Feeling Better and Fat Booth

Finn is slowly getting back to his normal self today. Not totally there, but not nearly as fussy! I have been on a cleaning rampage all morning! Here is the somewhat happy guy!

Finn LOVES to read books. This is his favorite one right now.

And now onto the Fat Booth. I know this app isn't super new, but it's new to me and I am obsessed with it. I stare at some of these photos and almost pee my pants laughing so hard. ENJOY!

        

Finn's First Ear Infection

Don't let this title fool you. Although ear infections are extremely common, this was not your typical ear infection. Finn's fevers had been spiking close to 105 at nighttime. Since I had recently been at the doctor's office, I wasn't concerned enough to take him to the ER. Plus he was still sleeping somewhat and eating somewhat. And the ibuprofen was bringing that fever down, but you have to wait 6 hours before the next dose and that was killing me because it started to wear off around hour 4. Anyways, after an AWFUL night last night, I put a call into my doctor's office. Two flippin hours later they finally call me back and tell me since his fever hasn't gone down, and he hasn't gotten that rash like he most likely would have if it were Roseola, and he's irritable - it would be best to bring him in again to check his ears. I totally agreed. He was so cranky and he wasn't eating. I was pretty much praying it would be an ear infection just so we could get on something stronger than ibuprofen.

So we get to the doctor's office at 10:30. Sure enough, Jack pees his pants. Not like full out, but enough to where he starts telling everyone that his pants are wet. UGH! So I take him to the bathroom to finish going, remove his wet underwear and hold back my tears. 45 minutes later we are called in. Let me also say Finn didn't stop screaming bloody murder this entire time in the waiting room. Oh and one mom came out of seeing the dr with her son, she is on her cell phone complaining to someone that her son has strep throat. In the meantime, her son sits down and starts playing with Jack. I'm like, great - please let your son spread his strep throat to my healthy son. I HATE GOING TO THE DOCTOR! Anyway, we get in the room, take his temp (99) and wait another 15 min for the actual doctor. His left ear was infected so we got on amoxicillin and some ear drops I'm putting in both ears just to be safe. I'm also paranoid that Finn is going to have an allergic reaction to the amoxicillin the way Jack did. And I'm also paranoid that Jack is going to pour himself some amoxicillin when I'm not looking too. I'm exaggerating - but hey, it could happen. Last week Jack took out toaster strudels from the freezer and put two in the toaster and made his own breakfast while I was in the shower. True story.

ANYWAY - I am praying praying and praying that the meds kick in and that I can get my happy healthy baby boy back. I can't have a repeat of last night that is for sure. Tom and I alternated coming downstairs laying on the couch and watching Kai Lan with Finn because it's the only thing that would get him to stop whining. Eventually, I just had to let him scream it out in the basement because the kid was not sleeping. Pretty much felt like the worst mom in the world. It's amazing how helpless you feel when your kids are sick.

And as promised, here is my basil slowly starting to grow!! I don't see anything else popping through yet in the other plants.

Enough is ENOUGH

This winter was brutal. And it still feels like winter even though technically it's spring. Someone in our family has been sick since Christmas. I thought we were in the clear, until Finn spiked a fever of 103 on Friday afternoon. I ended up bringing both boys to the doctor's office Friday afternoon, waiting for 2 hours to see a doctor. Waiting at the doctor's office might be one of the worst things in the world to do. Especially with more than one child. Finn's ears were sparkly clean, his throat looked fine, he was swabbed for influenza which came back negative. She suspected Roseola, which is a virus with a high fever and rash occur. But the rash doesn't come until the fever is gone, so it's hard to diagnose.  But since it's a virus, there isn't much you can do except give dose after dose of tylenol or ibuprofen to help with the fever. It's really really painful as a parent to see your baby so sick. I am about 80% positive Jack had this Roseola when he was about 12 months, but I never remember his fever getting this high. The dr said the fever could last from 2-5 days, so I'm not going to start freaking out until we are on day 6 of a high fever. Since Finn is relatively normal when the medicine kicks in and his fever goes down and he is eating somewhat and drinking milk and water- I'm not horribly concerned, I just wish this thing would run it's course.

Tom had a work event on Saturday night and we were lucky enough that my mother-in-law was so flexible and willing to babysit a sick baby at our house so we could both still attend. We had a great night out - I got to get all dressed up in a fun new dress and a tux for Tom. But Finn was always in the back of my mind, wondering how he was doing, etc. It's hard being a mom sometimes. OK, it's hard being a mom all of the time.  I'm always worrying about something, but more so when my boys are sick. I felt guilty leaving him when he was so sick. But I knew that his Grandma would comfort him in just the same ways that I would comfort him.

So, I am ready for spring. I am ready for everyone to be healthy. I am ready to kick all illnesses to the curb.

