What a Month...

Well, loyal reader(s?), when I posted that I wanted to start keeping up on the blog again, I had no idea that I was about to have a crazy, insane month.  Shortly after writing that last blog, I discovered that............ I'm pregnant!!  Without getting all TMI, basically I had a Mirena, I hated it, had it removed.  I didn't have it removed to get pregnant, just because it wasn't for me.  We weren't preventing after the removal, and had had a conversation about having one more, and before I could really wrap my head around it, it was done.  Got pregnant two weeks after Mirena removal.  I thought it would take a while for the birth control to get out of my system but I was obviously very wrong.  So, I'm 8 weeks today and we're heading to my first appointment this afternoon.  I am definitely more worried and nervous with this pregnancy than I was with Luke or Dylan, but I'm very excited, too! 

So, I found out I was pregnant at the very beginning of October, and then on October 10, my Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer.  We were all shocked.  She felt a lump in the shower and had a mammogram and biopsy within a month.  She is being treated at Georgetown University Hospital and the team there seems pretty amazing.  She will have surgery (lumpectomy) in early December, followed by chemo for a few months, and then radiation for a few weeks.  It's still pretty surreal when I think about it, and I hate the amount of uncertainty that surrounds the treatment and the cancer.  But, we are all certain that she is going to come out on the other side completely fine. 

I'm going to leave this post pictureless because I'm lazy, but I'll check in again soon!  Prayers for my family and especially my Mom are appreciated!

Alright y'all, enough is enough.  My memory is too terrible to not document.  It's time to fire up the blog again.  I find myself telling stories often about when one of the boys were babies and then I go "wait... was that Luke?  Or was it Dylan?  It was Luke.  It was definitely Luke.  Noooo.... maybe it was Dylan."  I'm too young for this crap. 

Luke started kindergarten this year.  It wasn't a HUGE deal because he did full day pre-k last year at Mt. Hope, so I feel like that was the big "OMG my baby is growing up" moment.  This year he was an old pro, I wasn't nervous at all, nobody cried.  Last year everybody cried except for my Grandma, who has been through this between children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren no less than 1,687 times I'm sure. 

Dylan started daycare in April and has been doing SO great.  He was really starting to act out constantly at home and was clearly needing some structure and some friends.  He has been doing really well adjusting.  He turns 3 on Monday but got bumped up to the three year old classroom a couple of weeks early to keep him in line with the school system schedule. 

Tommy started working this insane schedule a few months ago.  He does rotating shift work so he's either working midnight-8am, 8am-4pm, or 4pm-midnight.  There's also almost always an opportunity for overtime, or he gets stuck after his regular shift.  It's been super hard to adjust for everybody.  He's exhausted all the time and has to sleep weird irregular hours.  I'm exhausted all the time from having the kids on my own so much.  It could last for a few more months, so hopefully we can all keep up. 

I started at CSM over the summer.  I returned to finish my elementary education degree.  I am super excited and nervous and busy! 

The kids are at this awesomely weird in between age where they can both make me laugh SO HARD.  Make my heart melt COMPLETELY.  And make me want to rip my hair out, rip their hair out, and bang their heads together.  Super fun times. 

I'm going to try to shake the blog content up a bit with some of my crafty stuff and general life type stuff instead of boys/family only. 

No pictures today, just wanted to let the 1.75 people who will see this know that I'm baaaaaack. 

Fall Happenings

I’m going to stop trying to catch up and just start from where we are now.  Catching up is daunting and makes me blogging less appealing.  So, here we are in mid-November which I can’t believe!! 

Dylan is talking quite a bit now.  Some things that he says are juice, clock, bug, Pop Pop, woof, good girl (that’s what he calls dogs), nana (for banana)… that’s all I can think of at the moment.  He is such a handful!!!  I’m pretty sure he's normal in his mischievousness but he is in to everything! 

Luke I think is very level headed for a three year old.  He does sometimes get a little wound up and act out of character when we’re around other kids… Is that normal?  I find myself saying “Oh my goodness!  He doesn’t normally act like this!” when we’re around people we’re not with often or in a party setting.  He has a huge imagination and is always pretending to be an animal or a monster or a dinosaur.  He is pretty obsessed with dinosaurs and loves “The Land Before Time” right now, which was one of my favorite movies as a kid.  He melts my heart at least once a day because he can just be so sweet.  I love when he tells me he loves me out of the blue! 

This was on our annual family trip to Ocean City in October.  We had the best beach day I saw all summer!  It was definitely warm enough (except for the water of course), and almost empty.  My favorite beach is a quiet beach when you can focus on the sound of the waves. 

Halloween was a great time with my puppy and dinosaur.  We had a huge crew come to our house for dinner and then we all walked around and trick or treated.  My uncle hung back to hand out candy. 

That’s it for now… I am resolving to be better about blogging!  Even though I hate sitting down and committing the time to it, I really do LOVE having these memories written down in my own words.  My memory is horrendous and I love the idea of being able to look back on this whenever I want.

And finally, go check out Holly, who just gave me a $10 Starbucks gift card for captioning a picture of her sweet daughter Olive Betty on her blog!  She and her guest blogging husband Chris are hysterical and relatable. 

March

The main thing that sticks out in my mind in March is that Luke was hospitalized and diagnosed with asthma.  He has had breathing problems since he was very young, but I guess doctors are hesitant to diagnose children when they’re very young.  On the day Luke went to the hospital he had been sick and wheezing, so I had brought his nebulizer to work with me.  My Mom called me up at one point and said Luke sounded really bad.  I went up and he was taking very very shallow wheezy breaths, and was very inactive.  He looked miserable and wasn’t really talking.  I gave him two back to back nebulizer treatments and he really wasn’t getting any better, so I called his doctor’s office and got an appointment right away.  He was breathing much better by the time we got there, but still not great.  They gave him another breathing treatment and when he still sounded bad, they said they wanted him admitted.  We headed over to the hospital and stayed for just about 24 hours, and they officially diagnosed him with asthma. 

