babies

I caught Mya nursing her baby the other day:) Honestly I thought I would see it a lot sooner than this. She is always talking about it, but I hadn't seen her trying it out! The picture was taken on my phone so the quality isn't great, but I couldn't risk going downstairs to get my camera for fear she would stop!



Seeing her do this reminded me of when I caught Max pumping after I had Mya. Here's the picture:) Click here if you want to read the post.



This morning Ivy took a great nap so I went downstairs and was playing babies with Mya. It's her very favorite thing to do in the whole world. Her and I pretend talked about dirty diapers and feeding babies and going to the grocery store for 30 minutes minimum. As we were playing I got to thinking about how many babies we actually have. So...we lined them all up and took a picture. I know of 2 that are missing for sure, and there may be more. I think this girl is set in the baby department!

snow rat

Max is a snow rat. You know, like a pool rat, but in the snow. He could play outside in the snow all day long if we let him. We have to watch his cheeks carefully and when they go from red to white we make him come in to take a break! His snow pants, coat, gloves, hat, and scarf were in the dryer 4 times last weekend alone.

He'll do anything outside...ski, sled, shovel, build forts, igloos, bridges, have snow ball fights, etc. You name it, he has done it. And, because of the kind of winter we have had thus far, he has done it all in the last week! Lucky for us, we have some neighbor kids who also love to be outside so they entertain him for hours on end.

Last weekend Chris ran out of things for him to do, so he asked him to help shovel the deck! Here are a few pictures from the dynamic shoveling duo:)






Mya also loves to be out, but in smaller doses. Her reason for coming in is usually because the snow is too deep!



Ivy....well, she just sits and watches me dress and undress her brother and sister while looking pretty cute:)

3 1/2 years old!

Today is Mya's half birthday! She will be celebrating her "un-birthday" next week at school. I'm pretty sure she has no clue what an "un-birthday" is, but at least she gets to wear the crown she has been asking about! When I told her this morning that she was 3 1/2 today I was expecting her to be happy. Instead, she cried because she wasn't 4 1/2 like Max! Here's an update on our little "big-sister".

She has exceeded our expectations for her mothering of Ivy. We knew she would be into the baby, but we had no idea she would be this into her. We can count on her to get us anything we need and she will entertain Ivy anytime we ask if we need to get something done. She asked me the other day when she could carry her by "mineself" and I wasn't quite sure how to respond. I said when she was 5 we could talk about it:)

Mya loves school and knows all of her capital and lower case letters. She can count to 30 and recognizes numbers 1-10 mixing up 6 and 9 occasionally! We are not quite sure if she'll be going to kindergarten when she's 5 or 6. I think she'll be ready when she's 5, but she is so darn little (28.5 pounds last time we checked) and I'm not sure I want her and Max to be 1 year apart in school. (could be trouble if Mya is dating Max's friends and vice versa!)

She loves loves loves to sing. Unfortunately, she received the Huinker genetics when it comes to her voice. It's God Awful. I love hearing her words to songs. At Christmas "We miss you a Merry Christmas" was my favorite. Mya continues to be very independent. Lately she has not wanted to go to school because she can't reach the sink and needs assistance! Her gymnastics teacher came up to me after the last class and told me Mya was doing very well, but needed to be able to accept help a little more often!

This little girl makes us laugh all the time. She still runs and jumps into Chris's arms when he gets home from work. Her faces have not changed since the day she was born. She can still give the best scowl you've ever seen! Here are a couple of pictures I took recently that pretty much sum it up:)

Feeling Blessed

Sunday night marked the last of the "baby meals" we were so fortunate to receive from our friends in Dubuque. We have been blessed with 2-3 meals a week since Ivy was born! I honestly did not know how much I would love this. 17 different people brought a meal (or 2...some of them brought one for my freezer, God bless them:) We had everything from our favorite Papa Murphy's pizza to meatloaf to pork tenderloin! Each meal was enough to feed us for dinner and lunch the next day so I should really count it as 34 meals! The timing was perfect every time...each one coming on a day when I couldn't have made a meal myself! I got a few new recipes that I will be adding to my repertoire and I accumulated more "gladware" than you could ever want or need! The people who contributed to our meals were from various aspects of my life...the volunteer group I'm involved in, my playdate friends, neighbors, book club friends, and MOPS friends! I feel so lucky to be surrounded by such generous people here in Dubuque!

