the Very Busy Week

My head is still spinning from our very fun and very busy weekend and week. The weather is getting warmer and we are starting to do lots of fun things that we couldn't do last year because I was on bedrest.
On Friday night Ian took Caleb and Julian to a father-son campout organized by our stake. They all had a great time, even if they didn't get a great sleep, and are looking forward to the next campout. It was fun to meet up with their friends from school, especially their buddy Beckett.


On Saturday afternoon we headed over to Valencia for a birthday party. We met Abigail and Thomas in the NICU when they were first born around the same gestational age as Caleb and Julian. It is so wonderful to see that all of our kids are doing so well after their early births and it was fun to celebrate with Abigail and Thomas.


On Monday we went to the beach for the first time in two years with Ian's brother and his family and some friends. Jack thought that the sand was very tasty, and Caleb and Julian couldn't get enough of playing in the waves. Next time Ian and I will dress better for the water.


On Tuesday we took the boys to some of the parks around here including Aidan's Place and Coldwater Canyon. The boys loved playing and playing and we had to drag them away.



On Wednesday we went to Disneyland. Ian took the day off of work and all four kids joined us (but no camera- it's just too much to deal with). We got there at 9am and left at nearly 7pm. It was crazy, but unbelievably fun.
On Thursday we had our last day of the friends school we've been doing with all our neighborhood buddies. We've had such a great year so far and are looking forward to doing the Joy School curriculum this fall. Everybody came over for lunch. It was chaos but so nice to enjoy all the growing families around us.


For the next few days, I think that we are all going to have stomachaches.

Mother's Day Milestones

The past couple of weeks before Mother's Day it seems like we've been hitting major milestones daily at hyperdrive speed. Christian and Jack are both sitting up for 10 minutes at a time, they're crawling on their bellies, they've started singing in the mornings (well, I call it singing, I don't about other people), eating 4 solid feedings a day, Jack's first tooth erupted but poor Christian is the one who's been through teething misery, Caleb and Julian transitioned to big boy beds and we're on our fourth week of potty training.


Losing the diapers and the cribs seem like letting the last ties to babyhood/toddlerhood slip away and we're bravely (sort of) entering childhood. If potty training is our first peek into this world, it's been rather interesting. Looking back, I think that we kind of did it all wrong. That being said, I don't know that there's really anyway to do this right. A bazillion factors are connected to this process- the kid's readiness and desire (not the same thing), our attention and ability to teach them (I've learned the hard way that making them wait a few minutes is not a good idea but sometimes I just can't get there!), finding the right rewards/reactions to failures and successes, etc.

I could go into more details, but let me just say that potty training Caleb and Julian has been one of the most overwhelming and educational things that I have ever done. There's the accidents, the fighting to get them to go potty before we leave the house, the false alarms... it all takes a toll. Then there's the grand naptime when everyone goes down and Caleb and Julian have taken turns for about an hour getting up and down from the potty as I try to figure out if they're stalling or just having a hard time (it's 50/50 but I don't want to take chances) and at last I get them down and collapse on the floor outside their room because my arms feel like they are literally going to fall off only to hear the babies waking up for their turn. That's when the song 'Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel' made sense to me in a way it hadn't before. I'm not sure if I can recommend the method of learning patience by having it beaten into you when you're down, but it's good for those who need to get it in a hurry.

So besides Ian making an amazing breakfast for me, for Mother's Day weekend we went to visit the rose garden at the Huntington in Pasadena. It was breathtakingly beautiful, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of beautiful buds have opened into gorgeous blooms and the air was clouded with perfume. Growing and changing isn't easy, I was reminded of that when we took the boys to the potty during our visit (diapers would have eliminated that), Christian got cranky (more teething?), Jack tipped over on the bench (ouch!) The journey is messy, but we've got to get there to get to the blossom. While we were taking in the day, a middle aged couple strolled by us and said 'It goes by so fast, we've just been talking about sending our kids to college this year. Make sure you enjoy these years!'

Yeah, we are enjoying our little buds while we can. We are.