Winter Activities photo dump

Peeked at my camera today to look at the pictures of our roof & discovered a bunch of things I hadn't uploaded to the blog yet.  So here is a random collection of photos of the things we do in wintertime!

Bake cookies.  This was actually pre-Christmas, baking cookies for Santa. 

 They actually did really good this year with the cookie cutters.

 Decorating!!

 It was hard to decorate them, & not eat every last one on your plate :)

 Ok maybe not so hard to not eat this one :)

 Playing Santa & Reindeer

 We actually had a few days with a dusting of snow on the ground where it was warm enough to play ouside.

The kids got a ton of new games for Christmas.  So we've played games a lot of evenings.  Twister was fun.  Until they all decided it was more fun to spin the dial than to play.

 I ended up having to just say "put A hand on red" vs saying left or right.  They all kinda know & do ok with left & right, but it was exhausting answering 3 kids each time, "Is this my left?" And they had more fun just playing instead of worrying about if they picked the correct hand or foot.

 Trying to get Logan to eat Nutella..... fail.  Seriously what kid wouldn't try what mom coined a "Chocolate Smiley Face Sandwich!"?

 Put our Church family picture in a frame & behind a couple of other pictures I found an oldie.  THe kids had to be like 6 months?  I think the last few years have been good to us!  

Oh 2014.....

I haven't done much blogging this calendar year '14.

But this year, so far, well it can pretty much bite me.

Tonight, Jan. 19, I re-joined the dark side and went back to working nights.  Farewell normal sleep routine.  But that also means farewell to the 5 am alarm clock mornings, which are so not my style.  We'll see how it goes...

After Christmas began this whole cascade of things going on with my grandma.  Prayers for her abundantly would be appreciated right now.  Very, very long story short, she has a currently still unidentified large mass on her kidney.  She's been through the ringer already, & has a long journey ahead so please, please just keep her health & comfort in your prayers.

Wind storm almighty reeked havoc on our roof.  A 5x3 foot-ish stretch of shingles above Olivia's room bit the dust.  New shingles were on our 1-2 year agenda for this house of ours, but it sure wasn't on our January to do list.  So we await a visit from Insurance Agency Almighty to determine how much out of pocket this is gonna slam us with.  Prayers for a very generous insurance check would also be appreciated.

We've passed around nasty colds & 102 degree fevers.

And we're only 20 days into the year.

See my point?

Remembering 2013...

2013 was a good year.  Like every other year, it was full of chaos & change.  But I'm realizing with age, that change IS life.  Things would be pretty boring if they always stayed the same.

I so love doing this blog post, looking back at the past year & seeing how much has changed.  How much the kids have grown & how much they have learned.  Its such a visible reminder of how fleeting time really is. Kids grow up in the blink of an eye.  Cherish the moments.  Laugh.  Smile.  Cry.

As this is my 3rd year putting together this review, I can't do it without looking back at the past years too.  Its just amazing to look back at what the kids were doing & learning at different points.  2012 in review.  2011 in review.

Here is a glimpse back at what 2013 meant for us:

January started out with a bang, when Logan learned to spell his name.  We played a lot.  Jeff's car tried to blow up.    I set some big new house painting goals.  And managed to take a break from painting to visit the zoo.

February we stayed busy & met up with some of our triplet friends.  We did more spelling!  The boys got a new room!  We sang & sang.  We played outside & played inside & played outside.  We baked.  We thought we finally had Logan poop trained, we were wrong.

March we met the Easter Bunny during Spring Break & found some other fun things to do.  We celebrated Easter.  Saw some dinosaurs.  And celebrated Easter again.

April gave us a Princess Bedroom!  More & more house projects got done.  We went bowling & had the flu. We had more springtime sickness, which caused us to miss the March of Dimes walk.  Olivia learned to write her name & we built a garden.

May is when we turned 3.5, which was full of ups & downs.  Our toy room got an amazing redo!!  We visited the dentist & the zoo.    Took pictures in the park.  Had a fun filled Memorial Weekend.  And continued to learn oh so much in pre-school.

June finally brought warm enough weather for a triple slip & slide & T-ball!  Hayden learned to spell his name, in the dark.  And LogaN learned to write his name!  We made the best of a rainy weekend, with a parade, bowling & the circus.  We went swimming at my favorite pool.  Jeff & I celebrated our 7 year Wedding Anniversary.  Olivia learned to ride a bike.  We spent tons of time outside!!

July brought a very fun filled trip to Minnesota.  We spelled some more.  This month 10 years ago is when Jeff & I met.  What a wild 10 years it has been.  We spent the weekend at Grandma & Grandpa Siebert's house celebrating Community Days.  We finished up our summer projects.  We had more Community Days fun.  And we camped in a Caboose.  I hate camping but somehow this is my favorite summer memory.

