For Memories' Sake

My children are growing up and changing, and though it's exciting for me, it also pains my heart, because it seems to be happening too darn fast. It also doesn't help me feel any younger, which is a hard one for me to swallow lately. In the last couple of years I have started to feel (and I think look) old! There are daily evidences that remind me of this: this week I'm officially done nursing Tori and all her bottles have been thrown out and replaced by sippy cups, Austin can beat me in arm wrestling now, Anne Elyse is a jump rope star and singing rhymes such as, "Ice cream, ice cream cherries on top, who is your boyfriend? I forgot!" and Austin, when I asked him how do you spell hottest (one of his spelling words), he replies with, "She is the hottest girl in school." Sometimes I wish I could go back to this:

BUT maybe just for a day {smile}, because when they were this little, and I had 3 babies in 3 years, it was seriously the hardest time in my life, because it was so much work and so exhausting physically and emotionally. Look how cute they were {and still are}! Tyler was the cutest baby, and I think my chunkiest even though he was born 1 month early.

Date: February 2006

Location: Rochester, New York

For Memories' Sake

I had a blog epiphany the other day when our family was looking through some old photo albums (from before digital cameras when you actually printed your pictures). We had so much fun recalling the memories from these photos, I thought I should do a once a week post titled, "For Memories' Sake," and blog about something from my past. Introducing, post #1!

Keith just had another birthday last week, and we've been teasing him that he's now on a "slippery slope to 40." Here's a picture of him on his 30th birthday. Look how young he looks! :)

date: January 2006

location: our home, Rochester, New York

Chilly Willy Nilly

What the heck? We've had snow on the ground at our house for a WEEK now. It's also been super coldy - like in the 20's during the day. It's been beautifully sunny though, which has been refreshing, but after a week of clear skies, I start feeling weird. Like things are not right, like we need a good cleansing rain to come and moisten the grass and trees (and my nostrils)! All this dry, cold air is making me feel like I have alligator skin. Good thing rain is in the forecast for tomorrow. The kids were lucky to have snow to play in over the Christmas break.

14 Months!

As of late, baby girl is really starting to get into things and explore her little world. She currently has a big bruise on her cheek from climbing the pantry and then falling. I caught her the other day on top of the table with the bag of Oreo cookies. I love the look on her face here. She totally looks as if she's thinking, "Oops, I got caught!

She is also so sweet with her little baby doll right now. It melts my heart the way she gives it pats on the back and cracks me up the way she sucks with the baby when she gives it its bottle. I swear today she was trying to get me to breast feed it!

2010's Grand Finale!

No, it wasn't an awesome fireworks display but a ride in a tow truck! Considering all the vehicle problems we've had this year, we couldn't end the year without just one more breakdown. It's so wonderful to spend hundreds of dollars towing your car and getting it fixed.

***Note, this picture is not of our truck, but this is what we looked like. The kids and I rode in OUR truck on the flat bad and Keith rode up front. Apparently it's legal to do that in our state. And since it was 22 degrees last night, we even had the engine running with the heat on. We were about 45 minutes from home, and it was lucky we didn't have to call a taxi to get the family home or that would've been another $100.

We took the family to Cabela's for a New Year's Eve outing and then planned to go out to dinner(something we don't get to do very often), but when we were leaving the Cabela's parking lot, we heard a loud snap. I looked at Keith and said, "What was that?!" He gave me the "bug eyes" and hopped out of the truck. Yep, the part that basically steers the vehicle sheared off and was laying on the ground, so you could turn the steering wheel, but the wheels weren't turning. Now, even though I'm sounding a bit sarcastic here, I DO recognize this was a blessing, because if we had been driving down the freeway at 70 mph (or driving at all), we most likely would have crashed. It could have been very, very bad. So, I really feel like it was a blessing that it happened where it did (although Keith says it could've happened in the driveway before we left) :) We knew the power steering was having issues with this truck anyway, so it's not a big surprise, but considering the (bad) luck we've had with vehicles this year, I really did NOT want to spend the first day of 2011 with a broken down vehicle...and it's not like we have junker cars either.

My Durango (with only 80,000 miles) is still sitting in the driveway, in need of a new engine that we don't have money to purchase and have somebody put it in (it will cost about $5,000), this is the 3rd break down with the truck this year, and our new Passat that we had to buy in October because Keith's employer pulled his work van because of budget issues, broke down before we even had the license plates on it. That cost us about $500, but it's been working good ever since (crossing my fingers here). Thankfully, we have my Grandma's car to use until she gets back from Utah, and thankfully it will probably only cost about $300 to fix the truck if Keith does the work himself, but it cost $180 to tow it home, so when all is said and done, it will be about $500...just as long as it's not THOUSANDS of dollars!

I was texting my sister while waiting for the tow truck to come, and my sister said, "Well, you could fake like you're drunk. AAA is giving free tows tonight to anybody who is drunk." That made me laugh right out loud! I must say, Keith and I handled this situation pretty well. There was no crying, no swearing, no getting upset. It was as if we deal with this all the time (seems like we do). We just calmly started calling tow truck companies and said, "Oh, well. It is what it is." The kids did surprisingly well too considering it was 4 hours from the time it broke down until the tow truck came and we got home. All with not having had dinner and very hungry. Unfortunately, they are all to familiar with what to do when the car breaks down!