Oh...and Chris thanks everyone as well. Can you imagine what our 13.6 trips to HyVee per month would have been without all of these meals?!?!?

Interior decorating at its best

Recently Max has been very interested in decorating his room. Combine this with his obsession with scotch tape, and his room is pretty decked out. I had to take a picture of this to show him years down the road. My personal favorite is the wrapping paper and tissue paper taped up to the wall:) The calendar you see in the second picture is one from snapfish that I let him make. Over Christmas they had a buy 1 get 2 free deal so I designed 2 calendars for gifts and then let him do one himself. It actually turned out pretty good except for the fact that many pictures show up in multiple months!




He has also been interested in taking pictures lately with our good camera. He puts the strap around his neck and then goes to town. The latest pictures are actually pretty good so I'm going to post those too!

2 months old!

Miss Ivy turns two months old today! She is doing really well and I feel so blessed to have her! I took her into the doctor Monday morning for a quick weight check. I wasn't worried, but her 2 month well child isn't until the 24th so I kind of wanted to know how much she weighed at 2 months! Also I started feeding her on 1 side only so I wanted to make sure she was still gaining weight at a good rate. Turns out she's a little bit of a porker! She weighed 12 pounds 2 ounces! Mya was 11-5 at 2 months if that gives you something to compare it to.

She continues to be a good sleeper....when she's not flat on her back in her crib:) She has to be completely swaddled unless she is on her tummy. Ivy loves her bouncy seat with the vibration turned on. She is not a huge fan of the swing so I'm thinking about putting it away because it takes up so much room! She is the happiest when someone is talking to her or holding her facing out so she can look around at everything happening in this crazy house! The pacifier is one of our best friends these days as well! She loves the bath and we don't even have to use the space heater anymore.

Ivy is a good car rider...thank goodness..because I have to wake her up a minimum of twice per day to take the kids to preschool and go to pick them up. I feel so bad about it each time, but I don't have a choice and I'm hopeful that it will make her a very "go with the flow" kind of kid. Someday I want to invent a car seat that you can buckle a swaddled baby in and have it still meet all of the safety ratings! I'm pretty sure Max and Mya have been woken up 3 times each in their ENTIRE LIFE! Mya is still an awesome helper and the whole "can I hold/burp/rock Ivy" 30 million times a day has gone down to 29.9 million times a day. Max is even a little bit more interested. He probably asks twice a week:)

If you are into pop culture at all, you've probably read that Beyonce and Jay-Z have used the name Ivy as part of their daughter's name. I'm guessing it will jump to the top of the chart for popular girl names now. I love the name, so why wouldn't Beyonce and Jay-Z use it??:)

Enjoy a few pictures of my adorable 2 month old:)

Resolutions for 2012

I enjoyed looking back at my resolutions for 2011 so I decided to do them again for this year! Some are going to be the same as last year and some will be new! No particular order...

1. Make fewer stops at Hy-Vee each month. We go there WAY too often for just a couple of things or a coffee or for Chinese food:) We need to condense our shopping to a few trips per month. Last year we averaged 13.6 trips to Hy-Vee each month. That's just plain ridiculous. It doesn't help that it's on Chris's way home from work so when I need something, he's able to stop without going out of his way. Don't ask me why I know about the 13.6 trips...my lovely husband figured that out:)

2. Drink less Diet Coke. I'm hoping by next year at this time I can safely say we do not drink that crap anymore!

3. Take a class of some sort. Whether it be a camera class, or a tennis instructors class or whatever. I'm feeling like my brain isn't being challenged enough as of late!

4. Take more pictures and video of my kids. This one will probably go on my list every year. One thing I want to do is take a picture of the 3 of them together on the 3rd of each month. I already missed Jan 3rd, but I figure 11 for 12 isn't bad. I got the idea from a blog I read. She has 6 kids and takes a picture of all 6 of them on the 6th of each month. Max and Mya absolutely love watching video of themselves. Who am I kidding...I love watching old video of them too!

