::disney with the fam 1::

The kiddos and I were lucky enough to get invited on a trip to Disneyland with the grandparents and Cammon & Lorri's family.  Kris had to keep on aworkin' so we could afford our rock & roll lifestyle, so I had to man up and take all the kiddos to the airport by myself!

They were all really good on the flights.  They're pretty great little travelers.  We made it to SoCal and my Dad came and picked us up (which was soooo nice.)  And there we were.  We had a pretty great room with a lot of space and enough beds for all the silly people.



Here are the kiddos on the first morning.  Isn't Lucy's outfit to die for?  Her mouse ears were a major hit at the park.  I had so many ladies ask me where I got them.
Sandy was pretty delighted by her outfit too.  He's a Lucy fan.  And a Minnie Mouse fan.



And off we went!  We did lots of swapping around of babies and kids and taking turns to go on rides.  Sandy is such a good sport.  He's hardly scared of anything at all.  I think we were maybe on Thunder Mountain in this photo?


And here's the crew of kiddos.  They got along really well.  There was some good bonding and hardly any dissension.  But poor Gigi didn't have the best trip.  I think it was all a little intense for her.



But look at them all in the cute little Disney outfits that Gram got for them!  So stinking cute!




Sillies!



Grandpa loved carrying Lucy around in the Ergo.  She kept patting his beard with this really perplexed look on her faced.  I couldn't ever get quite fast enough to catch that moment on camera though.

She took some pretty great naps in the carrier and was very patient getting dragged around all day long.

And here's Grandpa with his girls.  He's such a great kid person.  He loves the kids and they love him.  We like this photo because it really shows the personality of these silly little ones.

Sandy picked out his souvineer on the first day.  There was no dithering about what he would get.  He knew exactly what he wanted.  A LIGHT SABER.  And once he got it he didn't want to do any more rides or shows.  All he wanted to do was play with the saber and norrowly miss slicing random passersby in half.  All this was even though I wouldn't let him take it out of the packaging until we got back to the hotel--mean mom.

We were waiting by Winnie the Pooh while Gram & Max went on some big exciting rides.  Sandy made some friends and played serious Jedi games while I fed the baby and talked to Dad.  It was a lot of fun.



And here's my sweet little guy sleeping with his light saber in hand.  Happy boy.  Max was happy too.  He got to spend lots of time with Gram and to go on lots of big rides, two of his favorite things.

::::

Kris looks all tired and scruffy because he'd just gotten back from his Moab trip and he was tired and scruffy but happy.

But honestly that just didn't impress Lucy when it came time for her to eat her dinner.
She was even unimpressed with his special baby feeding faces.



As you can see she's really only interested in me.  You can read it on her face--"you're having HIM feed me because, why?"



I love them both.



And by the way, lest you think Kris is better at this than he really is, I fed her 99% of that baby food and he just took over for the last 1%.  But he's still awesome.  Mostly because of his baby feeding faces.

::swim meet saturday::

On Saturday Kris was gone out of town for a biking trip to Moab--having lots of fun which was great.    Max had a swim meet down in Albuquerque for his team.  I didn't want to skip this one because we had only been to one before this and a lot of the other meets were out of town, quite a bit further away.  I thought it would probably be good just to make this one happen.

Anyway I had to get everybody up and in the car pretty early--early enough that it was still dark as we pulled out of the garage.  But of course we were still a little bit later than we were supposed to be. Construction, traffic, getting crazy little people out of the door.

When we got there Max went to warm up and I had to find a seat in the bleachers--much easier said than done.  But we finally wedged ourselves in amoung people's stuff and claimed a spot.  Max was so nervous about his events that he was stalking along the side of the pool wiggling his loose tooth.  Wiggling and wiggling and wiggling until suddenly it popped right out.  He came up to me and handed me his tooth with water and blood all dripping down his chin.  It was weird.



It was good though because it was a distraction for him and he was pretty excited that it finally came out!





We were lucky enough to inadvertantly choose a seat right next to a family of our patients.  I didn't recognize them but the mom recognized Max.  Their little boy played with Sandy the whole time which saved my bacon because we were there for about 5 hours.  We got there at 8AM and didn't get to leave until right about 1PM.  Lucy napped twice.  Sandy got hungry 45 times.



So I did a really good job getting everybody there and bringing a few snacks and entertainment, BUT I forgot to bring towels.  That was a little inconvenient to say the least.  One of the other moms, much more experienced and on top of things than me lent me her extra, so that saved us from sitting in a puddle the entire time.



Max did great.  See him in the bright blue NAC cap?  He was very nervous about a lot of things but I thought he did really well.  He wasn't super fast, but he was steady.  He did a 50 meter breast stroke, a 50 meter freestyle and an 100 meter free.  On the two 50 meter races he wasn't last.  Which is awesome considering it's been a lot of work for him to get faster.  On the 100 he was last but he stayed strong the whole time and didn't quit.



I couldn't have been more proud of him, honestly.

The rest of the day we spent driving around Albuquerque trying to track down the new series of Lego minifigures.  We got home at about 5PM.  It was a long day and exhausting but I was glad we invested the time in Max and went to cheer him along.  He's growing into a big brave special boy and we love him.

