Birthday Mania

As I mentioned previously, the kids had another friend's birthday party coming up that they were really looking forward to. Their friend, Rich, celebrated his 3rd birthday this weekend at Lifetime Fitness, a national globo gym chain. The party started right by fueling the kids with pizza, juice, ice cream, and cake before proceeding to the party games. The gym staff coordinators tried to wrangle a bunch of 18months-5 year olds into two teams for an organized game of soccer. That lasted about 5 minutes and was not a pretty sight. The staff quickly decided they need to take this party in another direction and brought out a giant parachute which the kids loved playing with, under, and on. They probably got about 15 minutes of fun out of that one. Then came the scooters!I don't know if anyone else had used the scooter before, but we had them at my elementary school and would have a blast during gym class playing scooter hockey, where you sit on your butt and scoot yourself around backwards and forwards and hit a wiffle ball with mini hockey sticks. At this birthday party, the kids didn't play anything that advance. In fact, they couldn't quite figure out how to get the scooter to move while sitting on them, which resulted in "Mommy, push me!" They did manage to figured out that if they laid down on their tummies they could spin themselves around in circles. Then some how the two activities were combined., an before you knew it parents were slingshoting their kids around the gym. You just grab a foot or two, spin around in a circle and then let them fly towards a wall (preferably padded).That lasted for quite a while, and then while I was taking Casey for a ride on a scooter, my girls came over to request another ride. These scooters are a little more high tech than the wood ones from my elementary school days, and hook together. So what started as a 4 person train with my kids and I, quickly turned into me trying to push all the kids at the birthday party across the floor on a mega scooter train.At its largest, I think we had 10 kids on nine scooters racing across the gym floor. Fortunately, a couple of the other parents took a few turns pushing the train also, because it was a beast to get moving. I know I worked up a sweat. Even little Casey got his exercise, practicing crawling across the gym floor. Don't be fooled, he still isn't going anywhere.

Happy Thanksgiving

Aw, some quiet time to update this site. All the kids (including Ryan are napping), so I actually have a little over an hour to myself. As much as I would like to take a nap too, I can think of more productive ways to spend my time. Ryan has been working the night shift for the last 3 weeks (11pm-7am), and Thanksgiving was no exception. Since Ryan worked Wednesday night, I spent Thursday morning keeping the kids quiet, so that Ryan could get some sleep. Still, I had to wake him up early, so that we could make the trek to Gram and Bub's house for Thanksgiving Dinner. The Knight/Friesenhahn crowd could rival a Melink gathering. There were probably 30-40 folks for dinner. We enjoyed turkey with all the sides and about 8 different desserts. As you can see, the party wore everyone out.

If I would have only had my camera...

Miracle of miracles, I actually got Elizabeth to dress up like a princess! The girl who owns 1 pair of Batman pj's, one Batman T-shirt, 2 Spiderman T-shirts, one Spider-man basketball uniform, one Batman cape, and a Spiderman Halloween costume, actually donned a princess dress and shoes to attend a birthday party. Note, she would wear her super hero outfits everywhere if I hadn't put my foot down and said that she could only use them as pajams. One of her friends, Lily, from school invited Elizabeth to her 4th birthday party. The theme was a princess tea party for girls only, and they were all asked to dress up as princesses. Upon first recieving the invitation, Elizabeth informed me that she was going to dress up as Spiderman and everyone else could be princesses. It took me a couple of weeks but she finally agreed to be a yellow princess (the dress belonged to Ava). Poor Elizabeth wasn't her normal chipper self at the party and was looking pretty glum until she found some binoculars with an attached flashlight in Lily's brother's room. She then proceeded to shut herself in the bathroom with all the lights out so she could try out the binoculars. I think those binoculars and cake and ice cream were the best part of the party, because she wasn't to into decorating princess crowns with stickers or eating finger sandwiches. In fact, there were even tears because she thought I had left her there. Anyway, she survived the birthday party, and she is still good friends with Lily. They just have different interests. On the other hand, Elizabeth is really looking forward to her friend Rich's birthday party next weekend, since it is a sport's party and she can wear her football jersey.

Beach in November?!?!

While my sister who lives in upstate New York enjoyed a foot of snow before Halloween, and even our beach condo in North Carolina had a dusting of snow last week, we were able to relax on the sunny shores of Texas beaches this past weekend. However, I do have to admit that we did have a bit of a cold snap and the highs were only in the low 70's and Saturday was pretty gusty. Still, it was great to be out at the beach in mid-November.Lizzy came up with the idea the other week that she wanted to go to the beach, we all agreed that it wasn't a bad idea at all. Luckily, Ryan had a free weekend (this was the first time he's had two consecutive days off in a row since starting in July), so we were able to meet up with Gram and Bub at their place in Port Aransas. We check out the Texas State Aquarium on Saturday, and took in some of the local dining establishments, and played at the beach on Sunday. It was a nice weekend get away, and we had a good time with the kids.

