Happy Wednesday to all!  Here’s a little glimpse into our week.

French toast mornings are the best mornings in our house! Sometimes these little guys aren’t very hungry when they wake up and prefer to eat breakfast when we get back home from school drop off but definitely not on french toast mornings. Right after I took this picture, Luke picked up his suction cupped bowl of syrup to dip his french toast in and dumped it on his head. Then rubbed it around in his hair a little. That was fun to clean up amidst the weekday scramble out the door!

Eli’s preschool has a fun tradition for the 3 year old class where the parents come in and help them decorate their ‘Easter bonnets’ with assortment of random Easter stuff we brought. Then we all get to parade through classrooms around the school and show off their beautiful works of art. Eli loved this! He got to lead the line around the school and was so eager he kept trying to make his way past the teacher and run to all the other rooms! All the kids were so adorable!

We had some beautiful Friday weather around here and spent as much of the day as we could outside!  Poor Luke and Reid (and myself) have had a touch of cabin fever lately so this weather was a much needed soul refresher! It’s not supposed to last around here but we will take as much as we can get!

We had quite the busy Saturday full of the first weekend of soccer games, team pictures and opening weekend at our local zoo! With the cold Iowa winters, our zoo closes for the late fall/winter and our boys have been asking when they would open again since November!  My kids are huge animal lovers and we love walking around the zoo and visiting them all. It was beautiful April weather for the animals on Saturday and there was hardly anyone around! The animals also must have been excited to have visitors again because they were all out and interacting with us!

This leopard was really excited to play and kept sneaking up on Caleb and Eli and jumping up on the glass with them and then running away. They absolutely loved it and we spent a long time hanging out with the leopards!

Our sweet Eli who was so exhausted from soccer and walking around the zoo that day that he ‘needed a rest on the lion Mom!’.

On Easter Sunday, we were thankfully able to go to Mass as a family which is always crazy with four littles but we do our best. Last year, Josh took the big boys to Mass on Easter and I stayed home with the twins who were 6 months old and going through a phase where they alternated being up every 30 minutes all night long. We were happy to be there together this year!

We had my family over for brunch after Mass and I made my very favorite cinnamon rolls which I will share soon! The kids spent the afternoon playing outside with their new Easter toys while Josh and I worked on tearing out some of the front landscaping and replacing it with some new plants and decorative rock. We have a lot more we want to do to the front of the house but it’s amazing how just little changes can make a difference on how a home feels! With some projects we have going on inside the house, it’s starting to feel more like ours and less like we are living in someone else’s house!

On Monday, I finished Best Lent Ever – a daily Lenten video and reflection series by Dynamic Catholic. I loved it! I am a new Matthew Kelly fan for sure. If you want to know more about it, sign up for next year’s Best Lent Ever or their daily reflections go here. I highly recommend it!

So…this week was nuts. Last week was even more so. Remember when I said we were working on getting our house on the market? Well it sold. In 7 hours. I know. That was pretty unexpected. We are obviously so thankful and happy but also a little panicked because now we need to find a new house quickly. We have faith that God is leading us but it is a little stressful! Here’s to some serious house hunting!

Also this week our house rocked our Cubbie blue for the first Cubs game of the season! Happy Opening Day Cubs fans!

I have some high hopes for this season! This is the best time of the year. Luke and Reid already have a favorite player. 😉

The babies had their first food- a little thinned out oatmeal and were a little unsure.

They took a few bites before they were more interested in the spoon than anything else. We will try sweet potatoes later this week which was always a favorite first with Caleb and ElI!

I found this Easter bunny sleeper with ears that Eli wore when he was that age. I couldn’t find it for Easter but we still had to try it out!

Look who is sitting up! You can tell by their smiles that they know they are a pretty big deal. I love this stage because they are pretty content sitting up with a pillow and a pile of toys on their laps for awhile. I know this won’t last long!

They’ve also definitely become more and more aware of each other. They find each other pretty amusing and are constantly falling over on each other or rolling on the other. They don’t ever seem to mind- maybe they are just used it it!

Hope you have a good week! Wish us luck with the house!

What a couple of weeks around here! First, some pretty big news for us. We have decided to put our house on the market and attempt to move our family closer to where I grew up. Staying in Iowa, just another part. We have basically spent every spare moment since Christmas Eve (when we decided to give this crazy plan a go) trying to prepare our house and talking with our realtor. I know…seems like a normal thing to do when you have infant twins right? There are so many reasons why we have been thinking about this and we kind of both feel like it’s now or never. If we are going to move, I would love to do it before kindergarten starts in the fall so Caleb doesn’t have to switch schools. So we’ll see. The house is supposed to be listed in the next week and then I guess we will reevaluate if it hasn’t sold by July/August. Wish us luck! Keeping the house walk-through ready with four kids shouldn’t be stressful at all. 😉

In other things… we also welcomed our brand new niece! We visited my sister’s sweet baby girl this week and we have been so excited! They knew her gender but kept it a secret. Maybe it was an aunt thing but I had a pretty strong feeling it was a girl.

