The varied moods of Eli

I have now done a post about Shiloh, the Birthday Boy, and a post about Micah, the other Birthday Boy.  I figured I couldn't skip the opportunity to update you on my middle boy.  

This change from being the baby of the family to a big brother has been an interesting one for Eli.  It seems that he loves the baby, but he is quite moody.  He will swing from end of the spectrum to the other in no time at all.  This was already common for E, but now it just seems to happen more frequently.

For the most part, Eli is a pretty happy go lucky kind of kid.  He is great at playing on his own. He is great at making believe and getting lost in the fog of childhood.  He loves to laugh and play with Shiloh too, especially if it has anything to do with building, or as he would say it "boding", or if it is playing with cars.  He is loud and cannot quite figure out being quiet.  We are working on our inside voice.

This is usually what we get with Eli.  He is a bit of a ham.

 This is what happens when I can't stop nursing Micah and do exactly what Eli wants me to right then.  There is no patience in the world of a two year old, and unfortunately, that is exactly what having a new baby brother around calls for.

He will get used to it right?

More of the Micah... and a little of the rest of us too

I know that I haven't put anymore pictures of Micah on since he was first born, and let me tell you, this kid has grown!  He is a champion eater and fusser! Almost every week, when my midwife comes, he has grown another pound.  I am not used to that kind of growing, but I will take it.  It makes me way less worried about if he is getting enough to eat, because, well... he is getting enough.  He weighs in just under 11 pounds at just shy of a month old.

The older boys adore him.  They can't wait for this little one to start noticing them.  I think we will hit a whole new high when this guy can smile back at them or even just notices that they are talking to him. We have to be careful when Eli holds him because when he is done, he is done, and he will just shove the baby off and jump down from the couch.

 

Shi loves holding Micah.

Eli holding him and Micah with his usual face on

It was a rough start for Eli to warm up to Micah but now all he wants is for him to be close.

 Micah's first bath, kind of.  JonnaLu and I gave Micah his first bath.  It didn't go so well.  I thought that surely we would get a picture of it, but he was screaming and squirming and he knocked the plug out of the sink with his foot and all of the hot water ran down the drain and JonnaLu was trying to frantically get more water in while I was trying to hold onto a squirming, slippery baby.  We called it quits and wrapped him up.  Then we took a picture.

 We tried it again.  Same results. Again, a picture of the aftermath.  He sure is cute all wrapped up in a towel, less so whilst screaming in the water.  We have gotten into a better bathtime groove with him.  He now like a solid 75% of the baths we give him.  A definite improvement from the beginning.

We love having Micah around.  He is fussy.  He doesn't sleep well, but he makes our family feel complete.  Here is to hoping that the next month of Micah will be a little more well rested and a little less fussy.

My Beautiful boy!

I congratulate you if you got to the bottom of this post.  It was a long one.

Shiloh and Motherhood

 Tomorrow marks the four year anniversary of me stepping into the grand challenge called motherhood.  That also means that it is Shiloh's Birthday tomorrow.  I can't believe he will be four.  Actually, the funny things is, he has been saying he was four for a couple of weeks now.  In case you missed it, we had a baby at the beginning of this month.  Since Ken's mom was here helping out with all of the baby jazz and toddler jazz and Kenny knee surgery craziness, she wanted to celebrate with us.  I thought to myself, "why celebrate twice?"  I mean, normally,  I would be all for cake and balloons and parties twice, but I am going to restate it, I just had a baby and it seemed quite stressful to plan all of it twice, so we celebrated it once, with Kenny's mom and it was a lot of fun.

The Birthday Boy blowing out the candles!

We didn't go all out, but we did blow up balloons and make cup cakes.  We also, unpictured, did our annual taping of streamers in front of the bedroom door.  Shiloh loves running through the crepe paper streamers and tearing them down.  I wish we would have gotten a picture, but we were all so tired that we forgot to wake up earlier than him  to take a picture of it, but it was still fun.  Shiloh got a betta fish for his birthday.  We did do a little scavenger hunt for him to find all of the supplies with the fish being very last. It was fun and he was so excited about having a fish of his very own.  He named it seaweed very first, but then amended it to Nemo with the middle name of Seaweed.  He is very into first and middle names.

