We have been making the most of the beautiful Michigan weather over the last few days. The kids have been enjoying the beach. They drive their little Tonka trucks all through the sand pretending to make roads and burying themselves. Today we spent over 2 hours at the beach and the kids didn't even venture down to the water to get wet. We have checked out all of the nearby parks and have a few favorites. Most of the parks in the Grand Haven area have sand instead of wood chips or rocks beneath all of the play structures so the kids are in heaven! Our van is FULL of sand! We have been enjoying Aunt Mari's pool so much that she actually had to add some water to it yesterday because it was getting low from all of the jumping! Last night John and I went downtown to take a walk on the pier and got caught in a massive rainstorm while we were about 1 1/2 miles out! It was a long wet walk to the van so we tried to pretend that it was romantic instead, but neither of us have greast imaginations and we finally admitted that we were freezing! This morning John and Grandpa blew up their boat motor while they were coming in from fishing so they will be home in the morning and on kid duty! Grandma and I need a break from the morning entertaining!
Since I enjoy my little animals so much we decided to take the kids to the zoo today and check out some real animals. The John Ballpark Zoo was a nice interactive zoo and the kids had a lot of fun. Grandma, Grandpa, Mari, and Triston came too! I used my PPG Zoo member card and they let all of us in for free. I am sure that we were supposed to pay something, but they told us we were all set to go...so it was a great free trip.
Top 10 Reasons why we are ready for Daddy to come....
1. Every time that I turn around somebody is naked 2. Every time that I turn around somebody is peeing somewhere outside 3. We almost got kicked out of Dick's Sporting Goods today 4. The boys have learned how to climb out of their cribs 5. Everybody keeps taking the tops off their sippy cups and dumping them out 6. We have watched Dora exactly 7,896 times and it's starting to get old 7. Questions that begin with "Why" are driving me batty 8. Grandma's house has too many buttons 9. Grandma's house doesn't have a child-proof lock on the front door 10. We ALL miss Daddy!
If it were legal to put two and three-year-olds to work then we found the perfect job! The boys are blueberry picking machines! They didn't even eat a single berry when we were out picking this morning. Between them the boys picked 28 pounds of blueberries!!!!!! They each got a bucket that holds 7 pounds of blueberries and Kathie and I split a bucket between us. The kids wouldn't let anybody else add blueberries to their own buckets either...they wanted to do it all by themselves. Jonah filled up his bucket first and was mad that he couldn't pick any more so he tried to dump his bucket on the ground so that he could start over! We are in desperate need of some good blueberry recipes....so far we have made muffins, coffee cake, fruit salad, and pie! It was a lot of fun picking today and the kids were tired tonight so I call that a rousing success!
We are all safely in Grand Haven. John will be flying out to join us on Wednesday and then we are all driving back together next weekend. Since we left on Friday John has been doing some serious home remodeling projects! He painted our front hallway and entryway and is doing the upstairs hallway today. He had a ton of patchwork to do ahead of time thanks to the boys, so I am really excited to see it when we get back... it will be like a whole new house! Today Kathie and I took the kids to the beach. But first we took them to Meijer and stocked up on buckets and trucks to use in the sand. The weather was really nice when we first got to the beach, but then got really windy and a little chilly. The boys didn't seem to mind and got wet and full of sand and thoroughly enjoyed themselves! The kids spent yesterday afternoon and this afternoon in Aunt Mari's pool with Triston. They are getting very comfortable in the water. Wyatt loved using the diving board and slide and today I got Jonah and Sammy to jump off the side of the pool to me into the water. Jonah jumped to me for at least 40 minutes before getting exhausted! Wyatt has started calling Kathie "Kath" instead of grandma! I always refer to her as Grandma Kathie, but Wyatt has always called her "Kathie" until now when it bacame "Kath"! Today I said you can call her "Grandma Kathie" and Wyatt said "you can call her Grandma Kathie, but I will call her Kath"! I give up! Tomorrow we are taking the kids blueberry picking in the morning. Samuel may actually turn into a blueberry if he eats any more! I have a feeling that blueberry picking may be more like blueberry eating in his case! It should be fun!
We made it to Michigan today. The kids did great with the exception of Shane screaming for an hour or so. We skipped naps and the kids all went to bed early tonight so they should be well rested for part 2 of our trip tomorrow! I have my ipod charged and ready to go so I can drive in peace.
