Stories that just need to be told.

I've been talking to my dad lately about genealogy. He helped me create a fan chart of my ancestors and it was really interesting. I found myself googling the names off the fan chart, just to see if any interesting stories existed. I found a few and it was strangely comforting to hear of the struggles my ancestors had went through.

Now, before you roll your eyes. This post is NOT a bunch of stories about my ancestors. While they are interesting, I'm sure they're just interesting to me, not to all of you.

However, these little stories made me realize how important this blog may be to others someday. There are a bunch of little experiences that happen that don't warrant an entire blog post, but they're things that might seem interesting to someone down the road.

*Matt put together Pudee's crib one night while I was sick. Nothing serious, just basically a combination of sick of being pregnant syndrome, migraine headache and a slight head cold. That night, he brought in the big box of crib and changing table parts into our bedroom and started putting everything together. The girls ran around unaware of what this new crib meant. Holynd kept giving Matt instructions. Some of which were completely incorrect, while others were strangely accurate. When all was said and done, the crib and the changing table were everything I wanted. Matt moved the changing table into Maddox's room and then proceeded to push the crib in too. However, when he reached our bedroom doorway, it became shockingly obvious that the crib was too wide to fit through. Now, my husband is smart, handsome, funny and patient. But, everyone's patience has a breaking point and Matt's breaking point is when he has to put things together. So, when he faced the reality that the crib would have to come apart, in order to fit through the door, he wasn't having it. He took the doors off their hinges and placed the doors in the hallways. The crib barely made it through both doorways, sans doors, and the crib was placed in the perfect place.

**We bought our Volvo a little bit before I found out I was pregnant with Maddox. I remember driving around with Matt, totally unaware of my new pregnancy. I looked back at the girls in their carseats and then turned to Matt and said, "What are we going to do with all this room?". I'm sure that gave someone in heaven a chuckle because eight months later we placed a third carseat in that Volvo.

**I was there the day my grandma had to be taken to the hospital. I spent the day in her home with my mom and my little brothers. I was a week away from having Holynd and was still going back and forth about her name. I was pppprrrrrreeeeetttttttttttty sure I wanted to name her Holynd, but I was scared of having a baby without a name firmly picked out. I'm not like that now, I'm ok with being unsure until I see the baby. The last thing my grandma said to me was, "Take care of that baby. Take care of Holynd". That settled it for me. We were going to name her Holynd.

**Sloane struggled with colic from about 6 weeks old to about 3 and a half months old. It broke my heart, especially because she was such a good baby for the first six weeks. Every night she would start screaming at about 6pm and keep screaming until around midnight, sometimes later. It. Was. Awful. I tried everything to comfort her. The only thing that slightly worked was if I paced the hallway really fast and sang, Praise to the Man. For some reason, she loved that hymn. At 3.5 months old, all the sudden she found her thumb. She was a completely different baby. I'd feed her, place her in her crib and she'd stick her little thumb in her mouth and fall asleep. I had remembered on one of her ultrasounds being shown that she was sucking her thumb. It was almost like she needed to figure out how to do it once she was here. She's still a loyal thumb sucker.

**Matt got rear-ended 2 weeks before we got married. His Civic was totaled, but they gave us a rental car to get us by until we bought a new one. It was a Nissan Sentra. It sounded like it had a hamster running on a wheel under the hood. That car was hilarious. A few days after our wedding, we went shopping for things that our little home still needed. We ended up with a TV, a dining room table and bags of other odds and ends. We had completely forgot how small that stupid Sentra was, but somehow, after an hour of moving things around, we got it all to fit. I had to ride all the way home hunched over with my seat smashed forward and not fully straightened-up.

**We had our reception on a separate day of our actual wedding day. We got married on a Friday and had our reception on a Saturday. I'm still trying to decide if this was a good idea or not. Matt and I ran down to Payson first thing Saturday morning so I could get my hair done and my mom could help me into my dress. After we both were ready, we hopped in the stupid Sentra and started driving to the reception center. When we got off the freeway, my mom called, "Your dad is hungry and wants you to pick him up something to eat." (My dad was at the reception center setting up.) So we decided to go through a Wendy's drive-through. There we were, all decked out in our wedding garb in the Wendy's drive-up. I think the kid working at the window did a triple-take. I'm sure he wondered what kind of jerk would take his new wife to a Wendy's drive-up for their wedding dinner.

I'm hoping to keep posting these little stories as they come to mind. Maybe one day our kids and their kids will sit around and laugh at how weird Matt and I were.

:)

The Date

Matt talked Holynd into going to lunch and a movie instead of going swimming. She agreed wholeheartedly when we told her in would be in a theater. She loves the movies, which works out great for Matt because he likes them too. I'm not a movie person, so Matt's been looking for a movie companion for awhile.

They saw The Lorax and said it was really fun!

The babies got to go shopping with Mommy. They were both really good, which was weird because Maddox does not like to shop. He must've known that we were shopping for things to go with Mommy's birthday gift. ;)

It was an awesome afternoon.

I'm off to make another gloriously-ugly sticker chart. Maybe one day I'll splurge and do it on the computer.... Maybe...

PS: The Easter bunny has started shopping. Actually, he started shopping a month ago. I like to buy spring/summer things. Easter is slowly turning into one of my favorite holidays.

It's Off To Work We Go...

The first time Holynd decided to stop being potty-trained, I was in shambles. I had a new baby at home, a middle child who did not like the idea of being a middle child and then my potty-training rebel.

At one point, Matt came home to find me sobbing in our bathroom.

It was a good time.

