Spring Break

On Thursday we left for Oregon.  We almost never leave during Spring Break, since Ryan has to babysit water his greenhouse plants every day.  (I think this is the first year since Ryan started teaching that we've left for an over-night trip during the spring time.)  Ryan bribed two of the janitors at his school to water his baby plants, and we LEFT!  (Make that- spend the whole of Wednesday doing laundry, packing, get snack foods, print off hotel reservations, load all our crud up in the car and then we left.  Whew!)

We were in a good mood when we left though:

 (It makes my heart melt to see such sisterly affection.)

Our first stop was Multnomah Falls. 

 After I took this picture of Ryan and the girls, another waterfall visitor offered to take a picture of our family in front of the waterfall.  Unfortunately, he never actually took a picture.  My guess is he pressed the button halfway down (how the camera focuses) and not all the way down. :(  Oh well.  Ryan took a picture of me on the bridge.

Then we drove to Seaside.

 (Yay!  A family picture!)  It was such a nice day.  Beautiful blue sky, and decent temps for the beginning of April.  I've seen much less pleasant days during summertime.  We went directly to the beach to walk around and play in the sand.

 Maddie found a big shell that she liked to use to dig in the sand. 

 Lewis and Clark (and the Kannelys) found the Pacific!

 We went into the town to walk around and find a snack- salt water taffy!  The kids loved the candy store.

 Then back to the beach.



 Ryan helped the girls dig a hole. 

 This one is actually my second sand castle.  The first got plowed-through by a few of my children, who shall remain nameless.  We were going for the Aztec temple-look this time.  And Elizabeth is sitting IN her hole.

Maddie

I think we will need to go back to the coast soon.

We took our sandy selves to Subway for dinner.  Honestly, I felt like we brought half of the beach with us.  So after dinner we took ourselves to our hotel for bath time and bedtime. 

Once the kids were down for bed, Ryan and I weren't quite ready for bed yet.  We brought our laptop with us, so we plugged it in the bathroom and looked around on hulu.com for shows to watch.  We settled on Castle.  We sat on some slightly used towels, with our backs to the wall (or the TP in my case.  Who puts the toilet paper dispenser across the room from the toilet anyway?) and enjoyed us a couple episodes of Castle.  Yep, this is vacation.

Does it get easier?

So I am sitting here in my quiet house, all the kiddos asleep in their beds, and I find this question over at the Multiples and More website: "Does it get easier?"

I think back to those sleep deprived weeks following the twins birth.  Which had followed some sleep-deprived "I-can't-find-a-single-comfortable-position-for-more-than-60-minutes" weeks.  I'm not sure I know how we survived newborn twins.  The little bits I remember from those nights involved Ryan or myself struggling to get both twins to sleep.  This was so the other could catch a few winks.  There was crying.  There was laundry.  And there were two other children desperately needing attention.  I lost all my patience for nursing around the time the twins reached 4 weeks old.  I struggled with nursing two babies at once, and it took about 1/3 of my wakeful time feeding them separately.  Two weeks later Annie and Maddie were weaned. 

The trip to visit relatives during Thanksgiving was rough.  It seemed like I spent all of my visit feeding and diapering two demanding newborns and prayed Emma and Elizabeth were getting some attention from their grandparents.  Then there was the trip to get a Christmas tree with Ryan's family.  We told all the family we would be ready at THIS TIME to go get the picture.  Twins would be fed and ready to go, and the other girls would be ready too.  Well, getting our family of 6 apparently ready took less time than some others....  And by the time we got to the Christmas tree farm, Annie and Maddie were hungry.  Again.  I'm sure I was not at all an emotional, postpartum crazy woman, but I was angry and crying that I had to sit in the car while everyone else got to go, and I got to listen to stories of how cute Emma was doing this, and Elizabeth did this funny thing later.

But then Annie and Maddie started getting a more regular sleep pattern.  I left the house on occasion.  It is amazing how those two things bring a more positive outlook in life.  That's not to say that I didn't feel like pulling out my hair on occasion.  (Or regularly)  But regular sleep changes you from the emotional zombie to a person with a little perspective.

Each stage brings its challenge.  The kids want to be mobile but can't figure out the crawling just yet.  They want to feed themselves, but just make a giant mess.  They can get around, and need to explore everything. 

And then there's the stage we are in now.  Independence.  Gosh, it's just too fun.  "I do it!"  I buckle my own seatbelt.  I put on my own shoes.  I help put away the laundry and unfold all of it in the process.  Everything takes so stinkin' long.  But they look so proud of themselves when they figure it out. 

When we leave the house, we run into parents who are further along in the process of raising twins.  "It gets easier" they tell me.  I've wanted to ask, really?  Truly?  Easier?  And what does that mean about me right now?  I look harried and pathetic? 