I am leaving tomorrow again for Michigan...this time alone with the boys. We are going to Grandma Kathie and Grandpa Bill's house for a week with a pit stop at my parents house along the way. John is flying out to join us on Wednesday so that we can all drive home together in one car. Everybody is looking forward to some quality time with Grandma and Grandpa as well as some great Michigan weather! I have some fun activities planned for us and the kids so we should have plenty to do and lots to write about! Vaminos!
Shane is 5 months old today! The time goes by so fast with the fourth kid it's like somebody is pushing the fast forward button on Shane's little body! He is still the sweetest little guy that I have ever been around. I am so glad that we didn't have him first because all of the other kids would have seemed like such horrible babies in comparison! Shane is definitely a Mommy's boy (probably since I nurse him) and watches my every move. He saves his best smiles for me and Wyatt! Wyatt and I race to get Shane in the mornings when he wakes up so that we can see his big smile when we first come into the room. We are still waiting for that first tooth, but it is coming! In the last few weeks Shane has learned to splash anybody within a 5 foot perimeter around his bath tub, grab his toes, and suck his thumb. He is growing like a weed and I can't get enough of him. Let's hope that the next 5 months go a little slower and we can enjoy this little guy as much as possible before the tiny baby phase is just a memory!
It turns out that we wasted our money buying 2 cribs for the twins when we could have used only one! It's also a good thing that Sammy is still on the clueless side and only climbs into Jonah's crib instead of out of his own crib or we would have to be turning the door handle in their room to match Wyatt's thus enhancing the mental institution look that we have going on upstairs! For Christmas I am going to have John make the boys little mail slots for their bedroom doors and slide food to them through the slot. They will probably get naked and slide items covered in poop back to me from the other side of the slot.....but that's ok my medication is finally starting to kick in! Otherwise it might have bothered me when Wyatt opened the door to the boys room this morning to find Samuel naked in Jonah's bed and yelled to John and I down the hallway "God dam#$%&* boys I told you not to do that"! I'm terribly proud! There was still a question as to the status of Sam's diaper...poop or no poop, but John drew the short straw and had to go in! No poop! How that child got naked when his jammies were on backwards and he was in a sleepsack that was backwards and turned inside out is beyond me! Seriously whose children are these and why does John keep calling me Nurse Ratchet?
Where have I been? What have I been doing? Why haven't I posted? Do I have some extra pictures from Drummond that I didn't post the other day? Do I have some puppy pictures? Why did I eat an entire batch of rice krispy treats?I have been getting our house back together since our trip to Drummond. John was out of town for work this week and Wyatt had vacation bible school every day so I was driving and unpacking, unpacking and driving, and cleaning and driving..... John finally got home on Friday and we got to eat dinner with him. It was sooooo nice to have an adult to talk to after a week of jibber jabber! We went to the beach at Morraine on Saturday morning with the kids and then Bethany came over so we went out for our date night after everybody was in bed and ate a great dinner without any interruptions. This morning we went to church at the same place where Wyatt had vacation bible school and it was great. The three big boys went into the nursery and we brought Shane into church with us. Afterwards we ran into one of Wyatt's teachers from VBS and she said that she really enjoyed having him in her class last week. She also told us that Wyatt really seemed to be into gadgety-type of stuff and really liked buttons and knowing how things worked. She said that he kept trying to run the church's projection system and figured out how to turn all of the staff's earpieces volume up! She said that all of the teachers for all of the classes knew him name by the end of the week! John and I were like "Wyatt likes buttons and technical stuff? He wants to know how things work? That's so weird! Who is this child? He never acts like that at home! Usually he just spends his days sitting down and coloring!" As if!!!! We watched the movie "The Notebook" on Friday night (very good movie) and last night we were out on a date until late so my posts have been rather sparse lately. I still have some pictures from Drummond Island that I didn't post and some new puppy pictures of Keith's puppy Cali. The rice krispy treats were just awesome that's all there was to it! Sadly, my new homemade point system assigns 1 mile of running for every 100 calories of food....so that was probably a 5 mile rice krispy dessert! I just fell of the wagon.....now I have to run home!
It took me a few days, but I finally have everything back together and in working order at our house, so I can post some thoughts about our trip to DrummondIsland.