Shiloh with all of the fish supplies.

Shiloh is such an experience everyday.  He is precocious and lively.  He is talkative and social.  He is a definite charmer. He can get just about anyone to do just about anything.  He has a future is sales or marketing, this one.  He loves the color green.  He loves monster trucks.  If I let him, he would wear his monster truck shirt everyday!  He is also a walking musical.  He pretty much sings his whole life story.  You can often hear him singing a song about what he is doing at that very moment, even if it is about being in time out and how mean his mommy is for sending him there (That actually happens quite often). He is the best vegetable eater I have ever encountered.  Broccoli might be his food of choice.  It would come in second only to chocolate.  He is strong willed and determined.  He is smart and might talk like a 30 year old some days.  I love him! I am glad that he is my little boy.  He would correct me there and tell you he was a big, BIG boy, and that he is almost as tall as daddy, but he isn't a toddler or a baby anymore, and that is bigger than I could have ever imagined he would get four years ago.  This ride called motherhood can be rocky sometimes, but I am so glad that I am on it.  I wouldn't trade it for anything and it all started with my four year old guy!  Happy Birthday Shi!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

December 2014

 Our December proved to be very low key.  I was huge and pregnant.  Kenny was helping switch hospitals, which was enormous task with lots of extra hours worked, then he hurt his knee.  By the time the middle of December came, we pretty much just tried, mostly, to stay at the house.  Luckily we put up the Christmas decorations at the beginning of the month, otherwise we might have forgone all of the decor.  Besides the quite obvious hard things (such as Kenny being on crutches and me getting big and huge) we had a wonderful December.

My boys are so cute.  This was before church one Sunday and they just happened to both look at the camera and smile.  It was Christmas miracle.

Our little Christmas village.  Kenny gets me a new piece each year.

 This year, Kenny had the grand idea of giving away our farm fresh eggs to the neighbors for Christmas.  We don't have many neighbors so it worked out really well.  We had the boys sit down on a table cloth on the floor and paint egg cartons and then decorate them with glitter.  They had a grand time doing it and it felt quite personal really.  We might have to repeat this every year.  We all had so much fun doing this and our neighbors really loved it.

 Unfortunately we don't have any pictures of Christmas Eve.  We went to a friend's house for dinner.  They had their adult children home for Christmas, and then they invited many of the foreign exchange students from the college in Fulton over as well.  It was sooo much fun!  Shiloh was in heaven with so many adults around to pay attention to him.  The dinner was great.  It was such a unique experience because there were students from all over the world there.  There were those representing the Jewish faith, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, all celebrating Christmas with a bunch of Mormons, singing Christmas carols and listening to the Christmas story being read from Luke 2.  It showed me how much our beliefs can defines us, but with open minds and love in our hearts it can connect us too.

We didn't take too many pictures Christmas morning either, but the boys had a great Christmas.  They were so excited about it.  It was low key, but that is just the way we like it.  It was such a  relaxing day to reflect on the true meaning of Christmas.

I promise E has a diaper on, but his posturing hides it well.

Playing with some stamps that they got for Christmas.

Having a Birthday cake for Jesus on Christmas night. Tthe boys thought that it was particularly cool to have candles on it.

 A couple of days after Christmas, we decided to go for a walk across the Veterans Memorial Bridge in Jeff City.  I was, at this point, grumpy because I had been pregnant longer than ever before and we had been cooped up in the house and we got a break from the frigid temperatures.  The boys needed to stretch their legs too.  Kenny, unfortunately, hurt his knee more on this walk.  It probably wasn't the best plan for him to go, but he went anyway.  I believe Micah was born just two days after this evening.

They loved this walk.  We were lucky enough to see a train drive by along the side of the river.  The boys were in heaven!