But this brings me back to the original question.  Does it get easier? 

I would have to say yes.  I like that I get sleep.  I like that the twins can tell me what they want.  (I can usually figure it out.  Eventually. :o) )  They tell me, "Tank You" and "Wuv You."  They purposefully wrap their arms around my neck and give me hugs.  They can play together and with their siblings.  Somedays I feel like we just might get the hang of this parenting thing.

Our Story

So I've been messing with my blog lately.  Among some of the changes made, I wrote our an "Our Story" page.  I'm including it here, so it will get printed off with this year's blog posts.  Enjoy!

------

 In early March of 2001, I was a sophomore in college when I met a handsome young man at a single adult dance at our church. His name was Ryan and he lived in the same town as my parents, and worked where I was going to school. He asked me to come with him (and several other people I didn't really know) sailing the next day. I met up with him to carpool, and ended up sitting in the backseat while his other carpool-ee refused to move from the passenger-side front seat. Once on the sailboat, Ryan proceeded to keep himself so busy that we exchanged maybe a dozen words on the several hour, bone-chilling ride on the Puget Sound. I was oh-so-excited I was skipping working on one of my final papers to come be ignored and frozen to death.


The good news was my frozen state was visible, and Ryan's chivalrous side came out and I was allowed the front seat and full access to the heaters on the ride home. (Ok, I may not be fair- it was the other passenger's lack of manners that had me stuck in the backseat on the previous trip.) Ryan dropped off the other guy before finding his way back to my car. Then Ryan managed to come up with enough complete sentences to ask for my phone number and permission to call me.

We were pretty inseparable from this point. Ryan asked me to marry him in June (with a ring my grandfather made), and we were married in August of the same year. 5 days after we were married, we moved to another state. There we lived the college dream- hand-me-down furniture in an older apartment while we worked and went to school.

We really lucked out. Some couples talk about how hard it can be adjusting to living with their spouse. It wasn't like that for us. The apartment, on the other hand, had some serious issues. 

I was diagnosed with endometriosis early 2002. We made the decision to not wait to start a family with fertility problems running in my family, and that diagnosis. Emma joined us a year later, right during the first week of Ryan's student teaching. (Pain was my problem, not fertility.... I came to find out as soon as we started thinking about having a child- there one was! Or two...)

Ryan got a job teaching in 2004, a little closer to family than where we'd been living. Elizabeth joined our family the following year.

We settled into our life here. We made friends and liked our new town. After two years we bought our first home. And then the itch to add a 3rd (and probably last child) came along. And that's when Annie and Maddie entered the scene and changed our lives forever.

Cherry Blossoms

I cannot begin to tell you how excited I get for spring.  I love spring.  There is sunshine, and the dead and brown world begins to show life again.  The spring temperature of the great outdoors reaches levels that allow me to do more than dash from one climate-controlled bubble to the next.

The cooler temperatures and shorter days of fall seem to be acceptable.  There is the excitement of Halloween, Thanksgiving and birthdays to look forward to, and then Christmas to decorate, plan and wrap for.  But once New Year's passes and school is back in session, I am dying for spring.

Earlier this week we loaded up the brood and took a drive in the minivan to see if there were any cherry blossoms.  We found a few early ones!

Peace and Quiet

It's parent-teacher conference time: meaning long evenings with daddy at work.  I put the twins to bed at 7:30, but told the older two girls that they could read or play quietly in their room until 8 pm.  I figured this would give me a good chance to get the kitchen cleaned up and rid the living room of popcorn seeds.

First there was the pitter-patter of 8-year-old feet to the bathroom.  "MOOOooooOOOmm, I know I just went like 4 minutes ago, but I had to go again!"

Then it was the clomp clomp of slightly smaller feet.  "Mom, I only have 3 stuffed animals.  I need 1 more to make 4."  (Good math Elizabeth.)  So she ran down to get one, and came back with an armful.

(Threats of the bedroom light going off if anyone came out again.)

Moderate amounts of giggles and sounds of fun emanated from the hall, which was fine since I could still hear the twins playing in their room too.

Then I started hearing THUMP-thump, THUMP-thump, THUMP-thumps.  I entered Emma and Elizabeth's room to find Emma's new jump rope being put to use.  Ok, guys.  Really?  How is this quiet?

Emma's Special Day

Yesterday was wonderful.  One of the best yet- the day my first born was baptized.  We were so blessed to have so many of our relatives come for the day to celebrate with us.  Our small house was filled to the brim, and we will be eating left-overs for a couple of days but I wouldn't have it any other way.

 We did build-your-own burritos for lunch, and bbq pork sandwiches for dinner.

 Aunt Janelle ended up at the kids' table.  And little Alex grabbed Maddie's pink sippy cup....