It was a lot of fun to watch our kids experience their first campfire. I love campfires and brought all of the smore essentials with us. I have always been a little hesitant to bring the boys near a campfire because I was concerned that they would get too close and get burned, but they respected the fire and kept a fairly safe distance. We had a campfire down by the lake almost every day at lunchtime (instead of at night to avoid the bugs and meltdown time) and roasted marshmallows, hot dogs, and made smores. Everybody loved the smores. Sammy literally would take about 20 minutes savoring his smore before he polished it off. We could definitely get a lot of use out of a fire pit if we had one here at home! Hmmm food for thought!
Shane’s schedule was messed up on the trip. At home he sleeps swaddled up in a Moses basket with a fan blowing for some background noise (because our house is just a little loud if you can imagine). Up North I had Shane in my room with the fan and he kept getting up 2 hours earlier in the morning than usual and eating at least 2 extra feedings! I noticed that he was getting a tooth (boo hoo) so we thought that maybe that was throwing everything off schedule. It also could have been that the sun comes up at 5:30am since we are so far north and didn’t set until 9:30 or so at night so there was a lot more sunlight. I also suspected that Shane wasn’t getting filled up enough with milk and maybe it was time to start him on some cereal. In any case, since we got home, he is back in the groove. No issues with sleep or feeding so we are all happy again! He did have a little sleep mishap though on the trip that is worth mentioning…. Grandpa and Grandma (Bontir and Bonir) went home for a few days and we were in the cabin by ourselves so I slept with Shane in Grandpa and Grandma’s room. I put Shane’s basket on a little end table right next to my bed and went to sleep. At 5:30am Shane stared talking (but not crying) and I laid perfectly still so that he didn’t notice that I was awake hoping that he would fall back asleep. After a few minutes I felt a slight thumping on the bed and thought that Maggie must have come in the room and was wagging her tail. Finally I rolled over and looked at Shane’s basket. It was tipped over on the floor and Shane had rolled out of it and was almost completely under the bed. He never cried and was kicking my bed talking and smiling in the morning! That was quite a wake up for both of us!
John took Wyatt fishing a lot and they even did some fishing at night. Since Wyatt is never outside at night he saw his first sunsets ever on the water from the boat (which were stunning). Tonight when I was tucking Wyatt into bed he asked me why it was still light outside and I said that the sun hadn’t set yet. So he said “when the sun goes down it will go into the water?”. Apparently he thinks that the sun goes into the water every night and comes up out of the water every morning! How cute!
I did a lot of running outside on our vacation and mapped out a 3.5 mile loop that was a nice scenic route without a lot of cars to deal with. Normally at home I run on my treadmill so the outside runs were a nice change of pace. After the first couple of days, I decided to take Maggie on my runs with me and she was great! She really seemed to enjoy running with me and eventually I didn’t even need to take her on a leash. She would occasionally fall behind or run ahead, but she was always looking out of the corner of her eye to see where I was and check in. It was like having my own personal running coach on the trip. We are going to try and make it a regular thin here at home if I can just find a loop without huge hills and a limited amount of traffic. Easier said than done!
Grandpa spent a good part of his vacation making a new end table to put between the couch, a lamp, and a chair in the cabin. He claimed that it was an Amish-made table, but I swear that we heard him using power tools across the street in the garage. It’s quite an interesting design… After 400 coats of varnish the table was ready to be used and fit perfectly in the designated space. We were all pleased with how it turned out (though we were all high from the fumes so we were pleased with everything)…especially Grandpa!
We watched the movie 7 pounds with Will Smith and loved the movie! Watch it if you haven’t yet!
The red truck is still working and still the GREATEST vehicle in the world if you are 2 and 3 years old. I think that it is the lack of seat belts, or maybe the massive springy seats, or the enormously loud sound that the engine makes when it is fired up or knowing that your Mom learned to drive a stick shift in that very vehicle, but it was like liquid crack for the boys! The golf cart is the second greatest vehicle in the world and the tractor is the third greatest ride when you are 2 and 3 years old. It didn’t matter where Bontir and Bonir hid the keys for the golf cart, Wyatt ALWAYS knew where they were. He has a special talent for finding and taking keys to great vehicles that is shocking!