Leftover Halloween Fun

A few days after Halloween I hit the thrift stores to see if I could find any discounted costumes for the girls dress up box. I had some luck and picked up a purple princess outfit, a spider costume, and a clown outfit complete with a big bow tie and face paint. The girls were begging me to let them paint their faces, so I figured the bathtub was the safest place to conduct this activity. They had a good time and we have pictures to remember it. Luckily we used up all the paint so I don't have to repeat this activity anytime soon, because I still have a red ring in my bathtub.

All clean!

Greetings!!!

As you can see we are still alive and well (even Sam). We are still enjoying 80 degree days in November. It is "paradise" down here, you should all move here, or at least come for a visit. We miss all of you!

Halloween Horrors and Fun

For the past 4 years I have made the kids Halloween costumes. (I did cheat one year and got Ava a store bought costume when she was 2 months old). I don't proclaim to be "super mom" and I don't consider myself that crafty, but this was my way of doing something extra special for the kids when I was working full time. Since I am a stay at home mom right now, I decided to tackle making costumes for all three kids this year. I must say that the level of stress this project brought about and lack of sleep ranks right up there with some the convoy operations that I conducted in Iraq. First, I waited way to long to start this project. Finally on the Monday before Halloween, I took the kids to the fabric store. My original idea was to make they 3 little monkey, but the store was out of dark brown fake fur. My sister later suggested that I could have made purple or orange monkeys but I am not that daring. Therefore, I opted to make them three little mice, put some sun glasses on them and they are the three blind mice. By late Monday afternoon, I had a pattern, fabric, and my sewing machine out, but I am sure many of you can relate to how hard it is to get anything done with little kids under foot. "After feeding them broth, without any bread, spanking them soundly, and putting them to bed," I was able to get down to work. Monday night I was up until 2am, and then on Tuesday night around 10pm my sewing machine broke. It wasn't the best machine in the world and I have used it a bunch in the last 5 years, but it wasn't a good time for it to break. On Wednesday, I took all the kids to Walmart to buy a new sewing machine. For those of you who are wondering where Ryan is in all of this, he was working at Fort Hood for the week, 3 hours away. Anyway, I stayed up until 2am again on Wednesday, and 1am on on Thursday in order to have all three costumes ready for Halloween on Friday. Well, I got them all done and they were absolutly adorable, both the kids and the costumes. Ryan came home for the weekend. I took the kids to their school party first, and then we all hung out in our cul de sac handing out to trick-or-treaters.

Here are my three little mice raiding the pantry at their school's Harvest Festival. (Don't worry, I will post some additional pictures of the kids all dressed up.)

Earlier in the week the kids had a Halloween party with our playgroup, since my sewing machine broke mid-week and the mice costumes werent' finished yet, I let the kids dress up in their back up costumes. Lizzy of course had a blast being Spiderman. Ava was just into "juice and cake." Casey is just one laid back dude.

Pumpkin Patch

No Halloween is complete without a visit to the pumpkin patch. The kids got to go with Gina-mom and Michael-dad over the weekend, but we still wanted to take the kids as well. Lizzy informed me that they had more fun with their grandparents and that the other pumpkin patch was cooler (since we found out that most of the extra activities are not open on weekdays). However, after bribing them with cookies they thought that this pumpkin patch was okay also.

Chillin' on a stump with cousin Reina.

Staged hayride can still bring some smiles.The girls with Ryan's godson, Luke. (By the way, Lizzy tells me all the time that she has a baby in her belly named Baby Luke) Forced photo with pumpkin, they were much happier eating cookies.

Mammoth Caves and Mammoth Celebrations

I turned 30 earlier this year, The kids and Ryan made me a very nice cake and we had a small quiet celebration (See previous blog entry). My birthday wish was really to delay celebrating my birthday since I was 9 months pregnant and couldn't really have much fun. Well, my wish came true. We didn't make it to a topical island with beautiful beach and fruity drinks, but we did have fantastic time crawling around with bats and cave crickets, racing down alpine slides, rappelling off a cliff, and drinking some beer. Most importantly, we were kid free for the weekend!!!

My two great friends, Siusan and Crystal, joined me from DC for these adventures, and to also celebrate their 30th birthdays. (Don't we have some great legs!)

Here we are getting ready to launch ourselves down the alpine slide (think bobsled without the ice).