This is what I was greeted with at 7AM on a Monday.  Seems about right for a house with all boys!

Caleb and Eli helped me make a cake for Daddy’s birthday. I’m going to pretend we didn’t eat half the topping that was supposed to be on it. 😉

So thankful for this guy on his birthday and everyday. This has been a wild year for us… we had just found out we were pregnant with what we thought was one baby when he turned 30. What a difference a year makes!

We celebrated Easter this weekend… although perhaps not in typical fashion for us! I mentioned that Luke and Reid were battling their first cold, and poor things are having quite the difficult time. They were up Saturday night for a really long time just restless and fussy and the four of us hardly got any sleep at all. I was supposed to get up around 5:30 to get everyone dressed and ready to go but had only been sleeping for about 40 minutes at that point and just could not pull it together in time. Josh took the older boys to Church later that morning and I stayed home with the babies who were never going to make it through Easter service poor things.

They slept for a couple hours in the morning and perked up for a little bit so I could get them dressed. You sure wouldn’t know from this picture that they weren’t feeling good!

We headed down to my mom’s for brunch and then back home for a much needed Easter nap….for everyone!

Happy Easter to all of you! Hope you have a great week.

Happy New Year to all (officially!)  As usual, I’m already having issues remembering to write 2016 on everything. It was so nice to have a three day weekend and spend it hanging out with my little fam.  We did a TON of traveling over Christmas (over 700 miles in 3 days) so we enjoyed hanging low this weekend without any plans whatsoever except catching up on all the sleep. The babies apparently caught wind of that idea though and thought they would teach me a lesson on making plans with 4 kiddos under 5 in the house….

Our NYE was very uneventful.  My best friend and godson came to visit during the day so my crew skipped their ‘quiet time’ in the afternoon and lost their ever loving minds come 6:30 pm.  They willingly (!!!) went to bed early leaving Josh and I to snuggle the babies and ring in 2016 like the wild people we are.  Instead… this was me at 9:40 pm.  Whatever.

We spent Friday and Saturday digging through the Christmas presents we had unloaded out of the car in a sleepy haze and piled in the babies’ room. We finally put those away and took down our Christmas decorations.  Usually, it makes me a little sad to put all the bright and cheerfulness away for the year but this year I was SO, SO ready.  In our small living room we had crammed our regular furniture, two baby swings, more toys than you can imagine and a bigger Christmas tree than we have ever had before.  I was ready to have some sense of normalcy and walking space back.  Of course, I’d also had enough with the pine needles already.

Sunday we headed to our mall early in the morning to let the boys run off some energy before it opened for shoppers.  You can almost always find us there on a weekend morning in the heart of winter in Iowa because we all get cabin fever over here.  It was perfect because the cold kept even the mall walkers at home and we had our run (literally) of the place. We stopped by the hockey rink on our way out and my big boys were so captivated by the game that they forgot their crazy moods for at least 15 minutes and sat like quiet little angels watching. It was amazing.

We ended the weekend with Week 17 of football. Obviously the Bears have been out of this season for awhile but it was at least fun for us to watch the games that determines playoff matchups come down to the final minutes!

New beginnings doesn’t even begin to describe this past year for us.  We have experienced such change and flux from our normal and I’m extremely proud of how well we have adapted.  Fittingly, yesterday on the last day of 2015 I worked my very last day at my job and start today, the first day of 2016 as a new stay at home momma. I have conflicting emotions about leaving my job but most of all I am excited to close that chapter and start this brand new one today.  I don’t imagine it will be easier but I hope it is filled with more joy, less stress (or maybe just a different kind!) and more time to focus on those little people that really are the most important thing in my life.

When I was trying to come up with some goals for 2016, I immediately thought of all these books I wanted to read, opportunities I wanted to volunteer for, and all the hours I wanted to spend trying out new exercise routines to get back into shape. And then I laughed at myself.  I mean I hope that I can dabble in all of that sometime this year but let’s be honest. Those are not realistic goals for me to focus on this year during this crazy season of my life. There will be years for those things but this year I’m setting some more realistic goals that are just as important to me.

1. Prepare ourselves for mentally and emotionally for kindergarten and preschool.  Caleb will be starting kindergarten in the fall and Eli 3 year old preschool.  I love my big boys and know they will do wonderfully with what is ahead but I want to spend this year working with them on the things that will help them be ready.  Helping Eli be more confident with the potty and expressing himself with words.  Working with Caleb on letter sounds and his nerves about being at school all day.  And of course, working on preparing MY emotions for these big changes for my big boys.

