Sickly weekend

Ah, the joys of having a sick child. I got the daycare call on Friday that Ethan had a fever. I wasn't really surprised since he hadn't eaten much on Thursday night or Friday morning, so I had the sneaky suspicion he might be getting sick.

Once he got home and had some Tylenol, he started to feel much better and played and acted somewhat normal and even ate okay at dinner. But Saturday morning I went in his room and saw he had thrown up in his bed (and on the carpet) and on himself. And he had a fever again. And he was coughing. Poor guy. Again, after he had some Tylenol he acted almost normal. Throughout the day you could tell he didn't feel well, but still played outside and interacted pretty well. Then Sunday he woke up with a fever again. And I think he threw up a little, but it was mostly mucus. And he had the chills and looked downright miserable. Later in the day he started looking like he was feeling better, but by nightime the fever had returned. So there was no sending him to school today. Fortunately he slept much better last night and had no fever this morning or at all today, so looks like he is on the mend. He still has a very small appetite, which is unusual for him. So, based on all the symptoms, if I had to guess I'd say he has the flu. Whether it's H1N1, I don't know. He hasn't been vaccinated for seasonal or H1N1.

Anyway, I'm praying his sister doesn't get it since she spent the whole weekend with him, and it's impossible to keep them from putting things in their mouths and from switching drinks, etc. And of course hoping I don't get it (though I have been vaccinated for H1N1).

Nail clipping

Blythe actually asked me yesterday to cut her nails because they were getting too long. Apparently this means she has stopped biting her nails! Fingernails, that is. If only we could get her to stop biting her toenails.

And since Blythe was WANTING her nails cut, Ethan then wanted his cut too. Unfortunately I had just done his a few days ago (except Ethan wasn't exactly willing to at the time, so it was a typical torturous nail clipping session). Next time I want to cut his, now I know to get Blythe to ask to have hers done first.

Now, if only we could get Ethan to stop biting....his sister and his friends....then we might have a real breakthrough.

Grams visits

Grams (aka Braden's mom) came to visit us last Thursday and stayed until yesterday. We had asked her to come and help since my work and Braden's work both got pretty crazy at the same time, plus I had a baby shower to go to in Charlotte on Saturday (while Braden had a meet here in Blacksburg). She was a HUGE help while she was here. Currently all the kids clothes are washed AND put away and the kids rooms are actually clean. Wait, they trashed Ethan's room this morning. So - Blythe's room is actually clean.

I had 2 projects on Friday going live and Braden had a meet, so I was so glad she was here as I was trying to troubleshoot at 7:00pm. I would have been getting mad at the kids for not letting me work if that were not the case. Saturday, I drove down to Charlotte in the morning to attend a baby shower for my good friend Sue (Blythe's godmother), who is expecting her first in just a few weeks! The weather was great so we had a good time just hanging out after the shower and catching some rays before I drove back to Blacksburg that evening. Meanwhile, Grams was here with the kids and they went to the swim meet at the end so the kids could swim in a swim clinic. Ethan didn't really want to swim, but apparently Blythe did great. Then they headed over to a team dinner and it was back home and they were TIRED (Grams included!).

Sunday was gorgeous out, so we took the opportunity to clear out the garage so Braden can now park his car in there (and just in time for the 3 days of rain).

Thanks to Grams for coming to help out! We'll miss you!

Ethan's new room

After we found out we were expecting, we started working on Ethan's new room. Since we only wanted to decorate a nursery once, we originally decorated it in gender-neutral colors with farm animal theme. It's starting to grow a little old on me, but we sure aren't going to redecorate it, so we live with the farm animals. Also to make it "girly" we put a pink changing pad cover on and switched the lamp shade to pink. When Ethan was born, we switched them to blue cover and blue lampshade. And that's the extent of the redecorating for that room.

Ethan's new room used to be the guest room. We now moved the guest room to the basement where it is a guest room/exercise room. We also kicked the dogs out of that room in the basement. It's better to have the guest room down there anyway as that room has it's own bathroom, so guests no longer have to remove the 50+ toys from the tub and figure out how to get the bathtub in shower mode without removing the duck tub faucet cover. They also get real towels instead of duck towels.