Grandma's Christmas Tree

We spent Christmas Eve at my parent's house this year. Tori was quite fascinated with Grandma's tree. Grandma has life-sized birdies with real feathers in the tree, and I think Tori thought they were real (at least Clive the dog thinks they are! Grandma says he snatches them out of the tree and then runs)!

Today I'll be taking our tree down, which seems wrong since we woke up to about 3 inches of fresh, beautiful snow, but I'm ready to be done with the fallen needles, Tori breaking ornaments and begging for candy canes off of it, and the dog sleeping underneath it thinking my velvet tree skirt is his new dog bed. Our little tree has seen some abuse over the past few weeks. I can't help but sing the song, "I Cry The Day That I Take The Tree Down," the whole time I'm de-decorating!

From Christmas 2010

From Christmas 2010

Tyler Gets Glasses

A few months ago, Keith said to me, "Tyler has crazy eyes!" I was like, "What are you talking about?!" Then I started paying more attention to his eyes and sure enough his right eye would wander out towards the side of his head occasionally (but not A LOT). Then of course I was feeling guilty that I, as his mother, was not paying enough attention to even notice this. So, hoping that it was not that big of a deal, I thought, we'll just watch it, and I also knew he had an eye screening coming up at school. He had the screening, and nothing was sent home saying that he had any issues. I even told his teacher I had some concerns about his eyesight and asked her if she was sure there wasn't anything unusual or concerning that came up at their eye exam. She said no. So, about a month later, he had his 5-year well child visit at the pediatrician, and Tyler did the eye chart just fine with his left eye, but when we tested his right eye he clammed up and wouldn't answer what any of the letters on the chart were. The doctor said let's get him checked out by an opthamologist just to be sure. The day of his appointment was the day of our big snow storm, so we had to cancel and reschedule. Finally, we got to the doctor a couple of weeks later, and to my surprise, the doctor said his eyesight in his right eye is VERY poor. I was kind of shocked actually. The doctor asked if he did a lot of squinting, and I was like, "Yeah! He does!" In fact, one of his nicknames is Ty Ty the stink eye, because he always looks like he's giving you the stink eye. So, now he has glasses and he also has to wear an eye patch on his left eye, which even though the eyesight is still much better on that side, still not perfect. Basically the patch will retrain the brain to look through the bad eye and hopefully strengthen it. Poor guy. I'm glad we caught it now so that when he starts to learn how to read soon, he'll be able to see. He looks pretty cute in them as you can see, and he's been very good about wearing them. When he put them on for the first time, his face lit up and he got a big grin on his face. I asked him, "Can you see now?!" and he said, "Yes!!"

A Quick Funny

Being that we live in the shadow of a 14,000 ft. volcano, the town we live in has sirens that will go off when and if there is a threat of a lahar (a large mudslide that is created when a volcano erupts). About once every few months they test these sirens, and the kids have a drill they practice at school. There is 20 minutes to evacuate the valley floor once the sirens go off. Our house actually is located on one of the evacuation routes on the hill above the valley, but the school is down in town. This is what I overheard Anne Elyse saying the other day when she was pretend playing school: "Boys and girls, mountain Reindeer has blowed up."

13 Months

I've made it a point to take a picture on the first of each month when Tori turns one month older. Here she is at 13 months. I swear she's already showing signs of heading to the "dark side." We have even had a few mini temper tantrums already. Oh, boy, I don't think I'm ready for this!

Snow!

Thanksgiving week we had a lot of snow - very unusual for this time of year. We had about 8 inches at our house. The kids ended up getting the WHOLE week off school instead of just Thursday and Friday. I actually didn't mind too much, since my sister was in town, and we didn't have to worry about the school schedule. Keith was also home Tuesday and Wednesday, because we couldn't get off our hill, so it was a nice treat having him home ALL week, even though I'm paying for it on this week's paycheck. One thing I DID mind though, was that our power went out for about 30 hours starting Tuesday around 5 p.m. (just as I was starting to make dinner) and didn't come back on until Wednesday night around 9:30 p.m. Even though we have our fabulous fireplace to help keep things warm, obviously the blower doesn't work when the power is out, and when it's 15 degrees outside, the house can only keep so warm. Also, since we're on a well system for our water, if there's no power, there's also no water. It was pretty much a no-brainer to take the kids Wednesday morning and head up to my parent's house. Keith stayed home to get the thing-a-ma-jig hooked up to the house so we could run the generator. Of course, by the time he got it all wired into the house, he said he had the generator running for about an hour and then the power came back on. At least it's all ready to go the next time. We've already had two power outages here this Fall, so I'm sure there will be more to come before the winter's over.

It was Tori (and Ruger's) first time in the snow!

Tori loved looking out the window at all the "white stuff." You could tell she was thinking, "What IS this?"

We enjoyed our Thanksgiving feast at my brother's house this year. It was great to be with all my siblings and my parents. We decided that was the first we'd ALL been together for Thanksgiving since 2002!!

Baby girl partaking of her first feast:

Just had to post these cute Turkey's made by Austin and Anne Elyse:

If there was one thing this snowstorm did, it was put me in the MOOD for Christmas. I've already got my mantle decorated, and we're going to get our tree tomorrow after Keith gets home from work. I love this time of the year!