kissing Jonah or Samuel or bringing them a toy when they are crying and I think that this is all part of the process….either that or he is bipolar!

Milestones

Today I spotted something that made me kinda sad. Jonah has TWO little teeth poking out on his bottom gums! I feel like he is growing up WAY too fast for me! He is my little guy with his tiny little face and body that everybody mistakes for a girl (though I probably won’t tell him that when he grows up). He just still seems like a tiny baby that I want to keep little forever….and now this! What next? Sitting up? Crawling? Holy cow I am not prepared for this! Sam is technically the baby brother, but I see him as the big brother since he is actually the “big” brother, so I expected this from him! Jonah is full of surprises lately.

In keeping with the Milestones for Jonah theme, Jonah ate cereal for the first time yesterday. He LOVES it (big surprise since he is related to Wyatt) and grabbed my hand to help guide it to his mouth for each bite. He was too funny. I tried to give Sammy some cereal too, but he went hysterical, literally, so we will try again some other time with him. Wyatt was really curious about Jonah eating from a spoon and wanted to sit on my lap and eat too. When I walked away, Wyatt picked up the spoon and tried to feed Jonah a scoop of cereal by himself. He is quite the little helper these days when he is not busy sitting on one of the boys and bouncing up and down on them… but that’s a story for another time!

Home At Last

We are back home tonight after about 10 hours in the car! The boys did great on the trip considering how long we drove today. A few of the noises that we were serenaded with on the way home were... 1. A combination of 1-3 boys crying, 2. Very brief moments of silence, and 3. Samuel perfecting his lip trick (he sucks on his upper lip using his lower lip to make a really loud sucking sound).We are all happy to be sleeping in our own beds tonight!

The Last Day

Sadly, we are heading home tomorrow morning. It will be another year before we get to enjoy time together on Drummond Island again. I can't even imagine how big the boys will be when we come next year!
Wyatt was lucky enough to enjoy a couple more Drummond traditions this week.... 1. picking mayflies off of the side of the cabin in the morning after a good hatch and putting them in the mayfly box (constructed by Grandpa of course). Then, taking them out in the boat to use while fishing for Cisco. 2. Going to the Drummond Island craft fair 3. Going to the Drummond Island 4th of July parade (in which anyone can join and walk) and finally 4. Enjoying s'mores together. It was a great vacation that we will not ever forget!

Wet & Wild

No Fear Whatsoever!

Happy 4th of July!

Happy 4th of July!

Tuesday Snooze-day!

The weather today made everyone sleepy! It was overcast and a little chilly most of the day, so we had to stay busy inside today. We are keeping our fingers crossed that tomorrow will be better weather. On the plus side John made everyone a great fried fish dinner! If the weather cooperates tomorrow we may have a campfire and eat s'mores. Yum yum!

Here are some pictures from swimming yesterday