August started out with a bang at the county fair.  Jeff started a new job.  The kids each got their own teacher as they got split up for preschool.  We got started learning some creativity in our play.  We went to a Hot Air Balloon (and Wine) festival, helped our Great Grandparents celebrate their 65th Wedding Anniversary, went backyard camping & Hayden wrote his name with chalk!  Summer is so much fun!

September started with celebrating Addie & Ava's birthdays.  We "watched" some football.  Got our first Bibles from Church.  Did more & more cleaning, painting & organizing.  Started Sunday School & went shopping for Cotton Candy Grapes (yum!).  We had some triplet bonding time.  We FINALLY got Logan poop potty trained forever, finally.  Thank Heavens!!  We started celebrating fall with a trip to the pumpkin patch.

October saw us just keep growing up way too fast.  We got ready for a Pirates & Princesses birthday party.  And of course, did more painting.  We had an awesome (early) birthday party!!!  Hayden really started getting the hang of writing his name.  Olivia held a concert & sang, sang, sang.  It's her favorite thing to do!  We had more pumpkin patch fun.  Olivia got silly.  We acted our age.  I got old & started a new job.  And we had a great Halloween trick-or-treating dressed as Team Umizoomi!

November brought a beautiful day for fun & pictures in the park.  We also took family pictures at Church.  We had a 4 year check-up, we are getting TOO BIG!  The house projects continued.   We turned FOUR!!!!  I simply can not believe it!  We will never forget though how small we started.  We took our 4 year pictures.  And we endured another trip to the dentist.

December was busy, & I got behind on blogging.  We filled our house with holiday cheer.  We had a weekend filled with Christmas Program singing.  Our hall closet got re-made, rounding out my house projects for the year.  2014 house projects are going to be just as busy!  We visited with Santa, which went GREAT this year.  Our holidays were wild & busy.  We celebrated with lots of family at Christmas #1, Christmas #2, Christmas#3 & #4!

I have big aspirations for more house projects in 2014 & big aspirations for embracing all the other changes that life throws our way.  I have big aspirations for embracing 2014 for whatever it is.  The good, the bad & the ugly.  Because that my friends, is life.  And this year I'm resolving to embrace it all.

I'm not alone

I stumbled across THIS article on the Huffington Post "A Twin Mom's Post-Infertility Survivors Guilt."  It filed through my Facebook news feed Shared by another triplet mama & commented on by so many others who have walked in similar infertility shoes.  There it sat in my new feed just screaming "click me" as if I needed to know somehow that day, that I'm not alone.  The outpouring of love via text, Facebook, e-mail, and blogger comments following my "coming out" of the infertility closet so to speak, has left me a little humbled & honestly not quite sure where to start, or what to reply as I've been so quiet about this for so long.  But I guess, after talking to the RE & making our latest game plan, the world thought I needed this great read.  And so it appeared, full of lot of my own feelings, laid out before me in someone else's words.

My very 2 favorite quotes from the article:

"Though I consider my twins a miracle, I like the miracle to sleep, and I sometimes complain when the miracle wears me out. Once, I would have considered this akin to whining about how my pile of money was so heavy it hurt my back to lift it."

"That's why the infertility was harder than anything even my infant and then toddler twins have yet to dole out: the not knowing. As a twin mother I may be intermittently exhausted and occasionally overwhelmed, but it's nothing compared to indefinite uncertainty, the purgatory of TTC."


I called the RE right after Christmas, something I should have done weeks earlier.  I needed a new game plan.  But I didn't want to think about it over the holidays.  

Our agenda now includes another procedure sometime mid-late January to re-check my uterus, mostly to check for a polyp due to the fluid found in my uterine cavity last cycle & also a test to check the patency of my tubes. They say the risk of tubal blockage post c-section is only 1%, but I'm feeling in my heart the need to check.  So we'll check.  And I'm not betting against any small odds in my life right now.  Then, pending those results, we have 2 options.  If any tubal blockage exists & we can "afford" in terms of follicles to be more aggressive, we'll do the Femara/Follistim combo like we did in 2009.  If all is clear, we will try Clomid.  I've never really successfully done Clomid.  Weird to say given my infertility history.  I did technically do 6 cycles of various doses of Clomid in 2008 with my OB, but we weren't followed that closely then with ultrasound as OBs offices are generally built for preparing to deliver babies, not creating them.  So with all those doses, we never got to a point to trigger or do IUI.  So maybe, just maybe, it could work.  

So that's where we sit.  More uncertainty.  More lessons in trust & patience.

March of Dimes Time Already?!