 Emma and Ryan in their white clothing.

We started in the Relief Society room, but the family and friends of the two girls getting baptised became too numerous for that smaller area.  So we were escorted to the chapel, where just our family members took two entire rows.  Emma's school teacher came, and many of our friends.  Emma's baptism and confirmation was done by her dad, with Bishop Linde, Bishop Ricks, her two grandpas, Uncle Michael, James W. and Uncle Ron in attendance for the confirmation.

Afterwards we headed back to our house for dinner.

 The party winding down.  The twins went without their nap yesterday, and did quite well.  Towards the end of the day, I broke out the binkies though.

Today Emma went to church in her new white dress and shoes.  She looks so grown up.

Mayhem

While unloading the dishwasher this morning, the twins were in the kitchen "helping."  They haphazardly stacked all the cups together, and dumped the silverware in the silverware drawer (they can't see into the drawer when the dishwasher is open, which blocks any chair that could be pulled over). 

While I was putting the plates and bowls away in a cupboard, I heard words that sounded strangely like, "Poke. Poke. Poke." and then an, "Ow."  I turned back around and discovered Maddie stabbing her twin's arm with a fork.

On a positive note, Maddie added a new word to her vocabulary.

----
Later I jumped in the shower.  I was feeling selfish about the bathroom's warm air, so I locked the bathroom door as soon as I was in.  For some reason if the door isn't locked, then it is open and I freeze.  I know bad things happen when I am in the shower, so I hurried.  Fast.  But that didn't stop Mayhem from visiting.  (Like those commercials for Allstate Insurance, where the guy in a suit wreaks havoc around him.  I swear he visits here way more than he should.)

So I leave the bathroom less than 10 minutes after I entered it and Annie is sans a diaper.  But she does have big girl underwear on.  Two pairs, actually.  And Every. Single. Item. of clothing that was in the twins' dresser is on their floor.

Arg.

Springtime

Dear Springtime,

I've missed you and your sunshine dreadfully.  I was so happy to see our daffodils bloom Monday morning, seemingly right on cue.

 I was getting desperate for springtime color, so I had taken to making my own:

 (If anyone else would like to make their very own tissue paper cherry blossoms, click here.  They are super easy and cost me $1.)

Saturday night at about 7:30 pm, I got a text from my mother-in-law reminding us of the "Super Moon" that was due to rise around 8 pm.  After putting the kids to bed, Ryan and I grabbed our coats, shoes, and the camera and headed outside prepared to be amazed.  We were not at that time.  Due to the cloudy conditions, this picture was taken around 9 pm, when the moon was slightly more visible.  It was really bright from what we could see of it. :)

Way Back When

One night over dinner Ryan and I regaled our captive audience with tales of all the things that are new since we were born.

"I remember getting our first computer."
"Yah, and playing exciting DOS games like... Pacman."

"I remember my parents getting their first microwave."

"I remember the first cordless phone."

"Remember how chunky those first cell phones were?"

"I remember when we first brought home a VCR."

"Back when I was little, we didn't have CDs or DVDs."

This conversation apparently really dated us in our children's eyes.  Ever since then I get questions about other things that Emma or Elizabeth think might be new since I was a little girl.

"Mommy, did they have paper when you were little?"

"Daddy, did they have cars when you were a kid?"

"Did you have a tv?"

"When did they start making books?"

"Did you cook on a stove or over a fire?"

In Emma and Elizabeth's eyes, our lives must have been like Little House on the Prairie when we were small.  Perhaps this qualifies the grandmas and grandpas for the status of remembering Noah's ark.

What Isn't For Dinner

The other night while trying to come up with dinner ideas, I ran across an open bag of bought frozen rolls.  I couldn't honestly remember the last time I purchased any.  (Maybe in the last year...??)  I was just going to quietly chuck the bag in the trash, but the hubby thought we should give them a chance.

I left them thawing on the counter for a bit, and while they were losing their frozen state, rising they were not.  So Ryan tried the "quick-thaw" method with a pan of hot water in the oven.  We would have nice, warm, fresh rolls after the kids went to bed.

Fast forward to snack-time the following day.  I was making brownies for our company on St. Patrick's Day and preheated the oven.  When I opened the oven to put in the brownie batter, the most sorry excuse for a pan of rolls met my eyes.  They looked like half-baked blobs of pancake batter.

So I pulled them out of the oven and baked my brownies.

Later when Ryan got home, I pointed out our pathetic forgotten rolls which I had just left on the stove.  Ryan reheated the oven and finished cooking them so we could have them with our dinner.

Aren't they attractive?

We all tried a bite or two, and later they finished the journey I laid out for them when I pulled them from the freezer- to the trash.