Remember last year when we had all of the "pets"? We got the fish had some tadpoles for a short time, then there was this, and this.

A couple of weeks ago while doing some yardwork, we happened upon this:

He was enormous (obviously) and Woofy was dying to catch him (like he's a hunter). I managed to keep Woof in check and grabbed our new friend. He was in one of my flower gardens and was very well camoflauged - he looks like a clump of dirt, doesn't he?
The girls were thrilled with our new find. I picked him up and we put him on the patio for further inspection. He hunkered down and closed his eyes so we couldn't see him (someone needs to inform the animal world that this doesn't work). Eventually he began to hop away and got to the side of the house. I found some worms while I was digging up the garden and brought them over. HE ATE THEM!! It was AWESOME!
Froggy (his new name) was eventually relocated to a wheelbarrow so we could keep him long enough to show him off. Everyone who was interested got to meet him - Daddy, the neighbors nextdoor and Nate, Nolan and their mom (who was thrilled about the whole situation). We offered to let Nolan and Nate keep him as a pet, but she promptly refused because she thought it would be unfair to take him away from the girls:)
Before we went to church that evening we had to let Froggy go - we didn't want a bird to swoop down and find thanksgiving dinner months early. We brought him next door to Nolan's house and let him go under the deck where he eventually got lost. We haven't seen Froggy in a long time, but we sure do miss him!

The day she turned 3

Please join me for a day in the life of our newest 3 year old:)

This one does NOT like to wake up in the morning - even on her birthday

Birthday hug from daddy:Today, she's THREE!
Eating breakfast
Bringing her sis to school
Coloring while Mom works
Watching cartoons
Time for a nap:) (without a pacifier - she had to give it up when she turned 3)
She told me that she was going to help me wrap her presents. We argued about that and then decided she would hide while I wrapped. I got the camera out and told her to smile - right before this picture she says, "I AM smiling, mom, when I put my hand on my cheek!" She is way too cute:)
Meeting daddy at the mall:
Riding on the carousel - which everyone loved!
Playing at the moon & stars

Meeting a celebrity
Chasing bunnies when we got home
Opening gifts from mom & dad
and one from Nora:)
Now she has her OWN glove to play ball with Nora and daddy!

And she got a baby, just like she wanted!
Brushing teeth before bed
Playing with sis
"listening" to books with daddy (there wasn't so much listening going on at this point).

She had such a fun day! I think she struggled with liking being the center of attention and not liking it. And Ryann does. We love our little Cutie Donut - even if she tries to change her cutiness and tell us she's a cutie chocolate bar... (she'll forever and always be a cutie donut). She is awesome - so sweet, fun, funny, and cute! She loves her big sis and loves her little sis, and even though she doesn't quite understand when I tell her that she's special because she's the only one who gets to be a little sis AND a big sis, I think she'll grow into both of those roles really well. We just love her and constantly want to smooch her:)

Happy Birthday, Sweets!

Boy did life get harder - exponentially harder - after Ryann was born:) Thats not to say that SHE was so difficult, but the transition from one child to two children was difficult. And she was an angry baby - she didn't cry, she screamed because she was mad at someone. She did this from about two or three months. She was just angry about something - she wanted to sleep when she wasn't supposed to, or she didn't want to sleep when she was supposed to be sleeping. She did this until she was 13 months old. Nora adored our friends, the Fulmers. Ryann, on the other hand, would scream if she caught sight of them. If we dropped the girls off for them to babysit, she would scream from the time she was out of our arms, until we came home. One time I was bringing the boys somewhere and she was in a great mood (she was probably 9 months old). As soon as David got in the car and said "Hi" she started screaming. Doug has said many times - and he's totally accurate - that when Georgia cries it looks like (by the look on her face) someone is killing her puppy in front of her; when Ryann cried at that age, it looked like she wanted to kill your puppy in front of you. Very, very true. Somehow we survived;)

She was also quite a mama's girl and wouldn't let Cornbread care for her until she was about 5 months old and finally got it through her head that he wasn't leaving:) That made the first several months terribly difficult. Factor in the new nursing experience (didn't nurse Nora), the mama's girl thing, and a slight case of the baby blues... I was a miserable person to be around. But things got better:)

She had a stubborn streak very early on that continues to this day. She is stubborn - oh so stubborn, but she is adorable and sweet and loving and a joy. Happy Birthday to our Cutie Doughnut (by the way, you can NEVER change your cutiness).


Again, if you don't like birth stories, please stop reading here and go straight to the pictures.

