Aedan: 60 Months, Week 1
Owen: 18 Months, Week 3
After a fun weekend away seeing friends, we arrived back home a little after dinnertime, but luckily, we were able to bring food along with us in the car, so we didn't have to still eat when we got back home. While we were gone it was pretty warm outside, and the snow is slowly starting to melt. We can see a small patch of grass under the tree in our front yard, and the snow is receding in the back. Considering it was covering our table and grill, this is a great improvement, but we still have a long way to go, too. Spring in the U.P. is definitely different than most other places in the country.
On Wednesday last week, I noticed that the water heater was leaking out the top, and it wasn't stopping. After talking to a few people, we realized that it just meant our water heater was going bad. It was an old water heater, the pipes were bad, and apparently when they start leaking from the top, that means it's gone bad. It wasn't necessarily something we wanted to spend almost $1000 on right now, but it obviously needed to be done, and we were glad it could be replaced while we were out of town for the weekend.
On Monday, I decided to take the boys over to Canada to open gym at the gymnastics center in the John Rhodes Community Centre. I heard about it from another mom who has taken her two boys there. It is $5 Canadian per kid to go, which translated to $7.50, so not a bad deal. They have all the equipment out and you basically can go play wherever you want. The boys really enjoyed running down the long trampoline, and Aedan and his friend, Owen, had so much fun running around and playing together. It was a great way for them to get some energy out by running and jumping. At 10:00 they had snacks laid out for the kids, and it was quite the spread of crackers, yogurt, fruit, and vegetables. Aedan was really excited about getting his plate of snacks. The open gym lasted until 11:00, which was perfect. The boys had a blast, and this is definitely something we will have to go back to again. I wish I would have known about it sooner! There are so few things to take the boys to do in the morning, but this kind of activity is perfect.
Here's a video of Owen running down the long trampoline, and then coming back to me because he wanted to see himself in the video. Isn't it cute how he says, "Cheese!" (I didn't get any pictures or videos of Aedan because he was off with his friend the whole time.)
That night as we were getting the kids ready for bed, Owen and Daddy were playing together, and it was making Owen laugh so hard. I just love his belly laugh, and this will be a great video to look back on when we want to remember what Owen sounded like at this age.
This week really just went on like a normal week, getting back into the swing of things after the kids being off school for a week. We were looking into what we needed to do for moving to Pennsylvania, the first step which was selling our current house. We had that family of the lady I know from MOPS who was very interested and we were waiting to see if they were interested enough to move forward with an offer. I have trouble not worrying about things, especially big things like this because I knew we had to sell our house and know what we were going to get out of our house in order to really start looking for a new place to live, and sometimes patience is not my strong suit. Finally, on Tuesday she sent me a message saying her husband was on board with moving forward with the house, so now we just had to plan when to get together to talk over more details. I was relieved when I got that message, and I was pleased that things were coming together so easily. It was really exciting that we were going to most likely be selling our house on our own, to friends, saving everyone lots of money in realtor fees.
I'm not sure why I have all these pictures and videos of Owen in only a diaper and socks, but on Tuesday night I was trying to get a picture of him putting his hands up in the air like what he does when he doesn't know something. He puts both of his hands up in the air, usually right in front of him, like in the second picture, and bounces them up and down, as if he's saying, "I don't know!" It's pretty cute, but he's too fascinated at seeing himself in the camera right now.
In getting our house ready to sell, and just for our own sake, two other things on our list of things to do was to fix our leaky dishwasher and replace our garage door. We got the new gasket in the mail, and Ben installed it, but then it was still leaking, so I decided to look up a YouTube video on how to replace it. I took it back out, used a q-tip to clean the slot, and then pushed the gasket back in again, and then followed the recommendation to keep the dishwasher closed to help the seal form better. I hoped that my effort to fix it would work because if it didn't work than the gasket wasn't really the problem. As far as the garage door, I had a call and email out to a local guy to replace the garage door, but he isn't the best at replying to messages, so I figured I'd try to reach him again to get that process moving along.
I recently signed up for an online Pilates community called The Balanced Life with Robin Long. I have done a few of our free trials and really enjoyed the workouts that you get. I want to be more active, to get stronger and more flexible, and it's just too hard for me to find time to get out of the house to exercise, even though the Norris Center is just down the street. Sometimes I get stuck in not knowing what exercises to do and I don't particularly enjoy just running. I want something that I look forward to, and Robin's workouts are just that. They range anywhere from 10-30 minutes. She is extremely encouraging, and her mantra is "Grace over Guilt," which is totally what I need. She is trying to encourage consistency and for women to see the results you can get even from doing a 10 minute workout every day. I am trying my best to stay consistent, but I have to admit that I'm not doing as well as would like to. However, on Wednesday morning, since the boys and I didn't have any special plans to do anything, I decided to take a few moments for myself while Owen was still asleep, to do my workout for the day. Aedan even joined in with me. :) And apparently Daddy took a couple videos of us as he walked out the door on his way to work.