2. Decide once and for all whether to move closer to our families or stay here.  For years, we’ve considered moving closer to our families for what seems like a million reasons.  We’ve always been one foot in, one foot out and it’s been a subject of constant discussion.  With Caleb starting kindergarten in the fall, I want him to start school in the place we plan to live forever.  I’m not sure if that place is here or there but I want us to decide.  Then make peace with our decision and move on.

3. Work into a better sleeping routine with the babies.  They are only three months old and are doing great sleeping- it could be SO much worse with two.  I do however hope we can ease ourselves into a routine of an earlier bedtime for them so Josh and I can have a little time to ourselves at night to hang out together alone while the littles are sleeping- to watch tv, pick up the house or whatever.  I think we are both missing that time.

 

4. Start my new role at home and make it work for me.  I’m excited to be home with my kiddos and get into a routine.  I find comfort in routine and look forward to starting our new one with me home.

This Christmas season I am honestly overwhelmed with how much we have to be thankful for. Every year after Christmas is over and it’s time to put away our Christmas decorations, I always say a prayer for our family. I pray that the next year in front of us before we open these decorations again will be full of joy and memories and that we will open them just as happy as we are when we put them away. Never could I have imagined last January when I was saying that prayer, the plans that God has had for our family. We have been so blessed by these sweet babies joining our family this year and all our memories we made before and after they were born.

We have had a busy holiday season trying to fit in all our Christmas traditions we usually do while figuring out how to do this ‘taking infant twins out in public’ thing! Of course we had to go see Santa! This was the first year that neither Caleb or Eli was nervous, they were just SO excited.

We drove to a beautiful barn decorated for Christmas about twenty minutes away to see him and somehow there was NO line. Luke and Reid slept through the whole thing and we took our own pictures for free. That’s a win in my book!

We had a big cookie baking day at my Mom’s house and both of the boys were so excited to help. ___ I’m pretty sure breastfeeding twins gives me a close to unlimited Christmas cookie license. (No? Is that not true? 😉 )

Caleb was a shepherd in his preschool’s Christmas pageant. All the preparations were kept a surprise from the parents and the kids were told not to tell us what songs they were singing.  It was so adorable! I’m going to pretend that the reason I didn’t get any more pictures is because of where we were seating but in reality keeping two infants quiet and happy doesn’t leave much room for picture taking!

We saw Christmas lights, had our annual Grinchmas with my sister and went to a holiday parade. We definitely took advantage of the season and the mild winter so far. These sweet 4 are definitely all I’ve been wishing for under the tree this year!

Merry Christmas to you and your family from all of us! Hope you have enjoyed this season as much as we have.

Just popping in to share some pictures of my newest favorite Cubs fans! Our family decked out for the Wild Card game on Wednesday and Luke and Reid were so excited to witness their first Cubs playoff win that they partied hard into the night. 😉

We’re playing the Cardinals in the NLDS right now and I’m loving every minute of this playoff season!

Overall we are doing really well.  Obviously, we’ve never been more exhausted. Like ever. But these little guys are doing great! They are sleeping as well as can be expected at this point and so far have generally been pretty go with the flow. With two older brothers that go to school every day and have extra activities, that is such a blessing! We started swim lessons for Caleb and Eli last weekend and the babies just slept like sweet angels in the stroller while I watched lessons.

They have both started to gain weight and their bilirubin levels are both starting to come down slowly which is a huge relief. They are nursing like champs and we are working on getting tandem feeding down. We got their newborn pictures done last weekend and I’m so excited to see them!

Off to feed some babies. Go Cubs!

We’ve really been trying to get out and enjoy this beautiful fall Iowa weather this year more than just about ever before. We’re totally exhausted but I also feel physically rejuvenated not having to carry around 14 pounds of baby in my tummy anymore! The end of our summer was pretty dull for our kiddos since I couldn’t get out and do very much so we’ve definitely been trying to get out and do all the fall things now to make up for that!

We took the big boys to a local (free!) pumpkin patch over the weekend while the babies stayed with my mom and aunt. For being a tiny little patch, they had so much for the kids to do. Caleb loved this giant pipe slide!

This tiny little ‘train’ was a huge favorite. I’m pretty sure it went about 2 miles/hour and went in a small circle but my kiddos thought it was the coolest thing ever. We were lucky that there wasn’t a ton of kids there around lunchtime when we went so they rode it over and over and would probably still be there if we hadn’t convinced them to move on to something else!