::sunday sunset::

This sunset is from last Sunday, but tonight's sunset--if I could've captured it--probably would've been even more dramatic.  There were storm clouds and sun rays.



I loved the whispy golden rainish clouds in this sunset too though.



And while I was out taking photos of the sky I noticed one of my rosebushes had several flowers on it--I've really enjoyed the bushes.  This yellow one matched the sunset.  Gorgeous, right?  I love our yard and our view!

::sneak peek::

We were invited to a little halloween FHE this week and the boys got to wear their costumes--well I only let them wear half of their costumes.  I don't want to ruin Halloween and waste showing them off then, but these pictures were just too cute and hilarious not to post.  These guys are such hams.



This particular duo of Capitain Hook (hookless actually right now) and Peter Pan looks like trouble to me.

And as a bonus, here's Lucy sucking down a whole jar of "just peas, green beans and asparagus" and loving it.  Ick.  I would be like, "Mom, how about a dash of salt at least??!"  Max asked me if I was feeding her wasabi.

::lucy update::

Lucy is my favorite baby girl, that's for sure.  But she's a project.  A work in progress.  She's never been a good sleeper--naps were terrible for ages and nighttime sleep was always just ok.  Naps are tough anyway because with her being the third she has to be dragged around constantly to all the other things the kids are doing.
But in the last month or so night sleeping has gotten really bad.  There were a few nights in a row in which she was essentially up all night crying off and on from gas or something else.  And the only way I can get her to sleep at all on nights like that is by taking her in the bed with us, and then that makes sleep stressful for Kris and I because we're sleeping but also thinking about not squashing a little person.

Anyway, bad nights.  Too bad to just endure.  The nights were never good but for most of the time there they were at an endurable level.


So anyway I started to work harder on figuring out what's going wrong.  I was already giving Lucy gas medicine and gripe water several times a day.  I would give her little tummy massages for 30 mins or so before bed, trying to get all of the gas out.  And usually I would get some.  But it still wasn't enough.



Sandy ended up taking acid reflux meds because of similar problems, so I finally decided that we needed to try it.  But only after I stopped eating dairy for a couple of weeks and that didn't seem to help at all.



So hopefully the Zantac will ultimately help.  She had a great night after she'd taken it for a couple of days, but then I started drinking milk again and that seemed to have a negative effect.  So I've stopped that again and we also started giving her more solids.  We were just letting her play around with real foods, and she wasn't actually eating much.  So I started spooning her purees too, and that's made her pretty happy.



So the report is that we've had a few good nights lately mixed up with the ones that are still bad.  I hope we're on the up & up because I'm doggone tired!



And look at her!  She was on the blanket playing with me, then next thing I knew she was across the room!  She's scooching backwards and getting up on her hands and knees all the time.  We're getting close to a crazy monkey crawler!



I might be tired, but I know by now that "this too shall pass" and it all passes too fast.  So I snuggle her up as much as I can.  She's my buddy!

::and now....more sandy eating ice cream::

Oh it was a sad sad day.



Sometimes we need to kill some time between when we pick Max up from school and when we drop him off at his swim practice.  Sometimes if the boys are good we'll do a quick ice cream run at McDonald's.



Sandy makes a huge mess.  Well actually it's not a terrible mess for a 3 yr old, but he ends up with ice cream dripping all down his hand to his wrist and his face all covered.  Almost every time I order the cones I ask the drive through person to make one regular cone and one short, small toddler cone.  Think they EVER make the cone smaller?  Even a tiny bit smaller?  NO.  It's always big, tall and huge.



So I finally gave up on asking for a small cone, and just asked for a cup and spoon.  I scooped off the top of the ice cream into the cup and enjoyed it for myself and Sandy had less ice cream to manage.



But he was SAD.  So sad.  So so sad that at first he refused to even eat or look at his cone.  So pitiful.



But eventually he did eat it of course and then he staged some very sad photos for me.  I was laughing so hard.  He looks so pitiful!  Like Puss in Boots with the big eyes, or those horrible Precious Moments statues or something.  I still ate my ice cream though.  The cuteness doesn't effect me that much anymore.  I know better.

::out to linner::

Saturday afternoon we stopped in to Bumblebee (one of our favorite local Mexican places) for linner. Probably closer to dinner than lunch, but it was one of those in between times.

Anyway, I just looked around at all the cute people at the table and had to take a few pictures.  We're so lucky to have these cute obnoxious kids living with us and belonging to us.

Lucy somehow slept through our whole meal. That never ever ever happens, and it was nice.  She woke up suddenly when everybody was done and she was a little confused about where we were exactly.  It was just in time for us to leave, so that was good.



Bumblebee is one of those great old fashioned places where they still give littles free ice cream cones at the end of their meal.  And it's real ice cream too.  We usually don't have time in our lives to sit through Sandy eating a cone at the end of dinner, but since this was linner and a saturday we were cool to hang out a little bit.



I said to Max, "Someday you're going to look at this picture and be embarrassed and wonder why you always made such dorky faces."  He said, "No, I'm going to look at it and think how funny I am."
I wonder who's ultimately going to be right?
He has an underdeveloped sense of shame, so honestly he might never be embarrassed by his younger strange and goofy self.  I guess time will tell.



Oh those cute little eyes.



Love my people.