As I mentioned before we went to Madison, Samantha started getting up multiple times at night to go to the bathroom, and even though she did fine while we were there, she has had trouble sleeping every night since we got back home. After the trouble we had on Wednesday night, Ben wanted me to make an appointment for her at the doctor to talk about her issues and how they are related to her anxieties or worries about the move and the change that is coming. Even though it is extremely frustrating, it more just makes me worried for my little girl. I don't want her to be struggling like this, and I want to be able to help her, but I don't know how I can. I don't know what it was about Wednesday night, but it was by far the worse night he has had. She was up for two hours in the middle of the night. She kept getting up to go to the bathroom and even came down to our room and stood outside our door calling for me. Ben and I both took turns going into her room, trying to get her to calm down, and eventually I was able to calm her down by sitting with her, holding her hands, and praying for her. (Oh, my poor little Samantha, I wish there was something I could do to help you, to take this burden from your mind, and to ease whatever worries or anxiety is pressing on your heart. I pray for you every day. I pray for your sleep, and I pray that the Holy Spirit would comfort you while you sleep and help calm your heart and mind so you can rest.)
On Thursday Aedan started to feel pretty crummy. He said his throat hurt, and he had a slight fever after lunch. He voluntarily told me he wanted to stay home and take a nap rather than go to preschool, so that definitely meant he wasn't feeling very well. (Ben also wasn't feeling well and was very congested himself.) Aedan took a long nap, and we actually had to wake him up so he wouldn't sleep for too long and then have trouble falling asleep at night. After the Proulx family left that evening after coming over to talk to us more about buying our house, I encouraged Ben to take Aedan to the doctor to have him checked out. The whole time the Proulx kids were here, Aedan just stayed in his room. He definitely was not acting like himself, and he kept complaining about his throat hurting. I didn't want to ignore it like last time and make him suffer through it if there was something we could do to help him feel better. Since he took a nap, I knew it would be okay if he stayed awake a little longer so he could go to the walk-in clinic. Even though the rapid test came back negative, the doctor said he was showing all the signs of strep throat and prescribed antibiotics for him.
After having such a rough night on Wednesday, Thursday night Samantha was extremely tired, and she slept all through the night, not getting up to go to the bathroom, and waking up happy and like herself on Friday morning.
Even though Samantha had a better night, Ben's night was worse. He felt much worse, and he decided to stay home from work that day and take himself to the walk-in clinic. They said that he had strep as well, so now Ben and Aedan were both on antibiotics. I hoped that the strep would not spread to everyone else, especially little Owen, because that would be so hard for him to deal with.
Even though it was April 5th, and you would think the weather would be getting better, it snowed overnight into April 5th and then more throughout the day. No one was happy about seeing snow that day.
A lot of times we take Owen's clothes off while he eats so that way he can feed himself and get as messy as he wants without us having to then get tons of stains out of his clothes. So that's why he's only in a diaper again in these videos. I kept asking him where his clothes were because I was, again, trying to get him to do his "I don't know!" hand motion. You can kind of see it around 18 seconds into the video, but again, he thinks watching himself in the screen is just too funny. What a silly little boy!
Ben had to go to a special awards banquet that evening (At which he won Adviser of the Year, by the way. He would be too modest to say anything about that himself, but he will be dearly missed at LSSU. He is a wonderful, dedicated, hard-working professor. He is an excellent teacher, and he truly cares about his students. I am so proud of him for winning this wonderful award. He was actually nominated for Professor of the Year and Adviser of the Year, but they decided he couldn't win both awards.)
Anyways, while he was gone at the banquet, I gave the kids baths and put them to bed. Aedan was in the bath tub at this point, but Owen can't resist being near the water when someone is taking a bath. He loves baths and is often upset when he can't get in with whoever goes first. I got some water on his hair and made it spiky, which is what you see in these pictures.
So in all these videos that I have been trying to get Owen to do his motion for "I don't know," well, I finally captured it at the beginning of this video. You have to look carefully to see it though. :)
And here is my other boy, who is definitely looking older lately, enjoying his time playing in the bath tub by himself, without his little brother crawling all over him. Even though he had strep, he was in good spirits. He was spraying water all over the bathtub with his little squirt gun. I love his silly personality and his great smile.
Samantha had a half day on Friday, so when it was time to put Owen down for his nap, she offered to put him down for me. She was really excited about doing it. She helped me change his diaper, put him in his sleep sack, read him a book, and even rocked him to sleep. She sang him a song while she cuddled him in her lap and patted him on the back, and he actually fell asleep in her arms. She tried to lift him up into his crib, but she wasn't strong enough to lift him over the railing, so she just laid him down on the rocking chair, and rocked the chair back and forth until he fell back asleep again. Then, just as she was coming out to tell me he had fallen asleep, I was going in the room to check on her. She was SO excited and proud to tell everyone about how she was able to put him down for his nap all by herself. She is such a sweet and caring big sister. In fact, she wanted to put him down for his nap on Saturday as well, so I took a picture of her cuddling him in her lap. :) Owen has a special place in his heart for his big sister.
(Blog about March 31-April 6, 2019)
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