I had to cover up his IV with a rubber glove so he could play with play-doh in the hospital play room :) 

Luke now takes a steroid in his nebulizer twice a day.  It seems to help some, but we have still had some incidents since then where he gets sick and wheezy. 

And following in his brother’s footsteps, look who got his first nebulizer treatment in March…

Tommy had asthma as a kid and grew out of it, so I pray that my boys do the same and this isn’t something they’re stuck with forever.  I just hope that it never holds them back from doing anything they want to do. 

Here is Dylan being adorable in March:

and big boy at his 6 month check up… I’ll have to go back and look at his stats.  I don’t know them off the top of my head, but do know that he’s been running in the 10th percentile for height and weight just like his brother.  They’re both little shrimps.

Snuggling with Aunt Brit

taking a bath with AJ, just like me and Amanda did when we were babies :)

And the other thing at the end of March- Luke got a haircut!

I was over keeping up with his long hair.  It grew over his ears so fast, and was just a pain.  I’ve been keeping it a little longer than this lately, and he looks so big!  Let me tell you ladies, even being a hair stylist and being able to cut my own kids hair… it’s still VERY hard and VERY not fun!  I dread it!  Sometimes I am seriously tempted to go somewhere and pay someone to do it so I don’t have to do it myself!

Okay, another month down… maybe as we get closer to the present I’ll be able to remember more details!!

February

Anybody who is my facebook friend, which is probably all of you… if there’s anybody even reading this… sorry, because I’m totally just stealing events off of my facebook page and putting them on my blog. 

Okay, so a Luke moment not to be forgotten.  I thought Luke was in his room taking a nap.  I went in to check on him and he had dumped a full bottle of baby powder all. over. his. room.  It’s so funny looking back on this because I had totally forgotten about him doing that!  It was very unlike him.  He also took off his diaper and peed all over his room.  He peed IN his toybox and all over the carpet.  I was astonished.  I sent him to the living room and told him to sit there while I cleaned up and when I went to check on him this is how I found him.

He was worn out from making all that mess for me!  I couldn’t help but fall more in love with his insanely cute little self in that moment.  Then I went and cleaned up some more pee/powder and maybe some of that bursting love faded again :)  Just kidding!

 

My sweet Valentines.  Luke’s shirt said “the Ladies <3 Me” and Dylan’s said “Ladies Man.” 

Our great friends Jake and Lynsi got married at the end of February in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.  I briefly considered going when the details were first set, but quickly decided it was a ridiculous thought.  Well, about three weeks before the wedding Tommy and I talked about it and I booked it.  Tommy stayed home with the kids (have I mentioned how much I love my husband) and I went to the DR.  I actually traveled completely alone because I was so late to the game I couldn’t get on a flight with anybody else.  I was pretty proud of myself for traveling internationally alone. 

The wedding was beautiful and I had SUCH a great time for the 3ish days I was there.  It was completely relaxing and I was really able to let go of everything going on at home.  Until I got a call at about 4 am on Sunday morning.  It was my sister.  See, right before I left Bonnie told me “I’m terrified that I’m going to go into labor while you’re all in the Dominican Republic.”  I said rather bitchily “You’re NOT going to go into labor while we’re in the DR Bonnieeeeee.”  She wasn’t due until March 7th.  And she had that baby without me!!  I tried to get on a flight home right away but it just wasn’t doable.  I was really upset.  I was supposed to be in the room when she was born.  Instead I was hundreds of miles away. 

My beautiful baby niece Elizabeth Paige Martin was born at 12:27 am 2/27 at 6 lbs 11 oz. 

This Mimi is in heaven!

Luke is so excited!  He says her name kind of like “Yizbis”

My first time meeting her.  A little late, unfortunately.

January

In January we threw a shower for my sister Bon Bon and baby Elizabeth…

kind of hard with the lighting, but this sign says “welcome baby Elizabeth”

candy table

this picture cracks me up.  It sums up our lives as mothers perfectly.  Chaos.

 

quilt I made.  I wanted it to be bright and not babyish, but I don’t really like the way it turned out.

Also in January we left BOTH of the boys overnight together with Becca and Melissa and Tommy and I had a date day/night.  We were soooo lame though.  I just consulted my facebook timeline for a reminder of what we did in January and on our day without kids we had our taxes done and went to the library.  Oh, and now I remember that we got pretty crazy and decided to go out for appetizers and a beer at Applebee’s at about 9 pm, which is unheard of :)  Here is Dylan hanging out with Becca and Melissa.

In January Dylan started sleeping in his carseat.  His reflux was really bad at this point and I thought having him upright would help, and I think he really liked the snuggly feeling of being in the carseat.  I believe he continued to sleep in there until… April?  It was a long time, but it worked.

Snuggled in for the night.

And here is cutie pie Luke playing on his new swingset

Christmas 2011

Well, if I’m gonna catch up, I guess I’d better start where I left off… Christmas.  Ahhh, this is pathetic!

Christmas morning- Coming down the hall to see what Santa brought

Tommy’s family came over for breakfast- a tradition since we had Luke

Decorating a gingerbread house with Krystal

Heading to Mimi’s!

How stinking cute is Luke wearing my Mom’s glasses??

I wish I had more details, but honestly I don’t really remember them all… hence the point of blogging on time!!!