5 on Friday!!

Thank goodness it's Friday.  I'm pretty sure most mamas, especially mamas that have 3 boys 4 years old and under, are saying thank goodness it's Friday!! :-)

Here's my random thoughts on this beautiful Fall afternoon....

1)  On Wednesday Peter and I celebrated 10 years of marriage!!!  So exciting!  God is so good to us and it really for His glory and credit that we are happily married.  We celebrated last year with a big trip since we knew we would probably have a baby this year and couldn't get away.  Oh how we loved that trip....so fun to visit Asheville, NC, Charleston, SC, Myrtle Beach, with a quick road trip to Savannah....it was a blast!

It has been a wonderful, full, tough, amazing, and good, good, good 10 years together....fun to look back at pictures and realize what babies we were.  And see how much we've joined together, grown in love, and created a beautiful life as best friends who like to kiss each other :-)

2)  Since we're talking our anniversary, we actually get to celebrate tonight.  My family is watching our boys so we can go to dinner and then our oldest two are staying the night with them.  They are beyond delighted and quite frankly, so are we!  We love a little extra time to ourselves to rest and catch up.  Hopefully Ethan will cooperate and sleep through the night!!  Peter did treat me to a Starbucks, beautiful flowers and an extra hour of sleep on our anniversary.....so, so thoughtful.

(the crayons and coloring books around my beautiful arrangement are just our reality!!)

3)  We love to watch Shark Tank and last week they had a new product that was supposed to help baby's sleep more often.  Um, hello, you have my attention!!  It was a blanket to help baby's transition out of being swaddled.  Now, Ethan has never liked being swaddled, but we thought we'd give it a shot.  Well, we tried it.  And Ethan's sleep habits remained the same.  So we're selling it on ebay.  Haha, hope it works for other mamas....we probably shouldn't have got it since he never liked being swaddled in the first place and likes to suck on his hands! 

4)  I'm not sure why I feel the need to post really-bad-for-you-desserts....but it's kinda my thing.  Hubby and I love us some good dessert.  So make these brownies.  And be prepared to want to devour them all in one sitting!

Recipe can be found here

5)  Anyone else notice that a whole bunch of HGTV shows were just added to Netflix?!?!?!  Along with a yummy dessert. HGTV makes me happy.  Love it or List It, Property Brothers, Income Property......love it.  Hmmm, now I'm thinking I need to mix those mint brownies and some HGTV this weekend.  Perfect Saturday plans!

October is just flying by, but here's to hoping this weekend goes nice and slow!!  Happy Friday :-)

2 Months - Ethan

2 months has flown by, but it's true....our little guy, Ethan, is 2 months old!  Here's what he's up to....

Height:  24 1/4 inches  (our tallest boy so far, just a bit longer than Ben)

Weight:  12lbs 9 ounces (exactly what Ben weighed)

Likes:  You love to be held.  You love to be on your tummy, love to be on your diaper changing pad, watching your brothers, getting a warm bath, being sung to.  You love to talk and coo, you are going to be one vocal little boy!  You like being 'packed' in the Ergo

Dislikes:  Your carseat.  Unfortunately you cry at some point when we are running errands.  You hated our swing, but tolerate the one Auntie Amanda is loaning us.  You don't really like the activity/play mat yet, but will tolerate the bouncy seat for a little while.  You really like attention so you don't like it when you feel you aren't being talked to or looked at.

Eating:  Breastfeeding is still going great with you.  You have also taken 2 bottles, one for Daddy and one for Auntie Amanda while Mommy and Daddy had a quick dinner date.  It's great to know that you will take a bottle if you ever needed to.  You typically eat every 2.5-3 hours during the day, and wake up once to eat at night.  You are a pretty quick nurser too!

Sleeping:  You are kind of a mixed bag when it comes to sleeping.  From about 4 weeks old you decided you were not going to nap longer than 1 hour, ever.  And this continued for about 5 weeks.  You are just now starting to nap longer now that you are 2 months.  You usually go to bed around 7:30 or 8:00, I give you a 'dream feed' around 10, then you wake up between 4 and 5:30 to eat.  Then you go back to sleep until around 8:30 or 9am.  You sleep with your paci, white noise machine and fan.

Personality:  You are a very aware, strong, vocal little guy.  You seem to want to be in the middle of the action and don't want to miss anything.  You give the sweetest smiles and love to 'talk' to us.  We can already tell that you are going to be really stubborn, but you are also such a sweet little cuddler.  You can scream/cry sooo loud when you don't want to nap though!  You love to watch your brothers act crazy all day long.