The caving was awesome. We spent about six hours underground and did about six miles. Mammoth caves has 376 miles of mapped tunnels, so we hardly made a dent in exploring this cave system. In fact, the say that the wild cave tour is different every time you go. We spent the first half our our trek spending a lot of time crawling on our hands and knees and shimming through tight places. The second half was more vertical walking through the carved out stream beds and hiking on the old cave tour trails (circa 1900). We also managed to stay dry on this cave trip (just very dusty), where as I have done caved twice before and have had to wade in waist deep water and mud.

Ryan and his best friend, Mark, had wanted to come back to Mammoth Caves since they were teenagers, and they had planned out their whole trip to include camping, the wild cave tour, and rappelling. I was accused of stealing his vacation, when I suggested that my girlfriends and I go caving for our 30th birthdays. I told him that he has had the last 15 years to take this vacation, and it was his own fault that he hadn't made it happen. So, I let him tag along on my vacation. He and Mark opted to fulfill their teenage dreams and camp in the national park, while the rest of us stayed at a bed and breakfast. As you can see he also got his rappelling in, so overall he can say that he accomplished everything that he wanted to on this trip.

I wasn't dumb enough or brave enough to go off the cliff face first. Overall, all parties involved had a blast, and we can't wait to plan our next adventure.

Cousin Camp

God Bless Grandparents! I can remember when I was little spending a week at a time at Grandmother's and Granddaddy's house in New Jersey, and Oma's and Opa's farm in Pennsylvania, while my parents vacationed. I have nothing but fantastic memories of French Toast, Hawaiian Punch Soup, hours in the hot tub or pond, riding bikes, and having numerous other adventures. Gina-mom and Michael-dad have been the first of the grand parents brave enough to host cousin camp. I think this might because they still have "Uncle Austin" and "Aunt Katie" in the house to help entertain. They have graciously hosted first Elizabeth, then both girls, and now all three of our brood, and at times have taken in other another grand kid or two for a day or a night, so that us parents could get a away for a few days. Obviously, I don't have a lot of pictures of the fun that they had, since Ryan and I were down at Mammoth Caves, KY for a long weekend, but I hear there were soccer games, air plane rides, 4 wheelers, pumpkin patches, hay rides, and lots of time on the trampoline. You might want to check out Annie's blog entry for some pictures of their adventures over their weekend. All were alive and well when we were reunited with them, and now that we are back in TX they just want to know when they can visit again. However, I am a bit concerned about Elizabeth's passion for Spiderman. I heard that she wore the costume (with the face mask) non stop all weekend to include meals, an airplane rides, and jumping on the trampoline. She did have to take it off for church.

Little Dude Man

Casey is finally at an age where there are some significant milestones in his life. 1. He just got teeth #1 and #2 on the bottom.

I can't get his hands out of his mouth to snap a picture of he little teeth buds.

2. He is eating solids foods. Bananas were first on the menu. Quickly followed by everything else... prunes, carrots, squash, sweet potatoes, apricots, rice cearal, cream of wheat, apples, etc. 3. He is sleeping 10 hours a night. He started doing this as soon as I dropped him off with Gina-mom, and Michael-dad for the weekend. I will give them part of the credit, since I am sure they wore him out each day, but I think a lot of it is that we introduced solid foods that same week, and we finally have his belly full enough to let time enjoy a good solid rest period at night. The caloric intake has been the biggest difference I have noticed between boys and girls. Lizzy was sleeping through the night (10 plus hours) at 3 months and Ava at 5, Casey has been the holdout, but fortunately nothing like his cousin Milo (Sorry, Andrew and Lauren). 4. He is also sitting on his own like a champ. He has been doing this for a while, but he has finally stopped flinging himself backwards all the time. Look at that posture! 5. Crawling...I don't think this one will be anytime soon. He still hates tummy time. Overall, he is a happy go lucky little guy. He has his six month check up next week, so I will post the "stats" then.

Halloween Fun with Dad

Ryan got lucky the other week and found himself with some extra free time during the kid's waking hours, so besides sharing communicable diseases around the family, he was able to do a couple of Halloween activities with the kids before taking off to Fort Hood, TX for the latter portion of October and the beginning of November.

The girls and Ryan purchased the cookie house about a month ago, and were just waiting for October to hit, so that they would decorate it. As you can see, it looks just like the picture on the box. Lizzy also requested a Spiderman pumpkin. Ryan was hoping that she would choose her other favorite idol, Batman, for ease of carving, but no such luck. However, I think he did a great job and pulled off a fantastic Spiderman pumpkin. I know Elizabeth is very pleased with his handy work.

