Our Growing Family

A friend of mine recently asked why I hadn't updated my blog in over a year. The easiest answer was, I have four kids. Occasionally when I venture into public with my children in tow I get comments of, "I don't know how you do it." And the truth of the matter is, I don't. I have no idea how people manage to keep their kids clothed, fed, and educated and still have time for cutesy blog posts. By the time I have three or four children sleeping at night, I just want to sit back with a few Oreos, milk, The Big Bang Theory, and just breathe.

I was trying to figure out just where to start posting again. The last post was Hope starting kindergarten; do I post the picture of her starting first grade, lest you think she is repeating kindergarten? (She's not.)

I suppose it might be easiest to do a quick summation on our family members like a belated Christmas letter.

Andrew has been working for HP for over two years now. From this wife's point of view, it's great. He works from home with occasional travel. He enjoys what he's doing; he's in a capacity that draws on his strengths. He genuinely enjoys the people he works with. They are easily people that we would be friends with if they lived closer and weren't scattered across the country. Win-win-win.

I stay at home and go about with the children. I have many moments where my patience is tried and I'm worn ragged (lest you become deluded into thinking I'm a perfect mother), but I am happy to be a mother to my four beautiful, bright daughters. I still like crafting and party planning. We recently celebrated Joy and Grace's 4th birthday with a princess party. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/computerwhisperer/sets/72157633192157965/) I served as the president of our local mothers of multiples club last year, but was happy to release the title when I became pregnant with our fourth. I still enjoy the friendships within that club, as well as newer friendships with the local Mothers of Preschoolers. I enjoy helping out with publicity and flyer design for these groups. I spent last fall and spring accompanying Hope's elementary school choir, and it was a fun way to get to know some of the kids and families at school a little better.

Hope has really been enjoying school this year. I was worried a little when she spent the last half of kindergarten saying that she hated school, but I remember her telling me after school one day that even though she had a hard time getting up in the morning, that she really did like school. First grade is a fun year when they start really reading and writing. It's almost a little dangerous because we used to letter spell words that we didn't want the children to understand, and her brain is always going, listening all the time and figuring out what we're saying. I love listening to her read Magic Tree House books, and I love seeing her mind always going. This year has been special for her because she has truly developed a, as she would put it, BFF. She adores her friend, and loves recess and lunch all the more because they are together. She loves sleepovers and play dates and planning a lifelong friendship together. She's told me that they plan to be mommy friends together someday, and I hope that's true. I know that friendships come and go, but they serve great purposes at the points in our lives when we need them.

Joy is very loving and thoughtful. She often looks for ways to help out with the baby or bring you something you might need. She loves princesses and dancing and singing. She often sings her own made-up songs, or will sometimes do free play on the piano, as my mom said I did when I was her age.

Grace is our budding scientist. Hope really loves science (we thank Grandma Dori for encouraging this trait), but I don't remember her being this strongly interested in science at this age. Grace is currently our resident roly-poly rescuer (or murderer if you count all the suffocated ones that we've taken out of the wild and put in a plastic container). We can hArdly step out of the house without her searching the sidewalk and finding a roly poly.

Sage brightened our world last December. She came in her own time (four days late) in her own way (she broke her arm during birth), but she is a delight to the whole family. All of her big sisters love holding her and can't seem to give her enough loves and kisses. Hope will sometimes just randomly say, "Sage is soooo cute." Despite her broken arm (which has healed completely now), she is a good tempered baby. Andrew seems to think she might be our fussiest, but sometimes she has to cry a little longer than the others did while I am meeting the needs of older sisters. Or sometimes, the tired mommy or daddy just don't have the same energy and patience that they did when there was just one or three children. She is really quite patient and will reward me with sleeping in some mornings so I can help get kids ready for school or will happily play in her bouncy chair in the morning.

I hope to post more frequently, but as a mother of four and constantly encumbered with unpredictability, I'm not making any promises.

First Day of School

Here she is - my big Kindergartner, Hope. Yesterday was the first day of school, and Hope had been excited all summer long to be starting Kindergarten. For the last week she has been counting down days, we picked out her outfits for the week, and then it finally came. She was a little reserved when I dropped her off, but with a little coaxing (and no tears) she went her way. Day two went just as smoothly today and I think this is a good way to start the school year. Hope is attending Kennedy Elementary, the very same school her daddy went to, so that's pretty exciting for her too. Her sweet teacher even sent home a little crafty poem for the parents on the first day that might have needed their own comfort too (something going along with a bag of tea). Now if I can just get used to getting my own self to bed at a reasonable time so I can be ready for morning, we really will have a good year.

Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day to my wonderful husband, Andrew. I'm so glad to have been blessed to raise three beautiful daughters with a sweet and intelligent man. Here's the breakfast I made for Andrew, next to his favorite, root beer.  The tie pic in his hashbrowns is a free printable from Shindig Parties.   