PS - my basil plants have started to sprout! Pictures this week, unless I kill them off! And prayers for my little Finners please.

New Life!

One of my best high school friends had her THIRD baby boy tonight. Welcome to the world Everett Michael Morris! I can't wait to see pictures of the little guy.

Get this...in my group of high school friends, three of us have children. There are now 8 children between the three of us
- One was born super close to Thanksgiving
- One was born on Christmas Eve
- One was born on December 30th
- One was born on New Years Eve
- One was born super close to Valentine's Day
- One was born on Leap Year
- And two of Elissa's boys now share their birthday, March 23rd.

Isn't that crazy!?!?!?!?! And none of us have mixed genders.

So excited for the Morris family and I can't wait to get my hands on little Everett in June.

And in other new life...I'm attempting a salsa garden this year! I'm also going to try green beans and tomatoes on the side. In my little tray I have bell peppers, hot peppers, green onions, cilantro, and basil. I'm nervous that I'm going to screw it up, but I think this will be a fun adventure!

Brusha Brusha Brusha

Tom took this video last night and I think it is hilarious. The dentist would be so proud.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

In the past few days, Finn has really started copying everything Jack does. It's quite hilarious. We also have been able to venture outside in this heat wave. I can't wait to take the boys to the park, go on long walks, set up the pool and sprinkler, and just be OUTSIDE! This winter has been the worst! I had this nasty sinus infection that lasted about 3 weeks. I seriously just got my smell and taste back. I've never realized how important smell and taste are. I didn't know when Finn pooped because I couldn't smell it. Cooking was impossible because I couldn't taste the ingredients. And I had no appetite (but I'm not going to complain about that one!). We are all finally on the up and up. Back into normal routine and just waiting for all of this snow to melt!

Enjoy the latest pics of my boys!

Finn loves to read books. Most of the time, he reads them in this position too:

Growing up way too fast

Finn is SO sensitive. It's quite comical. Anytime he falls, or someone says no, or at dinner if Bailey eats something out of his hands - he loses it and starts crying and screaming. But my sensitive boy is also super lovey dovey and he loves to run up to me and give me the best hugs and kisses. Whereas when Jack was his age, he wouldn't give me the time of day!

And here is an example of monkey see monkey do:

Here is Finn copying and looking at Jack while Jack was doing his hi-ho dance with his hockey stick:

And just a few pics from outside - Jack is impossible to photograph outside because he won't stop running and playing, but here he is in the garage before taking off to snowblow the snow, ha!

Fun Little Saturday

We took a sporadic trip to the Mall of America on Saturday afternoon. Jack had a blast. Actually, the first ride he went on was Paul Bunyan's Log Chute. When Tom asked Jack if he wanted to go on it, Jack got super excited to walk in the dark waiting area. So I took Finn over to the area where we could watch them go down the huge drop. The whole time I was thinking there is no way Jack is going to last in that line and there is no way Tom will get him on the actual ride. Well, to my surprise, a few minutes later I see Tom and Jack at the front of the line. Do you see them?

And here they are on their way...

Can you see Tom's head? 

After the ride...soaked!

We rode some other wimpy rides too...

And I'm not joking, I thought I was going to barf while riding this ride. All it did was go in a circle and you could press the button to go up and down. I was getting all warm and numb and I'm just glad it only lasted like 2 minutes. Ha. When did I get so old and lame? Jack was actually really bored on this ride.

Don't worry, at dinner Tom got ride a ride...the bull! ha.

And after dinner, we had a few more points for rides so Jack went on the Log Chute again, but with mommy this time!

And we can't forget about Finners...poor guy was stuck in the stroller all night. He was pretty distracted by all of the people and noise though.

Laundry Day!

They're here!!!!

My first of like 8 loads is in right now! I haven't been able to do laundry since Sunday, so there is lots of catching up to do. I'll keep you posted on how it goes. I'm hoping they have some magical power in them that actually makes me like doing laundry. Now if only someone could invent something to put away all of the clothes. That would be amazing.

I haven't posted a video in a while. Finn has been so funny lately. You probably want to mute my music at the bottom of the website before you play this. And two things about the video 1) Ignore my super duper annoying voice. And 2) ignore Jack's outfit choice. He has been extremely picky as to what he wants to wear. Let's just say he only likes to wear one certain pair of underwear and he likes to pick his clothes from the dirty laundry hamper, not his drawers. Ugh. Anyway, Enjoy.

Reflection

With Ash Wednesday coming up this week, I've been trying to figure out how I want to spend this Lent Season. For a while I thought this year I might not give up something, but start something new - a food journal. I think my whole problem with eating is that I don't care. And I want to care, I should care what I'm putting into my body, so maybe a food journal will help.