At 34 1/2 weeks - the same point that Nora was born - I went to my regular doctor's appointment. He asked me how everything was and if there were any problems. I had been having a fairly uneventful pregnancy in the previous few months (I had spotted early on), but over the weekend I had been feeling crampy. I told the doctor and he wanted to do an exam just to make sure everything was okay. He checked - I was dilated to 2cm and 20% effaced already. He said it felt like my cervix was in labor and sent me immediately to the hospital.

I called Cornbread and told him what was going on. I didn't think anything would happen, but didn't know what to expect. The nurses hooked me up to the monitors and I was having contractions every 2 minutes but I didn't feel them. They gave me a shot of Magnesium to stop the contractions. It made me feel awful - queasy, sweaty & my legs hurt. I was stuck there. I stayed for 2 days & left on Thursday. I couldn't get out of there fast enough. I was sent home on bedrest until I hit 36 weeks. I don't think the doctor expected me to make it even that long.

I managed the bedrest - barely and unhappily - for 3 days before I just gave up. I couldn't stand not being able to do anything - I couldn't drive, do laundry,vacuum, pick up or carry Nora. Nothing. I hit 36 weeks and he lifted the bedrest. I was now dilated to 3. And he had told me that my bag of waters was bulging... I did everything that week to induce labor and try to get my water to break - spicy food, walks, shopping, planting flowers, painting the ceiling & walls in the family room. No such luck.

I went in on Monday, May 17th for my 37 week appointment. I was having some bad contractions in the waiting room ,but as soon as I went to the bathroom they stopped. The nurse took my vitals as usual. Didn't make her usual comment about my blood pressure being good. Instead, she brought me back to the room and told me that the doctor would retake my bp. He came in and took it again. It was high.

I will never forget this: "Do you feel like having a baby today?" he said. Uh, yeah. I didn't think he was serious - Of course I felt like having a baby. I had felt like having a baby for the last 4 months. I had no idea what he was talking about. My bp was too high, so he sent me to the hospital to be induced.

I called Cornbread. He made arrangements for Nora. I got there at 12:30. He got there at 1pm. The doctor came at 2 to break my water. I was having contractions, but they were mild. By 6pm I was still only dilated to 3-4 and the nurse did an exam and noticed that my water had not fully broken. She called the doctor and he came back to break it again at 8pm.

I had no drugs. No epidural. We were watching a White Sox game and I can clearly remember yelling at Jose Valentin as my contractions were getting longer and more painful. I would stop mid-sentence for a contraction and resume right where I had left off when it was done. The nurses were laughing at me in the hallway because I was watching a ballgame in the middle of all of this.

By 9pm I was feeling too much pressure and wanted to push, but was only at 9cm. By 9:10 I told the doctor he didn't have a choice - I was pushing. At 9:19pm Ryann Joy was born.

She was beautiful and sweet and they gave her to me right away (different from Nora who was whisked away immediately). We held her forever. I talked to her and told her all about our family - how fun we are, how much we laugh, about our Guy, how much we love and how much love we had for her. She had no idea what I was talking about, but cuddled in my arms, I think she somehow understood:)

My Cutie Doughnut - Happy Birthday, Baby Sweets! You're our big girl!

One Month:

Two Months: Three Months:

Four Months: Five Months: Six Months:

Seven Months: Eight Months: Nine Months: Ten Months:

Eleven Months:

One Year: Two Years:

Three Years: To come:)

A lesson in avoidance

Ever get overwhelmed? Ever get that feeling that you can't dig yourself up from the mess that you're in? That it is just going to be too hard, too much work and you don't have the energy - so instead you surf the internet or watch tv or find something else entirely useless to do with your time so that you don't have to face what you SHOULD be doing? Thats me right now. Always happens after we travel and get home too late on Sunday evening to do any significant unpacking and laundry.

We had a busy end of the week last week. Thursday night Cornbread worked late and I went to a high school musical to see our friend in his first musical production. Friday morning we were downtown by 8:30 am to see our friend graduate from University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) with his masters in Social Work (remember - I have 3 small children, I'm doing BFL AND it it at least a 60 minute drive in the rush hour traffic... means we got up at 5am). We got home around 3 and then had last minute packing to do, grocery shopping, yard work, etc. etc. Left the house on Saturday morning for Detroit to celebrate my oldest nephew's first communion. Out of the house at 9:30. We came home at 7:30/8pm on Sunday night. Just in time to give the girls some ice cream (great dinner, eh?) and put them to bed and basically do nothing else.

It takes me days to recover from something like that - remember the whole introvert thing. Normally when we go out of town for the weekend we try to be home in the afternoon on Sunday so I can recover a little faster - and by recover I mean be able to unpack, get the laundry sorted at least and relax a little before bed. Didn't have that this weekend... so Monday was the day that I tried to restore my energy by just hanging out and doing not much of anything. Today I'm overwhelmed. Lets just say that the house was picked up and clean when we came home on Sunday... In a matter of 24 hours, my children have turned everything upside down. I can't blame them entirely - I did nothing to stop them or to clean up after them. But I'm left with feeling overwhelmed today - where do I even begin with all of this?