Its January, that means the March of Dimes Walk is just a few months away.

Last year my very own post-preemies were sick, so we missed the walk :(

But we have battle the cold & the rain in years past to walk for something we stand for, strong & healthy babies!

I usually join up with the team from the NICU at the hospital that I work.  This year, I walking (hopefully not working, or sick & actually physically walking) with my friend Anne in memory of her daughter Isabelle.

Please donate to Team My Little Sunshine & support babies like Isabelle, Hayden, Olivia & Logan.  Who were born early.

A badge like the above will hang out on the right side of my blog for the next several months, so you can donate anytime!

How can you say no to these little bitty faces? 

Hayden

Olivia

Logan

House Projects 2014....

So..... I bought some things to take on the master bathroom.  I've had an idea for quite some time what I wanted to try in there, but I've been too chicken.  Given our 1990s oak trim in our house (which we are not painting, as we did that in our whole other house so we are sooo over painting trim!) some of the ideas I like I'm not sure how they will turn out with the oak.  But I'm gonna do it anyways.  I bought paint & about 1/2 of the accessories.... then I got this NASTY cold.  I cough, I look like Rudolph from blowing my nose, yet I have so much sinus pressure built up that 800mg of Motrin does not TOUCH this headache.

So no painting yet....

I think after I get the bathroom done, I will take on the master closet.  Because, honestly, its a cluster of hoarded, needs to be thrown out, old, worn, clothes.  If I followed the rule of "Go through your closet & if you wouldn't buy that piece of clothing if you were shopping today, throw it out" I would probably own 3-4 shirts.

I'm searching Pinterest for ideas for our master bedroom too.  I know kind of what we'll do in there, just given some accessories that will get hung & pillows that will get used.  But I'm not sure really what walls to paint what & how to take it all on.  Maybe doing the bathroom & closet will give me some inspiration?


I also bought some shelf liner for my kitchen & did about 1/3 drawers & cabinets of the kitchen this week.  I'll be short a whole roll I think to finish, so I'll have to get more.  But I'm doing it slowly.  It takes a long time!  I'd really like to do more to my kitchen, but its not gonna happen right now.  So I'm hoping cleaning up & re-organizing in there will keep my desires at bay for a bit.

Jeff got all the walls that we are building right now framed up in the basement over the weekend.  So next is on to figuring out lights & wiring!

I need some motivation.....

So the BIG 2014 project is getting our totally unfinished concrete hole of a basement in functional condition.  My biggest wish is that by this spring, in tornado weather, we can sleep down there & actually SLEEP vs. me laying awake all night in a worry we won't wake up on the 2nd floor for a tornado siren.

There are a couple Jeff size projects that have to get done before I can dig into much of anything.  A) Building a few walls, taping, mudding, sanding, etc.  B) Going through & cleaning up all the extra wiring on the ceiling & C) Running new wires to get some of the existing lights on different switches & add a few switches/lights to get the lighting arranged in a way that it works with the layout we are hoping to achieve down there.

We spent an entire day down there already cleaning up spiderwebs, cleaning up the spray paint mess I've made as I've done other house projects & sorting through boxes & boxes still packed from our move 1 1/2 years ago.  Actually some of the boxes are still packed from 4-5 years ago when 3 newborns invaded our life and 1/2 of our old house had to go into storage.  I've got a garage sale pile building.  And things sorted & re-packed a lot more organized so when the basement is done & I want decorations for down there, they are safe & ready to go!

It was kind of like Christmas down there sorting & finding things I literally had not seen in 4-5 years.  I actually got decorations up in the hallway & office!

So here's my current conundrum.

It's winter & cold & I need a project.  Its going to be a bit before I can start painting & painting & painting in the basement.  But I need something to do for the time being.  Most of the projects we have left are bigger.

1. The Kitchen:  Which will cost me more $$ than I can spend right now
2. The Master Bed/Bath:  Which will also cost $$ as we are in need of new bedding.  And I have zero ideas as to what I really want to do in there.
3. The upstairs hallway storage closet & dresser:  Which really I could probably rock out in a couple of days, other than that I want to sand & paint the dresser & given that my paint nook in the basement is no more, that has to wait until its warm outside.


There, of course, are bits & pieces of all my other projects with loose ends that need tied up which is what I SHOULD be doing.  But seeing that basement & wanting to dig into that big project, my mind is having a hard time focusing on all those scattered little things.  I need some motivation to do THAT!!  Also because I know if I dig into a big project now, I will get done half-ass because its just passing my time until I can get to the basement.  And because we can't put $$ into 2 big projects at a time.

Instead, I'm sitting on my butt, blogging.
But what I really want to do is paint the kitchen!!!