House of Death

I apologize for being delinquent in posting lately. A few of days after my last post, we were inundated with some sort of stomach virus. It first hit on Wednesday night when we were out celebrating Nana's (Ryan's Grandmother on his dad's side) 90th birthday at the Olive Garden with some a bunch of the family. Elizabeth told me that her stomach hurt and that she was going to throw up. My first mistake was to try and move her. Since we were both pinned behind the table with a wall and chairs blocking our escape when she blew, she ended up with vomit from head to toe, and my entire left shoulder was decimated. Typically, we would have called it a night there, but since it was a fairly large family affair Lizzy and I headed off to the bathroom to try to clean ourselves up. When we re-emerged Lizzy was wearing Casey's burp cloth like a toga, and I had a wet, smelly shirt from rinsing it out in the sink. My second mistake was letting her try a little milk and water to calm her stomach. Nope, that didn't work, and she wiped out her toga. Outfit number three was Casey's onesie, which looked kind of like a shirt dress on her. We survived the evening, but not without Elizabeth filling up a bread basket and a salad bowl with vomit, and puking in her car seat on the way home. The rest of the night wasn't much better. By Friday, Elizabeth was feeling a good percentage better, but Ava and I weren't feeling so hot. Poor little Ava threw up while she was taking a nap, and was too tired and sick to move or let us know until she woke up 3 hours later. I took the approach that if I didn't eat I wouldn't throw up. I didn't throw up, but after fasting for almost 3 full days I could barely see straight. Ryan made it until late Friday night before falling ill, but still managed to crawl out of bed on Saturday and Sunday to work in the Emergency Department, where he couldn't help but be frustrated at his patients because he was sicker than 60% of them. By the early part of last week the worse was over, and I scrubbed the house from top to bottom. I thought we had banished the bug, but it sounds like we were still walking time bombs and managed to spread our TX bug to Ohio to our loved ones during out vacation this past week. Sorry!!! Well, these next few post will bring you up to speed on some more pleasant subjects like our vacation adventures, and the kid's milestones.

General Updates (and Bragging)

Flashback, here are the girls exactly 2 years ago!

Now for the updates.

First, here is Ava modeling a hand made dress (now shirt) from her Oma. Since turning two, Ava has acquired impeccable fashion sense and takes great care in picking out a perfectly color coordinated outfit each day with any help from mom or dad. She will even pick out matching shoes. Her vocabulary has also increased dramatically, and she was almost giddy when she declared, "Mommy, my purple shoes." She besides talking about her purple shoes and pink blanket, she will also frequently ask for cookies and milk. It is awesome to watch her embrace toddlerhood. However, I could do without the tantrums. I think her nursery school class has been good for her, I have found her attention span increasing as well as making her more outgoing and loving. She is also excelling in her gymnastics class and can do a perfect forward roll on flat ground, and today she mastered a forward flip on the high bar without assistance. Ava is gorgeous when she smiles. However, don't let that beautiful smile fool you, she is just as stubborn and independent as ever. Elizabeth on the other hand, doesn't show the same interest in fashion that Ava does. But don't let her pink pants and red pirate t-shirt fool you. This girl can run a mile in 6 minutes flat. Okay, I might be exaggerating just a little bit, but this girl is fast. She says that she can run like Spiderman, and fly like Batman, and she loves to Rock'n Roll. Below is she rocking out with her Elmo guitar that we found a flea market, she says she is ready for and "upgrade," because her current guitar is for little girls. Lizzy is at a tough age right now, she no longer wants to be a toddler but isn't quite at the pre-K/Kindergarten age range yet . Just like she is ready to wear sweaters and raincoats, but it is still 90 degrees and sunny here. She is protesting nap time, but I still make her lay down in her room for 2 hours while Casey and Ava sleep. She asks "Why" about everything, and has stared talking back when you ask her to do something. She is starting to act like she is all grown up and can make her own decisions, and she is a challenge to keep in line sometimes. When we aren't giving her the attention she wants she will copy Ava's or Casey's behavior good or bad. Other times she is a great big sister and mother's helper, and it makes me so proud to see her set such a good example around the house and in public. Each girl is unique and at a different milestones. I love them both dearly, and I am keeping my fingers crossed that we can all survive the next 16 years without too many battle scars. And I am sure you are all wondering how poor little Casey is, so I promises the next entry will be all about him.

Some days I think I will keep them

Sometimes they are just too cute for words... and then there are the other times...

Natural Bridge Caverns

I was actually able to snap a few photos of our adventure in the caverns thanks to the great camera that Ryan got for me one Christmas (I still don't know how to use its full power). We had another great day with Grandpa before sending him back to PA, and Ryan actually had a day off work to join in on the fun.

Impressions of the cave? Lizzy kept asking where Batman was, and Ava kept saying "Let's go." She really wasn't that interested in the tour guide's commentary. Casey? He is always willing to go along for a ride. Riding the dinosaur at the park entrance.