So, after we cleared out the guest room upstairs, we painted the room blue. We already had the humongous headboard that we had made for the guest room up on the wall and it was way too big for a queen bed (because we never measured it when we made it), we thought we should keep it up and set up a bed against the wall kind of like a day bed. Turns out the headboard is even a little bigger than the long side of a twin bed. But not by too much. We didn't really want to get a day bed since we wanted the option to turn the bed later, so instead we opted for 2 headboards that we put on each side. We bought them unfinished, so 2 weeks of staining, drying, polyurethane, drying, sanding, etc and they were ready to attach.

In the meantime, Braden started hanging all the penants that he has gotten for Ethan. They are now out of the nursery, where they never belonged, and into the cool boy's room where they are much more fitting.

So here is the almost finished product:

I still need to get a couple of large baskets to hold toys and books and we're going to put more shelves in the closet. After that, he'll be ready to move in.

Halloween

This year's Halloween was a good one. We started the day with a neighborhood Halloween event at lunchtime that had food, games, face painting, and playing on the playground in our costumes so they could get dirty and Mom would have to clean them. It started to rain a little just at the end, actually while we were on our way home.

Ethan went down for a nap just as Gommy, Poppa, and Laura arrived. Blythe had no nap, so we were a little worried how she would hold up, but lots of candy seemed to do the trick (but made for a hard crash later in the night).

As the day wore on, we started to get prepped for the night. Braden carved 3 more pumpkins to say B-O-O and hung up a few more Halloween lights I forgot we had. He also made himself into Wolverine using foil-covered chopsticks and some face paint. Here's our finished product of our front porch (and of course, we also had scary music playing).

Gommy did Blythe's hair in a french twist and she got to wear a little bit of makeup. A crown and a dress, and whollah - Cinderella.

A far cry from last year's scary skeleton.

Ethan also got to wear makeup (face paint that is) to become a scary (okay, cute) tiger.

Here's another cute one of the 2 of them

Ethan was tired of taking pics and really wanted to start his trick or treating, so I think we were the first ones out in the neighborhood, but others soon followed. The rain held off for trick-or-treating and both kids made it all the way around the outer and inner circles of the neighborhood and gots lots of candy. We managed to get rid of all 3 large bags of candy we bought. Needless to say, both kids were quite tired!

As is typical of Fall Back (i.e. end of Daylight Savings), we had a great night of sleep on Saturday night. Then this morning Blythe was up at 6:15am. Just can't win.

No costume vote for Blythe

There will be no costume vote for Blythe this year. She was uncooperative last week when we tried to take pics in different costumes and this week I have not had time to retry. Oh well. She really only has one costume to wear anyway. She is going to be Cinderella. I'll be sure to take lots of pics on Saturday and post them.

And I made it to 10 weeks along before I had to break out the maternity clothes. Seriously? I thought only people having multiples had to wear maternity clothes at 10 weeks. I'm probably going to be huge this time around. I guess I could keep wearing my regular clothes and just unbutton (and unzip) them. I should invest in some Bella bands so maybe I actually can do that. Problem is that the other times I was pregnant, at this stage it was summer so I could wear stretchy skirts or athletic shorts. For winter, I swear all I own are jeans and those are quite unforgiving. Alas, I will be wearing maternity clothes for the next 7 months.

Saturday with Nana

Well, looks like Tiger was the winner on the costume vote for Ethan. Good thing, since that's what I was planning he be anyway. He's not old enough yet to really pick his costume (like Blythe did last year). Maybe we'll break out the face paint and paint a nose and whiskers on him. Anyway, I need to take another costume pic of Blythe and then I'll post her vote.

So, for today I'll talk about last weekend. We were supposed to go to Gommy and Poppa's house for a weekend visit because my Nana was in town visiting from Texas. She's 90, sharp as a tack, and clearly able to fly from Texas to North Carolina on her own. It had been 3 years I think since we'd seen her. She had met Blythe was Blythe was young, but not Ethan or Ada. Unfortunately my mom got sick (could have been H1N1) and we don't want my pregnant self or any of the young kids to get that, so we instead went to Doug and Lynette's house and my dad, Nana, and Laura met us there. We had a nice visit on Saturday hanging out at the house while the cousins played. We said goodbye on Saturday night and they drove home and we stayed the night. I didn't get any pics from Saturday as I relied on my dad and brother and sister-in-law (aka everyone else) to take pics.

Sunday we spent the morning carving our pumpkins we got at the pumpkin patch earlier this month. We brought them so we could get it done. Here were are all at work as a family affair.