 I saw this clever idea online at Oopsey Daisy Blog to make "pop" wrappers for the soda-loving daddies. She had a printable Coke wrapper that was inspiring, but Andrew is more of a root beer fan so I decided to do my own version. 

 The Nutrition Facts I adopted from Oopsey Daisy, she did them so well. 

If you started your family in 2006 (the A&W logo says "since 1919", so we changed ours to since 2006), you're welcome to use this file. We used the mini cans (we found ours at Target). You can download it here. 

Preschool Graduate

Hope has officially graduated from Preschool.  We had her in a two-day a week program that she has really come to enjoy. It has helped her get used to the classroom routine and ready for Kindergarten. She'll be a young Kindergartener (next year they're bumping the birthday cutoff earlier), but we feel that she is ready. I don't know who is more excited, Hope or myself.  She's pretty excited that she'll get to attend the same Elementary School that her daddy went to. 

I'm not super into the ceremony of the whole thing, but her class performed a couple of cute songs which is always fun.

 

Here's Hope and her teacher.

I put together a goldfish snack, and using the patriotic ones that are in stores now, went with the One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish idea. Here's how they came out.

 I also signed up to bring a dessert and decided to try cupcakes in Ice Cream Cones for the first time. The novelty of it was pretty cool for the kids, but as usually they liked the frosting best. Note: very simple to try, you just put the batter straight in the cones and put the cones in a muffin tin so they have something to stand up in when you put them in the oven. The super hard part is the transportation because they kept falling over in the tin in the car (and yes, I was driving carefully).   

Happy Easter

The girls were pretty spoiled this year with three Easter egg hunts. Fortunately, the candy somehow disappeared and we managed to make it through without too many sugar crashes. Here are some pics from our Easter events. Here we are Egg dying with cousin, Giselle. I found a couple of great tips online, first, to use puppy pads (for potty training puppies) for easy cleanup for spills. It worked great, we laid it across our dying surface and it soaked up the spills right away. Second, to use a muffin tin for drying eggs. We still ended up putting some in the carton because each girl had her own segmented carton, but it just gets soggy with the dye that drains off of it.  Maybe next year we'll have a muffin tin for each girl to put her eggs in.  I liked the idea, because it'll drain off into the tin without getting the carton soggy.

 Serious hunting...

 Face full of anticipation

 I found an egg...in your basket

"Let me know when you find them all, I'll be on the slide" - Grace

 I can't even remember what bossy comment she was saying, and frankly I don't know if I even heard her over my laughter at her expression. The hands-on-hips stance is getting more frequent around here.

Grace's First Shiner

Exactly two days after her second birthday, and happy birthday pictures, Grace fell on the cement and hit her head. The bump on her forehead, drained down to her eye and in a matter of hours she had a black eye.  Hope commented that evening that Grace's eye "had a rainbow over it." Another day or two later and it just kept looking worse. Here's the t-shirt I made for the occasion and the shiner in all it's glory.

Changes in the Girls' Room

Last month we made some changes in the Girls' room, the most noticeable one was a bunk/loft bed for Hope and the twins. I had been looking at this bed about a year ago, and happened to think about it again and looked on Craigslist at the right time and found an amazing deal that I couldn't pass up. So, here's the Doll House Loft bed. The twins sleep on the bottom, and Hope loves her Big Girl bed on the top. I love that everyone is excited about their own bed, not that I don't make visits when getting girls settled down. 

Here's Hope peeking through her top bunk window.

Here are all three girls up on Hope's bunk.

And here's the other change I made.  Hope has her own dresser and that's fine for her.  For a while, with the twins clothes, I had three large baskets and I would simply sort their clothes into tops, bottoms, and pajamas. But then I felt like I was looking for things within the baskets a lot, or I'd find one top from a set, but not the coordinating top for her sister, which is frustrating when you know you have it.  So, thanks to Janine (another twin mom friend of mine) who said she hung all her twin's clothes up in sets, I was inspired to do the same. Things are a lot more organized and easy to find coordinating sets. Although, now Joy and Grace think they get to have more input in what they wear and try to pick things out without considering mommy's selling points, such as, how easily can they take off these clothes or will their knees get skinned up at the park in this outfit? Skinned knees have been a more frequent occurrence lately and create a lot of drama because neither Joy nor Grace wants to wear a band-aid, and they both can't handle seeing the boo-boo and persistently try to pull their clothes down to cover it. If they're wearing a dress, they're pulling it down every time they sit down.  I made the mistake of dressing in Joy in short pajamas one night forgetting about the boo-boo and had to go change her into pants because she was so distressed that she couldn't pull her shorts down to cover the boo-boo on her knee.