Tractor rides are always a favorite in our family! Someone along the way came over with a chicken from their farm and let all the kids see it up close. That was pretty cool for our boys!

We got our pumpkin decorating on which of course had to be painted like ninja turtles.  We are big fans of painting pumpkins instead of carving them at this age because then the kids can help with everything and anything that doesn’t involve knives around a 2 year old is good news for us.

This is pretty much what these guys did while the rest of us were enjoying our outside fall fun. They wanted to be festive in their Halloween monster sleepers though. Don’t they look alike here? (Luke is on the left.)

The big boys helped Daddy rake up most of our overdue leaves… and then jumped in them and tracked them all over. If we’re being honest, that’s exactly where they still are today. I’m playing the newborn twin card for that one.

Our older boys have been obsessed with Toy Story since we watched the first movie over the summer and they have been talking about dressing up as Buzz and Woody for Halloween for months. It was all I could do to keep them out of their costumes until Halloween night.

Since Luke and Reid didn’t have much of an opinion this year, we went with the toy story theme and they were the Toy Story aliens! 😉 Their hats are just pieces of felt that I cut up and hot glued together. And of course added the pipe cleaner at the top.

Caleb and Eli went trick or treating around the neighborhood with Daddy and I stayed back with the little dudes. They definitely got a lot of attention from the kids that came to our door!

Trick or treaters are exhausting for a 1 month old!

That was our Halloween week!

It’s beginning to smell a lot like fall around here!  The weather has been unseasonably cool and absolutely beautiful. I used to be a summer girl at heart and dreaded the idea of fall but the last few years I totally changed my tune. Perhaps it’s the fact that I don’t have to go back to school anymore…..

September 1st is when I’m getting out all my fall decor, lighting up all my beautiful fall candles, and throwing some pumpkin in everything. I’m even okay with the fact that I need to wait about an extra month for a real pumpkin spice latte – because I think it will taste even better to my sleep and caffeine deprived self.

My four year old had a moment this afternoon where he was super sad that summer is drawing to a close and Christmas isn’t for another four months (because apparently the only good things in life are summer and Christmas). And four months is of course an eternity. We talked about all the fun things that will happen between now and Christmas time that we absolutely don’t want to skip!  Like the start of pre-k, our babies being born, football, Halloween, and Thanksgiving.  He’s pretty convinced now that fall coming is not quite so terrible. 😉

8 days and counting….

This space fell silent for so long because at some point I just wasn’t sure I had anything of interest to say!  Life with a 1 and 3 year old…. now a 2 and 4 year old is plain old crazy and sometimes routine but never boring.  The last 6 months have been arguably the most unexpectedly exciting of our lives so far and I felt like now was a time that I certainly didn’t want to forget.

So I’m back to blogging.  Sometimes what stopped me before was the pressure to have perfect pictures/perfect grammar/perfect content.  I’m letting that go now.  My pictures will not be perfect and the posts won’t always be concise or on-topic but that is just fine with me.  I’ll get better- I promise.

So…. what’s been going on in our lives?

* Caleb turned 4 and Eli turned 2 and they are the very best of friends.  Caleb loved preschool last year and will start Pre-K in the fall.  Our Pre-K is every day, half days which will be quite the adjustment for everyone!  I know he is ready for it though and has been counting down the days since preschool was over in May.  Eli has really grown up in the past year and his spunky personality is coming through more and more.  He is so very sweet when he wants to be and also has so much more sass than his big brother.  Sometimes, he gives us a run for our money!

* Josh and I have been working like crazy on updating our home.  I think when I stopped posting, we had around 3 rooms in the entire house done.  We got a burst of motivation this last winter because we were preparing to have the boy’s birthday party at our house and did our entire main level and basement in a few weeks. The last few months, Josh finished two of the bedrooms upstairs and now we only have 3 rooms left to do in the entire house.  Our bedroom, the laundry room, and our upstairs bathroom.  Can. Not. Wait. (I’ve been taking pictures the whole time and hopefully one of these days will get around to putting all the before/after photos up on here.)

* We’re tackling the art of potty training our second child.  I thought it would get easier after the first… but that’s not true.  At least not for us.  Potty training is not for the faint of heart and it is exhausting.  Slow and steady is our motto right now.  

*We spent our spring and early summer doing all the fun things we could as a family of 4.  We played, we went to movies, we traveled to visit family, we picked out new bedding and paint for the ‘Big Boy Room’, and we soaked up our time together because….. as of October we will no longer be a family of 4.  Our family is expecting….. TWINS!  We are thrilled, shocked, excited, nervous and everything in between.  A post on how we found out and how the pregnancy is going is on it’s way.  We are currently 26 weeks and trucking along.

This is definitely a time in our lives where nothing is boring…