Here's what we carved (and I'm not good at taking jack-o-lantern pics):

Pretty scary, huh?

Afterwards, we tried to get some good pics of Ethan to replace the not-so-good ones from daycare, but he was a tough cookie to crack. He's not smiling, but this one still turned out pretty cute.

After some Mexican food for lunch (mmmm....mexican food....craving cheese enchiladas), we hit the road and drove home. We had a great weekend! Thanks for hosting last minute Doug and Lynette!

Vote on Ethan's costume

Here are the options on Ethan's Halloween costume this year. Blythe's poll will be next week. Please vote! See right hand side of blog page. It's completely anonymous, so even if you're afraid I might find out you're reading my blog, I won't. But I want lots of votes!!

Option #1: Skeleton

Option #2: Monkey

Option #3: Tiger

Crazy morning

Whew! This morning was a doozy. As is a typical morning, I went into Ethan's room and found him sitting in his chair looking at books. He's so cute doing that because he brings his blanket "bubba" with him and makes a stack of books next to him and goes through each one. So I sat with him a while and looked at books with him. Then I picked out his clothes and attempted to change him. But he had other ideas! He wanted SO bad to stay in his spiderman jammies. "Pidey...pidey" he kept yelling. I finally got him changed and then he kept going and getting the spiderman shirt and trying to put it back on himself. Finally I lured him away over to Blythe's room. Upon entering her room, I found her in her princess jammies, with Barbie princess dress over it, pink princess shoes, a sparkly headband, and a wand. Oh, and a necklace. She hadn't gone potty yet, so I made her go and she managed to get all of that off, go potty, put it all back on, and come back all within about 1.5 minutes. I picked out her clothes and then we were finally able to go downstairs to eat. Good thing...I was starving! Pregnant girl needs to eat! (though apparently not as much as I have been...gaining weight way to quickly).

Anyway, 4 or 5 threats to change the channel off of cartoons since Blythe wasn't eating her breakfast and I finally did have to change the channel. Ethan was finished and busy playing with the dishwasher while I was then trying to get Blythe to change into her school clothes. And of course, these days Blythe cries about EVERYTHING. So she's crying. Ethan then starts crying because he's trying to close the dishwasher (liked I asked him to do), but he got it off track so it won't close. Finally I had to scream. And I know you're not supposed to because then you just raise kids who scream, but I think it's already too late for that. So then they both were REALLY crying. We got shoes on, coats on, and finally got in the car. Where it was dead silent for most of the way to school. Ahhh....

Long weekend

This past weekend was one LONG weekend. Seeing as how I'm at the peak of my yuckiness feeling right now and the weather was cold and gross and Braden was out of town on Saturday, I knew Saturday would be a difficult day. We didn't have anything planned and so actually Blythe stayed in her jammies most of the day. You'd think that would be a pretty easy day but nowadays my patience is like zero and the 2 of them fight all the time. The #1 thing to fight over - me. And I'm with them all.day.long. So there's a lot of fighting. We did manage to make it over to Chick-fil-a for dinner (just so the kids would have some play time on some form of play equipment). Ethan can now climb up there. Takes him a long time, unless he's assisted by his sister. When Blythe was around his age and able to climb up there by herself, she wouldn't come down and I'd have to either go get her or ask another kid to. So I was a little afraid. But he did good and followed his sister down the slide.

Braden got home Saturday night so finally I was relieved to have some help! Unfortunately, it was short lived as he came down with something on Saturday night. I thought it was swine flu since many of his athletes have gotten it, but it doesn't appear to be as he never developed most of the flu symptoms. But he was still quarantined to the basement for all of yesterday. Today he is feeling better.

So other than church, we again had no plans for yesterday. Another long day and so I was relieved to have it be Monday and I could take my kids to school today.

Picture Day

Ethan and Blythe had picture day at school this week. It's been quite a while since they had pictures made, so I was hoping they'd turn out good. Blythe said, "I was beautiful in mine because I smiled pretty". And she was right. Her pictures turned out very nice. See proofs:

Ethan on the other hand did not take very good pictures. Pretty bad when one of the "best" ones they picked out is him looking at a fake pumpkin. So, I think I might need to take him into the portrait studio to give it another shot. Here's his proofs:

Blah

I've never actually thrown up during the first trimester of any of my pregnancies. I've always just felt like I would most of the time for weeks on end. During my first pregnancy I thought maybe I'd feel better if I did (like when you're hung over), but I quickly realized that even if I pulled the trigger, it wouldn't make the feeling go away.

