Birthdays, Snow, Scripts, and Name Changes

Patrick's birthday came and went and was a success!

He had school, because it wasn't on a weekend, so he got to see his friends.

When asked what cupcakes he wanted to bring he said PJ Masks, of course but then asked that there be Princess Cupcakes for the girls. The store didn't have princess cupcakes so he took a dozen pink Poppy Troll cupcakes with him instead, and they were a big hit.

And then he had a PJ Masks birthday party with our family at Chuck E Cheese after playing at the local science museum waiting for Mae to get done with therapy, that afternoon.

Both were lots of fun.

A certain someone did briefly try to make a break from the birthday party after the cake, I think because she was a little overwhelmed, and I was surprised that she was tiny enough to fit between the bottom of the booth divider and the floor (when she went down there I thought, "at least there's no where she can go"), which meant she nearly made it to the door, which was right on the other side of the wall of booths, and would have if I hadn't managed to catch hold of her boot. 

Oh well, it just added a little bit of extra excitement after the cake, and she went on to have a lot of fun playing games with the other kids after her attempted elopement.  Moving on...

Winter has arrived in Michigan and bundling up five kids to go out and play in the snow gives me a renewed admiration for any of the kids teachers. Especially the little kids teachers. I have no idea how going out to recess must work in a kindergarten or preschool classroom, where all that snow gear must take an hour to get on, based on how much help the 3-6 crowd around here usually needs with this sort of thing.

Even Patrick, who is getting pretty good at handling some of his snow gear, still needs helps with the trickier parts that he can't quite get on his own.

So it takes us about thirty minutes of prep time to get everyone ready to go outside.

And I don't open up the door to release the first kids into the cold, until everyone is ready, so that the first kids aren't complaining that they're cold and ready to come back in, just as the last ones are ready to go out and ready to play.

I've learned my lesson from years past.

However, this lesson doesn't make getting ready particularly fun, since the four year old was the first one dressed and must have asked "when are we finally going to go out" at least seventy five times, before I'd gotten Patch, and then Maggie, and then Tessie, completely bundled, from head to toe.

Thankfully Sadie can get ready entirely on her own.

I'd forgotten that one of Maggie's scripts, which I hadn't heard in an entire year, was "swim in the snow." She hadn't though.

Within ten minutes of coming outside, after reminding me that it had been too long since she'd had a shake at McDonald's and after we'd gone through that script enough times to convince her that I'd understood sufficiently, she announced that she was ready to swim in the snow and then went through her script about the Bubble Guppies swimming in the snow.

It was pretty great.

I love her memory and how she can call up a script that she hasn't used in a year in an instant, in the correct situation.

And I love that I got that script on camera. I've watched it back so many times. It's one of my favorites.



And lastly here is the video with the update on the sleep study and the surgery.

It basically tells the entire story of the sleep study and the ENT appointment and everything that led up to them, which was more or less in that last blog post, with less dramatic pictures because Youtube thumbnails kind of need that:



And I know I said that was the last thing but there's one very, very last thing.

A bit of blog house keeping if you will.

For the past several months I've been thinking really very hard about changing the name of my blog so that all my pages have to same name, so that I'm not operating under a bunch of different names, which can be kind of confusing.

I've always struggled with naming, well really anything that isn't a child.

Naming kids has always been easy for me.

Naming blogs and other blog like ventures? Not so much.

The last time I changed my blog name lots of people let me know they hated it.

And some people let me know they liked it.

Which was okay. You've got have a thick skin in blogging or vlogging or doing anything online and blogging has definitely been slowly helping me work on that for the last decade.

The thing was, I really wanted to like my blog name. And I liked the newer name more than the older one.

But when I finally came up with my vlog name I actually and really loved it.

It just clicked and felt right as a description for the last decade of my life since becoming a parent.

So I am going to be changing the blog name on Facebook to a name that matches the vlog (at least in part... it won't have "vlog" in it). And maybe I'll eventually add it to the banner here, since my blog here has been living without any sort of a name posted anywhere for quite a while.

And that's what I'm up to at the moment.

James' 4th Birthday: A Festival, A Train Ride, and a PJ Masks Party

I went a little overboard, documenting James' birthday.

But it was so much fun and he was so excited about every moment of it.

And everyone else was having so much fun too. 

That's why this is my favorite time of year. It isn't yet so incredibly cold that we're all cooped up inside most of the time, and it isn't so hot and humid that it's miserable to be out for too long, and I love autumn so much that I'm trying to squeeze every last moment out of October that I can, even as each day gets a little colder than the one before it. 

There were so many choices for activities for his birthday that picking what we were going to do was the hardest part.

We finally settled on the Tecumseh Appleumpkin Festival.

The main reason that we decided on this particular festival for James' big day was because they have a train and we could rent the caboose on this particular train.

We weren't quite sure how the girls, especially how a particular eight year old, was going to do stuck in a crowded train car for an hour. It might go splendidly.

But what if it didn't?

So the caboose was the perfect solution.

We needn't have worried.

She adored every, single, moment of the ride.

As did the littlest member of our family, especially once the train got rolling:

Once the train ride was over we went back to the festival, went on the fair rides (discovered the Maggie loves the Scrambler), and then headed home, where there were presents and cake.

