vomit filled ear

Anyone need a garage band name? How about Vomit Filled Ear? It has a nice ring to it...

We took advantage of the home school day out at our local corn maize, making it FREE for us to go. We love free, and normally it would be $16 for us to go! Moo wheezed his little heart out as he ran through the hole maze. He really wanted to join up with one of the mega families there and be one of 8. Sorry bud. Ella Bella pulled her hat over her face and snoozed the morning away.

We also went to the apple butter festival whole Hubs was working. Our dear friend R spoils my kids rotten and teaches them all about the world around them. She chased Moo through the orchard and caught a frog for him. They fed goats and sheep and threw apples at each other. I am so thankful for how she just adores my kids. We adore her too! NAd yes, i do dress my children in ridiculous attire. It's fun!

wimpy white boy

It's not croup! Hooray!

Moo has the symptoms of Asthma, but it has to be a reoccurring problem to be defined as Asthma. We also suspect he has a garden variety of allergies and hope to get him non-wheezy enough to actually be screened for allergies. I traumatized him yesterday when I accidentally gave him "good and grainy" bread that had nuts in it. I happened to read the label a few seconds after I gave it to him and immediately pinned him to the ground and yanked it out of his mouth. For some reason, he didn't enjoy that.

Good times.

parenting truth 987

Your baby will always have a blow out in the brand new outfit, never the old hand me downs.

mini darth vader

I have my own personal mini darth vader, except instead of saying "Luke, I am your father." He says thing "Can I have sum froo loo's, peas.". Little man has come down with a nasty case of croup and is a wheezing, snotty, feverish, hacking little mess. We got to party all night long last night listening to him wheeze lightly between bouts of screaming trying to hold off on the drugs to get him to his allergists appointment at 9.

After enduring 16 plus hours of mild wheezing he kicked it up a notch around 7:30 this morning and ran him into our local awesome fancy clinic. By the time we got back in a room his oxygen level was down to 90% and his heart rate was 160 bpm. Not good. So 3 hours in the er, 3 chest x-rays, a blood draw, and 2 breathing teatments he was back to just mild wheezing.

We will be doing 6 or more breathing treatments a day until he licks this. Thankfully, he was easily distracted by Thomas videos and promises of m and m's if he left the nebulizer in his mouth for the full 30 minutes. The cute little fish mask was a HECK no.

in the crosshairs

Will you be praying for my sister, and her precious family and their town?

Nasty old Ike is making a beeline for their home and it looks like their home and all the homes of their friends and family may take a direct hit tomorrow morning. They have evacuated and are fine but shaken. They live just a hop, skip, and a jump (about 4-5 miles) from the beach so they will be getting the full brunt of the storm.

**** edited to add:
They are fine, their house is fine, and I think that most of their friends homes are ok too. What is not fine is the lack of electricity and functioning sewer citywide so they can't head back to work or get back to normal just yet. But in the meantime, I had fun seeing my sister, my niece and my sister's mother in law yesterday while they have relocated to my parents house until things settle down on the coast. Moo taught little Booger Bear all about trains and the girls slobbered on each other.

double the fun

Today was Ella Bella's 4 month check-up. She is now a hearty 16lbs 90z and 26.5 inches long. Moo was 27.5 inches and 16 lbs at his 4 month check-up. We grow 'm big around here!

Hubs is on shift today, so I got to brave the pediatrician alone with 2 kids. Fun times. I knew I was in for it when I got outside and it was raining and there were gigantic puddles all around my car. So, wet feet and pant legs and off we go.

No parking left at the doctor's office. Have to park across the street, it's still raining. Luckily, I brought along Phil and Ted. We load up the stroller and trek inside relatively easy. Take the elevator to the 4th floor and proceed to wonder around confused. Oops, we need the fifth floor. We are having fun now.

Oh crap, I forgot I get to redo all our paperwork because we have new insurance. Fill out paperwork while Moo proceeds to climb a bookshelf. Yep. Scold Moo and divert his attention while we wait, and wait, and wait. Ella Bella is hungry but apparently finds a doctors office an inappropriate place to eat and goes on strike.

Weight check. Ella Bella pees on the nurse. At least she was polite and smiled and cooed while she did it. We go back to the exam room and Moo proceeds to thoroughly investigate it and rearrange anything that isn't (literally) bolted down. We decide that since we are here, we are going to go all out.

Ear exams for both kids.
1 oral vaccine for Ella Bella.
3 shots for Ella Bella
1 flu shot for Moo

and, the icing on the cake.

Moo gets to have his blood drawn and tested for lead! Woohoo!