This morning was the closest I got to actually doing the deed. It was only because my stomach was empty that I didn't. So instead, it was dry heaving over the toilet. Awful. I haven't even had morning sickness so far. It's been "night sickness", meaning I feel progressively worse throughout the day and then I usually wake up fine in the morning. If only I actually liked the taste of ginger ale, maybe I might actually drink it. Oh, these first trimester weeks go by so slowly...

Back by popular demand....

...another pumpkin patch post! Sinkland Farms has gotten enough of my money for this year! I went back today for Blythe's school field trip. First there was an attempt to take a class photo.

Hey, if they don't have someone right there to greet us as soon as we get there, we can't guarantee the pumpkins and hay that were set up nicely for a group photo will still be that way after Blythe's class is through with them.

Nor can we guarantee all of the kids (or even most of the kids) will actually look at the camera.

Anyhoo, afterwards we took our hayride out to the pumpkin patch. This time there were no potty issues, so Blythe took her time searching for the right pumpkin. She ran to the farthest end you could go to and selected a pumpkin. Then she said, "here Mom, you carry it". To which my reply was, "Nope - it's you're pumpkin. You carry it.". So she decided she didn't want that pumpkin and instead picked out one much closer to the tractor hay ride.

After the hayride it was time to pet the animals. Unlike her brother, Blythe has no fear of the animals and tried to encourage her classmates to pet them as well.

She pet Maude, the 2289 lb horse (THAT'S a big horse!), pet the donkeys, and harrassed the girl holding the bunny to pet. She also fed the goats.

Another fun trip to the pumpkin patch, but I am DONE for this year! Until next year pumpkin patch!

Ethan's pumpkin patch field trip

2 pumpkin patch trips down, 1 to go. Today Ethan had his pumpkin patch field trip and what's more fun than 11 toddlers picking out pumpkins? Actually, there were more adults than kids, so it was a really nice trip for the little guys. We loaded into the hayride to head to the kids pumpkin patch (where they grow little pumpkins) and of course, really enjoyed seeing the tractor at work pulling us all. Once there, Ethan wandered around looking for the perfect pumpkin (which he seemed to think were the small green ones). Walking through all those vines makes it a bit difficult on the little ones. I tried to shoot some video but was worried he might fall into the thorny vines, so I only got a short one.

Afterwards I found it a bit difficult to handle Ethan and 2 pumpkins (yes, I got a pumpkin too...we're working on creating our own pumpkin patch at home). So, I headed towards the car. Ethan was kind of following me, but on the way, the hayride driver asked Ethan if he wanted to drive the tractor. Apparently he was the first kid to get to drive a tractor at the pumpkin patch so far this year. So they drove to the parking lot while I walked there.

We visited the animals, which Ethan loves to see. He pretends he wants to pet the horse, but when you bring him close, he shies away. He got a little too close to the turkeys and one tried to bite him. Anyway, after a quick lunch they were headed back to the daycare for nap time. Fun trip and I'll be going back again tomorrow with Blythe's class!

One Day...

One day...I will no longer be able to blog about Blythe. She will be too "cool" for that and will not be happy with me if I write things online about her that her friends might be able to read and make her look less cool than she actually perceives herself to be. So what will I do?

I will blog about Ethan.

But one day....he too will be trying to impress some girls at school and will not want me writing to the world about how cute he is and about those awkward moments. What's a blogger to do?

Well, blog readers, I will write about #3.

Yes indeedy, we are expecting number 3 around May 28 next year. I am 7 weeks along and feeling fabulous. Okay, actually nauseous, bloated, and generally crappy, but you know...fabulous.

Actually, I'll be blunt. I do not like being pregnant. So a warning now that for the next 7.5 months my blogs might be filled with "minor" complaints about how yucky I feel. Sorry.

But my goal this time is not to gain more than 40 pounds. I'm off to a not so great start as I have already gained 3 pounds. I'm thinking of continuing this "exercise" thing during at least some of this pregnancy instead of sitting around on my ass like I did with the other 2. So maybe that will help.

But anyway, we went to the doctor yesterday and everything looks good so far. Only 1 baby, so that's a relief!

Well, time to get back to thinking about food working.