I decided to begin by taking pictures - and am going to be brave enough to share them with the WWW. So enjoy - this is how we really live sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes. We are having everyone over for Ryann's birthday and Nora's preschool graduation on Saturday, so some significant picking up is in order. And as you can tell, I'm playing the avoidance game... so much so that I'm willing to post photos of our mess and blog about it!


By the way - I just realized that today is Wednesday and throughout this post I've been writing like it was Tuesday... Okay, so I guess I needed TWO days of down time:) Enjoy the pictures, laugh if you must... let me know how much better YOUR house looks!


We'll start with my bedroom. It is enormous and is like a second family room. Here is my bed and my computer desk. That is where I'm sitting RIGHT NOW - and its a mess. To the left of the computer desk is my ironing board with almost every one of Cornbread's dress shirts on it waiting to be ironed.
Next is another portion of my bedroom. This is in front of my bed, taken from the doorway. You see the ironing board with only a small portion of the clothes on it (those are the girls' clean clothes waiting to be hung up and put away). Also, my stack of stuff that I tried to sell on ebay, but it didn't sell. In the bottom/front of the picture you see our suitcase - and it looks like it exploded. Yesterday Ryann took everything she could find and put it IN the suitcase (which was still full from the weekend) because she was "packing to go to grandma's house". Apparently it didn't all fit. So I step over it to get to my closet:)Here we have the hallway up to our bedroom. I'm not showing you the girls' bedrooms because they are ALL napping - yes, they are (Nora and Ryann put themselves to bed). In the very bottom of the picture you can see some big pink blankets - those are two comforters that Ryann pulled out of the linen closet (door to the left) and spread out over the hallway floor - no clue why she did that. Instead of folding them and putting them away, I shoved them - with my foot - to the wall. Above that is a pile of laundry waiting to be brought downstairs. And you can kind of see the dining room table...
So here is a better shot of the dining room table. This is our "catch-all" spot in the house - ALWAYS has junk on it, which is nice because it really is the first thing you see when you walk in the front door. Right now it has some random toys brought up from the basement (really happy about that) a box that some shirts were shipped in, said shirts are hanging over the chair, which I'm pretty certain Georgia dragged out from under the table. Oh, and in the immediate foreground - our broken chair, which is obviously a hazzard, yet I haven't moved it yet.

Moving to the right of the dining room, we have the kitchen/eating area. This is so frustrating to me - I can never keep this area picked up or clean. You can see papers on the floor from Georgia's antics while I was working this morning. What you cannot see are all of the crumbs on the floor from our really neat eaters (whose idea was it to give Georgia some granola for breakfast - thats right, it was mine [kicking myself] ).

Turning to the left we see the kitchen - from back here it doesn't look THAT bad.
Okay, but lets get a closer look:) This is the left side of the kitchen. On the right side of the picture is a pile of CLEAN dishes, waiting to dry, then there is a cake plate that has Nora's leftover peanut butter crackers from yesterdays lunch in it, to the left of that is my recycling pile, some dish towels and a pot holder and then the stove. Oh, and Woofy's water dish is ON the stove instead of the floor because Georgia spills it all the time. We prefer to have a dehydrated dog than to mop up the floor all the time.And the right side of the kitchen. On the right side of the picture is a dress that I bought for Nora off of ebay that I haven't brought upstairs yet, and two junk piles. Moving to the left we see a coffee spill, the coffee maker, a cup knocked over that should be in the dishwasher, and then another junk pile - how do we get rid of those?And finally, to the right of the kitchen (from the doorway) we have the family room. This is where the girls hang out to watch cartoons - and obviously to make a mess. Nora's suitcase is front and center - she has had that packed for a month now to go to grandma's. We can also see that Georgia brought the broom downstairs after she pretended to sweep the kitchen floor this morning. Other than that we just have the basic mess - blankets, crayons, papers, clothes, dog toys etc.
Lovely, eh? There it is - my lesson in avoidance... I would rather post pictures of my messy house on my blog than spend some time picking it up... I need to get started.

QOTD: What does your house look like? What incentive do you need to pick it up (because if we weren't having people over on Saturday, I don't think I'd be working on it today!)

Sloppy Joes

Have you ever burned your mouth so badly that for the next day you feel like you have scrapes all over every part of your mouth - the roof, the tongue, the gums?

Thats me. Today.

Thanks to sloppy joes last night. Mmm.