5. Learn to can some of our produce that we have in the garden. I especially want to can salsa.

6. Get involved at our church in some way.

7. Last, but certainly not least...take a few seconds each day to appreciate everything I have. Especially my husband and kids. I'm so grateful to be home with them each day, but some days I forget to pause and think about how wonderful this time in my life is. Like the saying on my fridge says, "I'm gonna miss this."

Update on the kiddos

Here's a little update about what we've been up to around here! The weather has been absolutely wonderful. Cannot believe we've had Ivy out for walks the last few days. She loves the stroller and is adorable all bundled up (in my opinion at least:)


Max got right back into the swing of things with school. He loved being back with his friends after a couple of weeks off. I can't believe he's going to kindergarten round up in a couple of months! Where did the time go?? With all the caucus stuff going on this week in Iowa, I was remembering back to 2008 when I took him to caucus with me on a freezing cold, snowy January night when he was 10 months old. Chris was gone at class and so I had no choice if I wanted to go I had to bring him! He was a total trooper and I just passed him around all night to all of the randoms sitting around me:) Here's a picture of Max helping me make cookies this week. He is totally my helper when baking..he could probably do the whole thing himself if I let him crack the eggs!



Mya started gymnastics this week! We've been thinking about putting her in for awhile, but they had to be 3 1/2 so this month was the first she could join. She absolutely loved it and it might have been the cutest thing ever to see her out there stretching, jumping around doing cartwheels and somersaults in her little leotard.



Ivy is a smiling machine...especially in the morning and in the bathtub. She is a super sweet baby and I'm wondering if her baby acne is not going away because I kiss her too much! She's sleeping really well during the day and gets up a couple times each night, but goes right back to sleep which is really all that matters to me. I can deal with waking up for 15-20 minutes as long as I can go right back to sleep. She will be 2 months old next week which is crazy! She continues to eat really well. (as evidenced by the double chin) The kids have been giving her some bottles as well which is their very favorite thing to do!

Resolutions revisited

I revisited my 2011 resolutions and feel okay about how I did. I'd say I probably accomplished 50% of them which is a big fat F, but who's keeping track!

Here's the plant that I was able to keep alive for a whole year! It's not quite as full as it was and definitely needs to be re-potted, but it's alive and that's all that matters:)



We did find a church and are on our way to becoming members. The new membership classes took place right before Ivy was born and it was just too much for us to do at that time so we're going to take them in the spring and join. It's a really nice, small church that makes us feel very welcome and the kids love Sunday school. The church part...not so much:) Last week we didn't get the memo that when Sunday falls on a holiday they have only one service at 10am and not at 8:00 and 10:30 like normal so when we walked in at 10:29, the service seemed pretty short! Chris told Max that it will always seems short when we skip the sermon:)

The other ones I did pretty well on.....I definitely took advantage this past year with no diaper bag. We did lots of fun things with the kids both during the week and on the weekends. One of the hardest adjustments to having a new baby has been losing the ability to just jump in the car and go! When the kids asked to go to the park, museum, etc. we just went because no one was taking naps and we didn't need a diaper bag of any sort! I know we'll get back to that someday, but for now we're on a little bit more of a schedule. I also did a pretty good job of documenting the little things that the kids said or did. While I'm thinking about it I'll document one more right now! While at my parents for Christmas Max and Mya were sleeping together in the same bed and when Mya gave her usual "I can't sleep" before her head even hit the pillow, Max said "Geez louise Mya...you haven't even tried!" It was hilarious. (wonder who he hears phrases like that from???!??)

The ones I didn't do so well on...the whole drink less Diet Coke. I hardly drank any while I was pregnant (because I drank regular Dr. Pepper...my favorite) but now that the calories count again I'm back to good old caffeine free Diet Coke. Just 2-3 a week, but I know that stuff is nasty for your body so I need to cut it out. I'm also still a big time worrier, I didn't use a new tool in my kitchen each week, and we only went to the Farmer's Market 3 times all summer, but I figure...there's always 2012!