But then I started really evaluating my time and how it's spent during the day. I waste a ridiculous amount of time on the internet. Mainly facebook, and frankly it's getting quite annoying. I don't like bumping into people and knowing things because facebook told me. I've found myself comparing myself to others on facebook too and that is just stupid. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great way to reconnect with other people, especially those you haven't seen in a while and I know facebook isn't going anywhere anytime soon. I love seeing pictures of my friend's children and their families. I think the internet has saved me as a stay at home mom - but other times it's cursed me too. So I'm going to step away from facebook for a while, for hopefully a long while. I'm not deactivating my account (which by the way I think the only real reason I'm not deactivating it is because you need a facebook account to play the scrabble app on the iPhone - ha, how pathetic am I?). So I can still respond to messages and all that jazz.

This reflection also got me thinking about blogging. Do I share too much information about my life? Are there creepy people reading my blog? Should I not be posting pictures of me and my family? Should I make a password for my blog so I know exactly who can see things? I'm going to think about these things the next few weeks, but I know I'm not going to stop blogging. It's therapeutic. It's an online baby book for my boys, which by the way I could have bound into a book at any given moment if I wanted to thanks to a website called blurb or something. Plus I have a lot of out of town friends and family I like to keep updated.

And now something completely off topic - our washer broke this weekend. Like broke, broke. It was an old washer. All of the appliances in our house are old, but the majority of them work. ha. The sad news is that we've been talking for a while about getting all new appliances, but not even thinking about the washer and dryer. And then of course, this happens. Isn't that always how it goes? We bit the bullet and bought a front load washing machine and a new dryer too. Funny story about our old dryer - it's actually a fairly new dryer. But when we bought the house, they told us the timing belt did not work. Therefore, you couldn't set the timer on the dryer so it wouldn't stop unless you went down there and stopped it. The people who owned this house before us are great and we ran into them at our neighbors house and he said he even bought a brand new timing belt and it didn't fix it. You don't even want to know how many times I have started that dryer and completely forgot about it until 5, yes 5 hours later. One night, I let it go all night long because I forgot about it when I went to bed! The new ones are getting installed on Wednesday I think. I'll be sure to take some before and after pictures, even though our laundry room is in our dungeon.

Happy Monday!

Handwriting Link-Up

I was "tagged" in Daina's blog for this Handwriting Link-Up post. It's actually a pretty fun idea. I, just like Daina, have noticed that a lot of the blogs I follow have started Vlogging. That's video blogging. I really am not sure how I feel about this. Although I love to see and hear what the bloggers themselves actually look and sound like, it's almost like it's too personal for me to do. Maybe if some of my real life friends start doing it - i'll hop on the bandwagon. But in the meantime, looking at people's handwriting is always fun too, right? ha. I hate my handwriting. I swear when I wrote notes in junior high and high school - every paragraph I could have a different type of handwriting. All caps, cursive, sloppy, free-form, you name it. As you will see in the scanned copy of my handwriting, I'm not trying to impress anyone.

So...here were the questions that Daina answered on her blog that I used too:

1. What's your name and your blog name?
2. What's your blog's URL?
3. Write: "A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog!"
4. What's your favorite quote?
5. What's your favorite song?
6. What are your favorite bands and singers?
7. Anything else you want people to know?
8. Tag people

Although I only tagged Darcy, Jen, Elissa, BF, Teri, and Megan - I wanted to tag all of my followers that have blogs, but I ran out of room. I'll list a few more even though I didn't write them with my beautiful handwriting: AJ,  Jackie, Mel, Randi, Ali. So please, you should still do this if you are thinking for a different type of post this week!  It's fun!

New Kicks

Just the other week as I was putting Jack's shoes on I realized his feet grew overnight. We needed new shoes, STAT! This winter, Jack has been wearing his boots everywhere and in the summer he wore his crocs everywhere. So we were in search for some new tennies. My brother has been Jack's shoe guy since he was out at Craig hospital. (I made him a calendar of something to do every day he was in rehab and one day I told him to find a pair of shoes online for Jack). Ever since Brendan picked out these shoes two years ago, we let Brendan pick out all of Jack's shoes. However, Brendan hates Crocs and thinks it's ridiculous we buy them for Jack - but I don't care. Crocs are awesome and so convenient since he can put them on himself. We will definitely be buying Jack another pair of Crocs this summer. Sorry Bren!

Without much further ado, here are the shoes Brendan picked out for Jack. You can never be too young for your first purrrrr of errr force ones, right? That's Pair of Air Force 1's for you elder folks reading this. ha. Jack LOVES these shoes, but he won't put them on. ha. We'll get there.

Bren also picked out a jersey for Jack from Gustavus. Jack LOVES it!

I also bought myself a pair of new shoes a few weeks ago. I bought TOMS shoes for four reasons. 1) they are the most comfortable shoes known to mankind. 2) They are cute 3) With every pair you purchase TOMS will give a pair of shoes to a child in need and 4) it's pretty cool they say my husbands name on them.