One morning when I came into the cabin at 6:30 am to feed Shane Grandma told me to go in the back bedroom with her and the boys and close the door. When we got in there she told me that there was a bat in the cabin and Grandpa was going to get it. We waited and heard a lot of banging…then nothing. Finally Grandma peeked her head out and asked if the coast was clear. Grandpa seemed surprised and said the bats gone and “next time let me drink my coffee before you have me kill a bat this early in the morning…he wasn’t going anywhere!”
It was a 12 hour drive, we have about 25 pounds of crushed goldfish on the floor of our van, I had about 12 loads of laundry to wash when we got home, we didn’t have a dishwasher, we didn’t have tv, the weather was colder than we expected the first part of the week, Shane got off schedule, it took 2 weeks of packing and planning to get ready to go to Drummond Island…. but it was amazing, totally worth the drive, and we already can’t wait to go back next year!
We are back and it turns out that 9 hours in a car is pretty much the breaking point for the boys. Unfortunately, the trip back was 10 hours so the end was rough. We had a lot of fun, made a lot of memories, and have some great stories about ice cream at the TeePee, a sneaky little bat, Grandma's bee sting, Dad's Amish table, Shane's new tooth, and tons more to write about when we are a little more rested.
We are finally enjoying Upper Michigan the way that it was meant to be enjoyed! Grandpa made a new fire pit down by the lake and we have been eating all of our lunches outside on the picnic tables. We roasted hot dogs, brats, and smores over the campfire and didn't have to clean up the floor after the kids were done! The kids have done some swimming and boating. John has done some fishing (without any luck) and I have enjoyed some great runs and walks with a lot of great scenery! I'm sure that tomorrow will bring even more fun and excitement!
We made it to Drummond Island with all of the kids and our sanity after a 12 hour drive!!! Holy cow was it long! When we made it to the ferry we had missed it by about 5 minutes and they weren't scheduled to come back for 2 hours so we settled in for a nap with the kids all on our laps (because they all woke up as soon as we stopped), but the ferry guys must have taken pity on us because they came back after an hour. It was kind of nice napping with Shane on my belly for a while though...that usually doesn't happen. Even after getting here at 1 am, Wyatt was up and ready to go a 7 am! Nice! The weather is a big disappointment so far, but the kids are still having a great time. It has been as warm as 60 and as cold as 40 with intermittent rain! Tomorrow is supposed to be beautiful though so we are looking forward to some time at the lake with everyone. Maggie has barely had time to dry off between jumps in the lake so at least someone is going swimming every day. I just got some pictures from Keith of his new puppy Cali. He is bringing her home to Pittsburgh at the end of the week and I can't wait to get my hands on her!
Earlier in the week we had a couple of rainy days in a row so I decided to make cookies with the boys. They really enjoy cooking and they especially love eating homemade cookies. So the other day we make snickerdodles. They are one of the best cookies to make that involves the kids. After making the initial dough and chilling it for 1 hour, it needs to be rolled up into balls and then rolled in a mixture of cinnamon and sugar. I let them do all of the rolling and they do a great job with it. Since I am writing some of these blog posts ahead of time I don't know what the weather up north is actually like, therefore, I am bringing my snickerdoodle recipe. If it rains prepare for some serious cookie making!
I have discovered that if you buy regular size bandaids and cut them in half lengthwise, you can get double the use out of a box of bandaids. This little tip comes in handy when you have 3 kids that need a bandaid on every little injury on their body regardless of size, location, and severity. It will probably save me about $600 a year!
We are traveling to Michigan tonight and hope to make it to Drummond Island around midnight, so I have this post scheduled to post while we are still driving. Hopefully it is going well and the kids are behaving! Last week Samuel bit a huge hole in his crib sheet. He thought that it was hilarious when I came in to get him in the morning and showed me what he had been up to. I can't even tell you how he managed to bite a hole in a sheet while it was still on the bed...or better yet why he wanted to do it in the first place, but it may have something to do with trying to drive be batty! Twice this week I went to put a load of clothes in the dryer only to realize that after I loaded the washer and put soap in it, I never turned it on! I am starting to get concerned about my memory! I am thinking that this may be temporary and that managing 4 kids and packing for an extended trip may be memory overload, but in the meantime I have taken to wearing a small pad of paper and pen around a string on my neck to write down the essentials. Oh look, I didn't write down "breathe" and I almost forgot! See what I mean?!?!?