Highlights:  You've been busy since you were born trying to keep up with your brothers and all our activities and outings.  You were first babysat by Auntie Amanda and Nana, you took a bottle, you went to swim lessons and the fair.

Ethan Samuel, you are such a gift to us.  It makes our day getting you to smile and talk to us.  We know you are growing more and more each day and we just love watching it.  Your brothers, Daddy and I adore you and thank God for putting you in our family!

GongGong in the hospital

Peter's mom (lovingly called GongGong by our boys!) spent a weekend in a Portland hospital where she had her appendix and gall bladder removed.  GongGong and Poppy (Peter's dad) were on their way to our house for a visit over the long Labor Day weekend.  They left on Friday morning to make the 7 1/2 hour drive here with plans to stay outside Portland for a night for a little anniversary getaway celebration.  That night though, GongGong was feeling awful and it only got worse as the day progressed.  She thought it was the stomach flu and she didn't want to expose us (Ethan was still really little!) so they were going to turn around and go home.  Thankfully, God put a hospital right in their path and Poppy decided they had better go in and make sure she was okay since the pain was that intense.

Turns out, her appendix was dead and gangrene and puss were surrounding both her appendix and gall bladder.  They decided to remove both.  So we got a call Saturday morning that the plans had changed since she was in the hospital and we decided to go and spend the day there to be with them.  We weren't going to let a little operation keep our boys from their grandparents :-)

So off we went to hang out in their waiting room while GongGong was operated on.  Overall, considering we were at the hospital for close to 6 hours and had a little over an hour drive there each way, the boys were fabulous.

We soo wish she didn't have to be in the hospital, but we are even more grateful that God spared her life.  Things could have been a lot different if they had tried to drive home.  And a grandma's love for her grandkids is so great that she determined to drive down to our house on Monday and stay with us for a night despite her recovering from a major surgery.  Our boys loved having them both here!!

Praising God for taking care of GongGong and for a sweet time with them despite it all!!

5 on Friday!

Am I the only one who thinks its crazy that it is October???

The weather here has still been very summer like with a bit of fall thrown in so I'm a bit in denial that summer is over.  Really though, I love the month of October.  It always seems super busy but I love the crispness in the air, the leaves changing, and the excitement that's building for the holiday season.

So since I have all three of my boys sleeping at the moment........wait a second, that needs to be documented again.  Since I have all.three.of.my.boys.sleeping.at.the.moment!!!!!!! I thought I would blog!  And link up for 5 on Friday!

1)  We planted apple trees this year and we were surprised to actually get fruit this year.  It was only 5 apples, but we sure did enjoy them!

2)  My sweet friend watched my older two boys, Benjamin and Jonah, yesterday.  They are good friends and the same ages as her two boys.  I took Ethan to his doctors appointment in the morning and then had the day at home in the quiet.  Peter and I (and Ethan) went to Chinese for lunch, and I cleaned in a quiet house with my music playing on Pandora.  Oh, and Ethan took his longest nap EVER.  Seriously, the child has not napped more than 60 minutes in over a month.  Not once.  And he took a 2 hour nap in the morning and a 2 1/2 hour nap in the afternoon.  WHAT?!?!?!  Pure bliss!  Oh, and he turned 2 months yesterday, update post to come!

3)  I made a dessert this week that I can't stop thinking about.  I love to browse recipes and that's what keeps me occupied most evenings after my boys are asleep.  So I combined 3 recipes into this dessert that is seriously amazing!!!!
This caramel sauce a la Pioneer Woman:  http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2014/01/easy-caramel-sauce/

and this apple mixture:

• 1 1/2 cup sliced apples (I used Crunchpak)
• 1/3 cup granulated sugar
• 1 1/2 Tbsp cornstarch
• 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp kosher salt
• pinch of nutmeg
• 3/4 cup water

on top of these muffins (minus the frosting and made in regular size not mini size):  http://www.kevinandamanda.com/recipes/dessert/brown-butter-snickerdoodle-doughnut-muffins-with-brown-butter-buttercream-frosting.html

that were topped with cream cheese icing:

• 1/4 cup unsalted butter, softened
• 4 oz cream cheese, softened
• 3 cup powdered sugar
• 1-2 Tbsp milk

SERIOUSLY, SOOOO good!  I ate it too quickly to take a picture, but they were a big hit and delicious.  This was my inspiration picture though.....I just combined other recipes to make it perfect for me!

