April 2017...

....also known as one of the busiest months of our lives.  Maybe busy is the wrong word. The month was full. So I'll do my best to recap all the fullness of the past month.

April brought the beginning of soccer season for Addie. She loves playing but she is our flighty, creative child so focus can be an issue. She also has enough of her mama in her to dislike being out in the chilly morning weather for so long. Once it finally decides to warm up around here, I think she'll really enjoy soccer Saturdays :)

The beginning of April also brings us a birthday celebration. Adelyn turned 4 on April 8th! She is currently obsessed with all things Paw Patrol so she got the paw patroller and a few pups and trucks from us. She plays with them every single night in her room before bed and then tucks them in and reads to them and it's adorable.

Birthday cupcakes for breakfast

Over Easter, we drove up to Minnesota with my mom and sister to visit my aunt Jane, uncle Brian, and cousin Josh. We had so much fun getting to spend time with them and explore their small town.

We spent our first morning in town getting doughnuts from the bakery

There was a lot of bubble blowing and running outside for these two

Easter egg dying

We got to attend Easter service at one of the churches where Uncle Brian preaches

Adelyn and Josh playing the church organ

We got a private tour around town and found some trolls :)

Josh was Adelyn's buddy during our visit

We also got to have breakfast at the diner where Josh is a cook and he made breakfast for us. Adelyn was so excited every time she saw him in the kitchen window :)

We returned home the Wednesday after Easter and hit the ground running because Saturday was Adelyn's birthday party! She had a Paw Patrol birthday cake (of course!) and had so much fun playing with her cousins and our friends' kids. Thank you again to everyone who was able to come celebrate our girl!

We've all done a lot of growing up over the last 4 years :)

Jake was the first to leave Adelyn's party because he had to go on a short business trip to Oregon! I think we may have been away from Jake more this month than we were actually all at home together. Which always makes for a really crazy time for everyone. We need that man to keep us all from going insane. I guess we'll keep him around for a few more years ;) In all seriousness, nothing makes me appreciate how hard single parents work than being a temporary single parent. Props to all the parents out there who do it on their own for a period of time for one reason or another. You all are rock stars. Jake being gone also always makes me really appreciate just how much he does around here. Like deal with our 3rd child...the dog. 

Oh, did I mention that Trip's surgery recovery didn't go as planned because he got around the cone on his head and chewed his stitches out? About 36 hours before we were supposed to go have them removed. And the wound was so big that they couldn't stitch it back up. So Jake spent most of the month taking Trip to the vet every day, then every other day, to get his bandages changed out. It's finally healing enough that he doesn't have to have bandages on anymore. He's still wearing a giant cone and goes back to the vet once he finishes his antibiotics. He's really lucky the kids are so attached to him ;)

The month ended with a wedding! My cousin Jenna got married yesterday and Adelyn had the honor of being the flower girl! She had her hair done at a salon for the first time, got to wear a dream of a princess dress, and did an amazing job walking with cousin Beckett down the aisle. Derek had to steal the show and while we were focused on Adelyn he decided to take a nose dive off the pew and started screaming. We're a hot mess, y'all. 

We had a great night visiting with family that we don't see nearly often enough. And of course, what Adelyn was most excited about, we got to eat and dance :) It was a late night for everyone but my kids broke out some pretty white dance moves throughout the night.

They did great!

Some of the great grandkids. Adelyn had so much fun playing with her cousins!

Are you still with me? It's a lot...I know. The month of April went by in a huge whirlwind. But it brings us to the month of May. We're disconnecting in May. No social media. No television (at least for the parents). Cutting out all the junk food eating and bad habits that a busy month brings out in us.  I'm really looking forward to it. We need a break. We need a reset...for our physical and mental health. So with that...thanks for reading and we'll be back in June!

Weekend Wrap Up - Roombas and Dewclaws

It was a quiet weekend around here BUT in an effort to blog more, I'll do a quick recap.

The weekend's theme: cleaning. Fun stuff, right?! We actually got a Roomba last week so it was kind of fun.

But first...a massage. That's right. My sweet husband booked me a massage first thing on Saturday morning so I got to spend an hour being pampered into a coma. After the massage I went to get lunch, with a book as my date, and when it was time to pay I just stood there staring in my purse for 10 seconds before my brain started working enough to pull out my wallet. That massage turned my brain into mush in the best way.

We spent the afternoon on Saturday cleaning. Organizing the bedrooms and getting all the floors cleaned off so we could let the Roomba do it's thing. I don't even want to talk about the amount of fur I found under our bed. So if you hate vacuuming, as I do, go invest in a Roomba. Totally worth it to just block a room off and clear off the floor and let that little machine go crazy.

Sunday morning I woke up with a migraine so super dad Jake got the kids up and ready and took them to church. And then the day got crazy. Long story short - we have a clumsy dog with dewclaws.  Trip, our dog, came inside yelping after being out in the yard, which usually means he tweaked his ACL (long story there, too). So Jake brought him in and got him settled down and Trip went and laid by the front door while Derek napped. Once Derek was up, I called Trip into the living room because I was going to close the gate and let Derek run crazy and I didn't want him hurting Trip's leg. When Trip got up he was holding his back leg out at a super weird angle and hobbling around. Jake looked closer at him and realized he hadn't tweaked his ACL, he had ripped a dewclaw halfway off his foot. What's a dewclaw, you ask?

Letter D is a dewclaw

Apparently, the dewclaw is pretty much useless and not all dogs have them. A lot of the time, owners will have their dogs dewclaws surgically removed...to prevent what ended up happening to Trip. So Trip has this claw hanging off his foot while Jake called the vet and got him in for an appointment ASAP. They ended up having to do surgery to remove the dewclaw. The vet said she has no idea how he managed to injure himself in that way and she had never seen another dog come in with an injury like that. Ironic, because I was listening to a trivia podcast last week and they were talking about dewclaws and how in Asian cultures they are considered good luck. I think we can safely say that Trip has disproved that theory. 

So the next 2 weeks involve taking Trip out on a leash so he doesn't tear the stitches, lots of antibiotics and pain meds, and a nice cone on his head. Never a dull moment in this house.

Not much else has been going on around here - although we are in countdown mode for a little girl's 4th birthday. As she says "It's March and after March it's April and then my birthday!!" I have no idea when she turned into a little human but please slow down!

Well, hello

I don't even know where to begin this post. My last post was from July 2015 shortly after we found out our baby was going to be a boy. And now that little boy is 15 months old and snoozing away in his crib so a LOT has changed since my last post. I'm going to try to do a quick-ish photo recap of our crazy life :)

 The end of my pregnancy looked a lot like this: 

Snuggles snuggles snuggles! This girl knew her days as an only child were numbered.

And then, finally, baby brother joined the world.

The night before Derek was born

Adelyn meeting her baby brother. All the heart eyes.

And then life got crazy. Derek has never been much of a napper. Great night time sleeper. Naps are a fight. Every. Single. Day. And have been from day 1. Adjusting to 2 kids was HARD. I know for some people it's a breeze but it was definitely an adjustment for us. The first few months of Derek's life are a crazy blur of sweetness and sleep deprivation.

Thankfully, even though he doesn't sleep and he's all sorts of crazy, he's the happiest baby to ever grace the face of this earth. 

Over the past 20 months...

Adelyn started her first year of Pre-k

Finished her first year of Pre-k

And started her 2nd year!

We celebrated our super girl turning 3

Took a trip to the beach

And begged time to slow down. Seriously when did she grow up? And where did those long legs come from?

We watched our first born march to the beat of her own drum

Sheriff Callie at Princess Dance Camp

Our handy woman

We celebrated Halloween with Sulley...

...and Cruella and her dalmatian

We spent a first Christmas with our sweet newborn

and we spent the next Christmas decorating our real tree, only to find it infested with spiders...

...so Adelyn got to put the star on the fake tree the next day. Thankfully, she didn't notice the difference.

This little guy turned ONE!

He's a fan of the birthday balloons...

...and the cupcake for breakfast...

....and the smash cake.

Our girl started soccer

and brother was always there to cheer her on!

This handsome guy continued to charm us

And these two continued to melt my heart

So there you have it in a nutshell. And I'm making a pact with myself. I will never let this blog go anywhere close to 20 months without posting ever again. The time goes too quickly. These babies grow too fast. Even if no one else reads this I want the memories for myself and my children (I think Adelyn got her mama's nostalgia). The good times. The not so good times. The milestones. Even if things seem dull around here (will that ever happen again?) I will find something to fill up a post or two here and there. 

So what's on the horizon for our little family? We're a month away from Adelyn's 4th birthday. Derek will be joining Adelyn for one day of school next year. And there are some serious plans in the works for a Disney trip sometime this fall! The original plans were to go next spring but once I started planning, I couldn't wait that long. Adelyn still thinks we're going after she turns 5 so it will be a fun surprise for her to go when she's 4 instead :) So I will definitely be finding some blogging material along the way as we plan our trip!

If you made it through all that...thanks for stopping by!