My mom, having raised a child like Holynd, suggested a sticker chart. "She'll like to see how good she's doing. She's a perfectionist.".

However, having been a child much like Holynd, I was worried that all she'd do was use the bathroom 30 times in one day in order to fill up the chart and get a reward.

We eventually got passed the regression without a chart and life moved on.

About a month ago, Holynd was having potty-training trouble again. Not anything as bad as before, she was just waiting too long to go and having small accidents. A lot of the time, I would find her wiggling like crazy outside of the bathroom. She knew that if she stood up the inevitable would happen, so she just sat there wiggling and crying until I came and carried her to the potty.

I had recently decided that Holynd could use a few chores around the house, just to give her a tiny bit of responsibility. Things like putting her dirty clothes in the hamper and learning how to make her bed. Nothing crazy.

I decided to put my mom's suggestion to the test and went with a sticker chart for chores. She had three chores a day. Her morning chore was to make her bed and put her sippy cup in the sink. Her afternoon chore was going potty before and after her naps. And, finally, her nighttime chore was putting her toothbrush away and putting her dirty clothes in the hamper. She could earn three stickers a day, BUT if she had an accident I had to take two stickers off the chart. (She also loses her mimi privileges.) Once she got to 30 stickers, she got to go on a date with her dad, just the two of them.

When I was explaining the chart to her, I kept thinking, "This is lame and she knows it's lame!" After I explained everything to her, I asked what she wanted to do for her date. "I want daddy to take me swimming!" "Ok.... Do you want the whole family to go? Or just daddy?" "Just daddy and me".

Okie doke.

Matt's a trooper and agreed.

The chart I made up was drawn on a lined piece of paper. It's pretty much the ugliest thing you've ever seen.



Last night, she filled it up! She was so excited she was kissing and hugging everyone.

We made a big deal, took lots of pictures and celebrated.

It took her about 2 weeks to fill it up. She got a total of 4 stickers taken away for small accidents.

I will admit, I'm skeptical about how long it will keep working, but hey! you take what you can get. ;)

PS: mimi = blanket. Holynd has two mimi's that she likes to sleep with every night. If she has an accident she has to go a night without them. It's what got us through the last regression.

I'm 4 months old...

My name is Maddox and I'm 4 months old.

I also hate tummy time.

So I thought about it for a minute and.....

... decided to just roll over!

Go Maddox!!

**We thought it was a fluke, but he's done it 4 times.

4 rollovers = bragging rights**

Age: 4 months

Length: 27.5" 90%

Weight: 14lbs 23%

Head: 41cm 17%

We love you Pudster!

In Case You Were Wondering....

I don't know about you all, but sometimes when I read blogs and moms are blogging about all that they accomplished during the day, I always think.... "I wonder what her kids were doing?"

For the most part, Holynd and Sloane keep themselves entertained in the playroom. That's one of the perks of having kids close in age, there's always a built-in playmate nearby. Most of the time it involves a huge mess, but that's what the playroom is for.

There are a couple of times during the day where they want to be right under my feet. 98% of the time, there aren't any toys upstairs. The girls will drag some up during the day and, when they move on to something else, I'll throw the toy back down to the playroom. It's not the greatest system, but it works.

I've blogged before about how I try to cook dinner while the kids are down for naps, but that doesn't always happen. Not every meal I make can be kept warm until dinner. Somethings just have to be prepared right before dinnertime.

Last night was one of those nights. I made Parmesan Sage Pork Chops and Roasted Red Potatoes. I did do the potatoes ahead of time because it's pretty hard to screw them up, but the pork chops had to be done right before dinner. This meant that chaos pretty much broke out while I was busy cooking.

I decided to periodically take pictures of what was going on. That way when the girls get older and complain about how they can't ever cook without their kids running crazy, I'll have proof that they did the same thing to me.

"Spice Castles" are really popular in this household. The pantry is childproofed, but when I'm cooking, I open and close the pantry door a lot. This leaves plenty of opportunities for the girls to get into the food storage and play around. At this point, Holynd had only gotten into the spices, the canned items hadn't been touched yet.


Again, I do have childproofers for the fridge, but I don't want to take the lock off 40 times while I'm cooking. Thus, many opportunities to get into the fridge are presented. Here we have Sloane eating a zillion grapes.



ZuZu pets are pretty popular while I'm cooking because the wood floor works great for races. Here we have Holynd getting her ZuZu Princess Carriage ready for some kind of journey. It's so much fun cooking while little robotic pets run into your feet.

When I finally got everything in the oven, I noticed that the grapes had went missing. They were found here, scattered down the hallway.

These two are getting to be such good friends.

Changing into princess clothes is a must-do in this household. Holynd loves to dress up while I'm in the kitchen because she can wear her little princess shoes and "click" on the floor.

Pudee gets in on the action every once-in-awhile and decides that he's hungry and wants to eat RIGHT NOW! But, for the most part, his sisters take care of providing our daily dose of chaos.

Here, the girls decided to get all the shoes out of the closet so that Sloane could put on a pair of "princess shoes".

I decided to not post about Holynd going potty and trying to wipe her bum by herself. This left a really ugly mess in the bathroom while the pork chops were in the oven. People keep telling me that boys are worse. I have at least one full-fledged poopie crime scene occurrence everyday. How much worse can it get?! When asked why she didn't wait for Mommy to come help her, Holynd answered, "But mommy, you were cooking and I didn't want to bother you. So I just did it myself." That's very thoughtful of you Holynd.

So there you have it. A documented depiction of what goes on the hour while I'm cooking.