(Original recipe here:  http://www.shugarysweets.com/2013/06/apple-pie-doughnuts)

4)  The above dessert is really not helping with losing the baby weight.  I'd set a rule for myself to not have dessert during the week and allow myself a treat on the weekend.  And I was doing really good...until this week.  Oh well.  I kinda don't feel bad about it!  But I put my maternity pants away so I'd better not go too, too crazy :-)

5)  We're in the market for new living room furniture.  We love the idea of finding a deal on a leather sofa on craigslist and thought we found one.  It was advertised as Pottery Barn, but it was 35 minutes away.  We decided to go for it after being assured that it was in good shape, smoke free, etc.  Peter had to go by himself since we couldn't put a carseat in the pick-up.  When he got there, there was a rip in the loveseat, it had some cat hair, and it wasn't pottery barn.  But Peter bought the couch since it fit the look we were going for.  When I sat on it, I was disappointed in the quality of the leather (which probably wasn't leather!) and I was mad that we were essentially lied to.  I probably shouldn't be surprised or mad about it, but I was.  Anyway, we both determined very quickly that it wasn't what we wanted so it never made it into our house and I listed in on craigslist.  Peter felt bad but it wasn't his fault, I had talked to the people and was going on what they had told me.  Thank goodness, a nice family looking for furniture for their college student's apartment wanted the couch.  We had cleaned it up and it will be perfect for him even if it wasn't right for us.  And now, we will buy a new couch.  We're a bit burned out on craigslist, anyone else with me??

So happy that its Friday!  A beautiful, sunny, fall Friday :-)

New kitchen floor!

We've owned our house for 6 years now, which is just crazy to think that much time has passed.  But anyway, when we got it, it was a foreclosure that had been a bit neglected.  And by neglected, I mean that they left their cat in the house when they left and it destroyed the carpets.  The 4 boys that lived there put bb gun holes in the walls among other things.  So though we got a great deal, we had a lot of work to do!

We've also slowly updated a few things here and there. The kitchen floor when we moved in looked nice.  It had the look of dark hardwood even though we knew it was just laminate.  And though it was in good shape, it was cheap flooring.  It just seemed that year after year the finish on the floor was wearing.  And as we added our boys to our family the amount of crumbs on our floor immensely increased.  And the dark floor showed every.single.one.  You had to hand wash it in order to have it look clean, and then, it still looked dirty a few hours later.

For this busy mama, it was frustrating to say the least.

(this is an older picture, but I forgot to take one before we started demo.  You can see that it looks nice, it just wasn't practical or good quality.  Peter said it was like particle board when he was ripping it up)

We had talked about new flooring and we finally felt like we had a bit of extra money to get them replaced.  We talked to our local flooring company (who did our carpets) and he recommended that rather than spend so much money on tile (what we originally had thought of putting in), that we get a really nice, quality vinyl.  It just made sense to find something easy to clean, durable, and financially fit our price range of house.  So we searched their store and found one that fit my qualifications of "doesn't show every single crumb, durable and easy to clean"  And with Peter doing almost all of the labor/hard work beforehand, we'd save a ton of money on those costs.

We placed our order and wouldn't you know it, it was due to come in right when we were due with Ethan!  They asked if they could install it on August 6th-8th.  We were due with our 3rd baby on August 1st.  Now most people would think it was cray cray to have new flooring installed at the same time you're having a baby, but we thought it'd work for a few reasons.
1)  Peter was going to have time off work to help with demo since he was taking time off for the baby
2)  we thought we might be in the hospital at that time so then the flooring installation wouldn't bother us at all since we wouldn't even be there
3)  if we were going to be home, our sweet church friends were going to be bringing us food for at least a week after Ethan was born so we wouldn't even need our oven!

Perfect timing right?

And it was.

Ethan was born August 1st.  Peter had done all the demo prior to him being born.  Our friend helped move our appliances to our garage on August 5th.  And though the flooring installation was delayed, it went quickly once they started and we were allowed to walk on it shortly afterward.

With our friends bringing us dinner, we only needed a microwave for leftovers, we could eat outside since it was summer, and we got used to our refrigerator being in the garage.  The only minor challenge was not having laundry for about 5 or 6 days (which really piles up with a family of 5!)

Granted, I was super duper happy to have everything back in its place the next week, but overall, it went really smoothly.

And the best part is that I love the floor.  Crumbs are hardly noticeable.  It's so easy to mop.  It's super soft.  It looks like tile without any grout maintenance.  And I love the color.

(I will have to update this post with better pictures....my camera lens isn't working so I have to use my 'zoom' lens and I can't get good pictures)

I make sure to tell Peter many times that I love it and thank him for indulging his little wifey :-)  I'd better wrap up this post so I can go hand wash my floor.  Wait, no....not needed anymore.  Busy mama of 3 boys with new flooring = happy happy happy!