And where one very happy four year old ended a very exciting, exhausting day.



A day that I split into not one but three videos, because it really was that big.

I'm so glad to have these already.

Our Little Firecracker

Sadie had her birthday mapped out to a T and so when Maggie's big day arrived two weeks later I wanted to make sure it was something special too, even though she doesn't yet give us a list of what she has planned for her big day. 

The morning started with mermaid presents, and now, nine days later, she's still talking about "mermaid presents" so I think that we can safely say that they were a hit.  I was amazed at the number of mermaid products on toy store shelves this year, which made shopping for Maggie really easy.  And after the first few presents, once she realized that just about everything fit the mermaid theme, she became very excited about opening them:

Patch was really excited too.  And kind of devastated.  Because November still feels like it's a very, very far ways off when you're only three and it's actually June/July, and after having two summer birthday parties for his sisters, he was having a very hard time understanding why his birthday wasn't right this second too.

This was the mermaid stash when all was said and done:

Tessie slept through the excitement.

After her school we took her to Red Robin (because she loves the gluten free chicken burgers there:

And Sadie lost another tooth! 

And Tessie continued to sleep through the excitement:

After lunch we swung by Cold Stone for dairy free sorbet:

And then we headed home so that Maggie could take her mermaids for a swim:

After all, what good is having so many mermaids around the house if you can't put them in the pool on the back deck?

Meanwhile I rushed around inside and made the cake that I was too tired to bake the night before (after all I was only five days post partum...) and threw together the goody bags that Sadie had meticulously planned for Maggie's birthday:

We repeated the Bubble Guppies theme for a second year in a row:

Both the toys and the cake were a success:

And then we went outside for fireworks:

These weren't big fireworks.  But the kids thought they were pretty awesome:

Except for James.  James insisted that he did not need to be held and that he needed to be on the edge of the porch watching the action... so that he could hysterically cry every time a firework was set off, running away, being scooped up and cuddled and then struggling to go back and run to the edge so that he could watch it all over again. 

And he did not want to go inside.

Here he is about to insist that he needs to get down to go over and watch another firework. 

And I continued to try out the ring sling that I made, which Tessie is definitely a fan of, although I think I still prefer my Moby wrap, 90% of the time:

And all I can see in this picture is how swollen my ankles and feet still were at this point!  It lasted

a few more days before my ankles kind of returned and looked like ankles again...

The kids actually insisted that we take this picture and then were all totally goofy when it (and five others like it) were snapped.

Once the fireworks were cleaned up (they were done on a wetted down piece of cardboard since it had been so unseasonably dry here), the kids raced down to see the little spot of grass that had caught on fire during the show.  It was very, very exciting for them:

And then Sadie got control of the hose and the uncontrollable giggling began:

And that is how our Fourth of July birthday part went!  I can't believe that our little firecracker is six! 

James' Big Day

James turned one this week, and while we celebrated I made a note to myself to make sure to cancel the majority of our appointments on birthdays from now on, because while we had time for a little party, we were pretty overscheduled, and I just hadn't realized that his birthday fell on one of those overscheduled days until it was already here.  Patch had speech at 8 and Maggie had ABA at 9 and then OT at 2 and Sadie had her first Little Flowers meeting at 4:30, which meant that all in all, our day was pretty booked.  

Still, James had a lot of fun.  He pretty much tagged along and had a blast doing all the things Patch was doing in Speech.  And while Mae was at therapy I set up for his big party:

James loves all things related to cars and Patch was pretty impressed too:

Sadie and I made the cake and cupcakes:

 We had our little party at lunch time.  Sadie set the table:

Paul brought in lunch:

And we looked over and saw that amid all the excitement, the birthday boy had fallen asleep.

Maggie wasn't about to have him miss his party.  She was really upset about it.  So after six attempts she finally woke him up.  He wasn't thrilled.  Even if waking up meant cupcakes:

Presents, however, were worth waking up for.

Patch was on hand to explain how all the toys worked.  Especially the little steering wheel:

After Little Flowers it was time for a birthday dinner:

And cake:

James was a big fan of the cake:

And finally his big day was over and it was time for bed!  Happy Birthday to our big one year old.  This year has gone by far too quickly!

Paul's Birthday in Pictures

Yesterday we celebrated Paul's birthday and after lunch when asked what he wanted to do for the day, he said walk around the old part of campus.  This conversation followed:

Sadie:  "I think we should go to a park where the kids can run around.  And climb.  And go down slides!" (we've been going to a lot of parks lately)

Me: "Remember how on your birthday we did every single thing you wanted to do?  Well today is Daddy's birthday.  So let's do what Daddy wants to do!"

As we were walking around campus Paul and I couldn't help but chuckling as Sadie began to bring up the botanical gardens (which is one of her favorite school field trips).  By the end of the day we'd walked through them and she was exhausted and was being carried by Daddy back to the car and couldn't help but add this to the conversation:

"But Daddy hard work is what you really wanted to do on your birthday, right?" (referring to carrying her across campus).  "And going to the botanical gardens.  Going to the botanical gardens is what you really wanted to do on your birthday, isn't it?"

Yes, it turns out that it was.  Here are a few pictures from the day... I didn't get very many of the babies (who were in the stroller) until we got home and got down to the very serious business of eating birthday cake: