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.

A Day in the Life of a Mama CF'er

It's about that time again - time for the Cystic Fibrosis Walk. Time for me to ask for donations from you to help keep my sister-in-law alive. There have been some GREAT advancements in the CF community this year and it's all because of your donations. So, please, take 2 minutes and donate HERE - every penny counts. If you want to join us in walking, let me know and I can get you signed up. It's around Lake Calhoun on May 7th.

Instead of giving you the dictionary definition of CF, or telling you how amazing and awesome and wonderful my sister-in-law, Teri, is (which she is) - I thought Teri could give you a little glimpse into her day to day routine with CF.  So here she is...

Mornings are tough! It is tough getting out of bed even though I've had
lots of hours of rest, it doesnt mean they were all spent sleeping.
Most nights, unless on antibiotics, are spent coughing. some coughing
spells lead into asthma attacks which has been known to last any where
from 5mins to 3 hours of coughing non stop. At that point I end up
going down stairs to do a neb treatment of albuterol.

Once up I have breakfast followed by a handful of meds, vitamins, and
whatever antibiotic I'm on at the time. The coughing never stops but is
better during the day than the nights.

Once Ari (my 20 month old) goes down for a nap, I do my Vest (a machine that shakes your lungs to get the junk out) and 3 nebs. This usually takes 45 mins to over an 
hour if im on an inhaled antibiotic which is usually 28 days on and 28 days off.

I have been going to the Chiropractor 3 times a week because my back
and neck are always out from coughing so much. My ribs have also been out
do to coughing.

After Ari is in bed its round 2 of Vest and Nebs.

During meal time I take 3 pills to help me absorb fat. In Cf your
pancreas don't work to their fullest potential because they get all gunked
up from mucus.

Cf affects every part of my life, it sucks! But at the same time its a
blessing. God gave me this disease because I am a Fighter, and he
doesn't give people things they can't handle. I look at life like most
people have never looked at it. I only say that because i have been on
both sides of not having a disease to having one. I was diagnosed with
Cf at 15. Granted i had it from birth because Cf is genetic, but we
had no idea until i started getting really sick at age 13 and doctors
finally figured it out at 15.


If you have any questions for Teri, leave them in the comment section and she can answer them for you. Or if there is anything else you'd like to know about CF, let her know! I hope this gives you a tiny glimpse into what Teri goes through on a daily basis. If you'd like to help make things a little easier and help get this disease under control, then help us by donating to find a CURE FOR CF!


Here is Teri and her beautiful family!

Check out Teri's blog 
Check out Ronnie's blog - Ronnie has CF and him and his wife just found out they are expecting their first child!
Check out Jen's blog - her 2 year old son, Gavin, has CF.