Ella Bella was ticked off long before she got her shots because she was hungry and tired so of she just screamed slightly louder than the window shattering scream she had been working. Moo just frowned with the shot and then happily ran off to get a treat and a toy.

We then went off to find the lab for his blood draw. No wait, right in. He so trustingly jumped up in my lap and gave them his little arm. They kindly looked me in the eye and said, this is not going to be fun, hold his arms down and hang on tight. And...

He barely flinched as the needle went in and cried just a little bit while they took a huge syringe of blood. And then he hopped down and said, "Let's go home!"

He needed to be tested for lead because we have a house built before 1978. We have a house built during WW2 and there is lead paint everywhere. Thankfully, most of it is under several layers of latex paint and it is fine. The problem was on the exterior of our house where there was peeling paint. It's been bugging us for months but we knew we couldn't mess with it when the kids were around. So last week, my husband shipped me and the kids off to the grandparents house and got to work. He got on the equivalent of a hazmat suit and spend 3 straight days scraping and carefully cleaning and removing every bit of lose paint.

civility

Today, hubs stayed with the kids so I could as he says "buy high quality items for low cost." It's a treat to be able to go out on a weekday sans kids and really think about what I am purchasing. Yes, I got some sweet deals. Perhaps more on that later.

Normally, I hate shopping at Target if I am using any kind of coupon. They usually accuse me of running a black market coupon operation and stealing from there store by wanting to save .50 on a box of cereal. Grrr. However, there is one older gentleman who works as a cashier and he is pure sunshine. I always get in his line because he is so content to just be. To be there scanning all my "crap" and not even batting an eye as I hand him a dozen coupons. I want to come across as that, Content. Happy. Fulfilled.

I also went to our high end grocer today. We don't normally shop there because it's expensive and their sale items are still usually more than Walmart. Shopping there is just about as fun as grocery shopping can be. Lots of great food, beautiful displays, samples, and very friendly cashiers and cart escorts. I was waiting in line to checkout and the woman in front of me was on a tirade. She had bought a huge cart full of brand name items, easily $200 worth of items. And she was yelling. Yelling at the sweet cashier and the cart escort. Hollering and carrying on to a manager. Wow she was mad. She was so mad.

Because the &*%$#@#$ grocery store didn't have generic pop-tarts in double chocolate fudge cookie.

Yep. She was berating people because of the lack of variety in generic pop tarts. She left and I proceeded to pay for my groceries which took quite a while. The cart escort came back and was really shaken, apparently she had continued to holler all the way to her car about pop-tarts. Pop-tarts.

I promise this all has a point.

It has made me think about the kind of customer I am, and the kind of person I am. My son has the book No Biting and it covers the basics. Don't bite your friends. Bite an apple. Don't kick the Dog. Kick a ball. He loves that book. He has it memorized. But he doesn't LIVE it. I have a book that gives me great advice on how to live. It's my Bible, passed down to me from my sister. I love that book, yet it often sits on my shelf ignored and dusty when the challenges of life come up. I read it, sometimes. I feel like I don't LIVE it though.

I want to LIVE it.

I want people to see Christ in me, as I see it in the cashier at Target. I don't want to be so focused on earthly things that I am screaming about pop-tarts.

four

Ella Bella is 4 months old today. Agh. Her life is flying by before me. She wants so badly to be at the next stage now. Her current craze is trying to sit up. She refuses to lean against us, she thrusts her self forward and tries to balance. Crazy little peanut.

To celebrate 4 months of living we got her this awesome pink boon spoon. Basically, you put the food inside the spoon and then can feed baby with one handed ease. I have serious doubts about the necessity of it or even that it is anymore convenient than totting around a jar and a spoon. But it looks awesome and it's bpa free!

family portrait

I have been wanting to do a family portrait for several months, this is not what I had in mind.....


Not exactly what I had in mind. This is the Moo's idea of our apparently dysfunctional family. Upon closer inspection you will find that my father is missing a nose and a thumb while having a horrible eye brow dye job and my mother is a prom dress animal wearing teeny bopper wearing lace up tennis shoe tanks. My husband is apparently a big time player cheating on me with my near identical twin while I stand by. She is only referred to as "not papa". No idea who "girl moo" is or why he joined the fam. I do like that I am really skinny with long luxurious hair and am very stylishly dressed while carrying Ella Bella. Also notice that my son finds it completely acceptable that babies be drug around in wagons. No idea where he got the idea that was ok.

And yes, my son plays with Barbies.

*edited to add: None of this was staged, not the outfits the names, or the "posing"