Autumn 2014: Pumkpins and Hay Rides and the Like

We are going to quickly recap what has happened in the last part of 2014.  It seems my norm for blogging these days is playing catch up, but I really do want to share our pictures and adventures and my cute kiddos faces.

We actually had quite a packed Autumn.  Most of our excursions centered around pumpkins and dressing up and Halloween because, well, we love Halloween around our house.  It is celebrated all month long.  I might be just as sad when we have t take the decorations down as the kids are.

Kenny is part of a Master Gardeners Program through Mizzou.  They put a on Fall Festival at their demonstration gardens in Jefferson City.  There was food and games and booths and hay rides and face painting.  I got no pictures while we were actually there, Drats! But it was exceptionally fun. It really was a wonderful, and fun activity to take the kiddos to.  This was both of our boys first experiences int he world of face painting. I was a bit nervous that they might freak out or want to wipe the paint off the minute it got on or something, but they did great.  Shiloh chose to be Spiderman so, naturally, Eli wanted to be Spiderman too, but "a Bdoo piderman mom!"  He couldn't handle how much it tickled when they started to paint the lines on his nose so he didn't get his finished, but he didn't seem to notice.

One of our neighbors a couple of miles down the road throws a Halloween party and dinner every year.  We just recently started to get to know them and they invited us this year.  We had a blast!  They did a hay ride, pumpkin carving, a Halloween themed dinner, and s'mores around a bonfire.  We had such a fun time getting to know a few more of the people that live around us and the boys enjoyed all of the tractors and food and kids.  It will definitely be something that we make a tradition out of.  Shiloh still talks about it.

Shi wasn't much into carving pumpkins.  He was off playing on the massive playground they had, but E sat there with me and Ken almost the whole time.

Love that smile!

Silly Daddy

Ours are the small four pumpkins on the bottom left.

Like every year, I made the boys' costumes.  We went to a town Halloween dinner put on by the Methodist church in Tebbetts.  It was almost 80 degrees the weekend that they did it, so the poor boys had take off their costumes after a few minutes.  The crazy things was that the next weekend, Halloween, it was freezing, so their little jacket costumes weren't enough for outside.  I guess you can't win sometimes.  I noticed something this Halloween.  My boys were the only kiddos at any of the 3 Halloween shin digs that we went to that had homemade costumes.  All of the other kiddos were wearing store bought ones.  Isn't that weird?  Or maybe I am weird because I make them.  I remember putting together things we already had and making parts of my costume as kid almost every year.

My two little T-rexes!  Everyone thought that they were monsters. I guess maybe I am not that great at costume construction, but they liked them and that is all that counts.

My parents came in October.  It was great to see them for a few days.  We timed it so that they could be there for the Hartsburg Pumpkin Festival.  It is in this tiny little town that has only a little over 100 people living in it, but on this weekend every year, they get tens of thousands of people coming.  We had so much fun showing the festival to some family.  We go every year, so it was fun to show someone we loved what we always talked about.  The boys were great and it wasn't too chilly.  It was a perfect autumn day.

Just one of the pumpkin patches in Hartsburg.

This picture turned out so well with both the boys and NaNa in the background.

 

We went to an airshow at the little tiny airport that they have just outside of Jeff City.  Apparently they do this every year, but they aren't very good at advertising it.  Kenny saw a small sign off of the highway on his way home from work, advertising an event the following day, but it didn't say what the event was.  We looked it up and decided to go.  We were so glad that we did.  I think that our boys had the most fun I have seen them have.  When the planes came in for a landing we got to be right there and watch them come in. There was breakfast and model remote-controlled airplanes. There were airplane bikes and an airplane tractor ride.  It was such a fun event.

Eli in the airplane bike.

Cutest face EVER!  I love it when he gives a good cheese for the camera.

Micah Bryce Williams

Micah Bryce Williams graced us with his presence yesterday morning at 4:42 a.m.  He weighs 8 lbs.  which is quite hefty for one of my babies.  He is 20 1/2" long and a little chunkier than I am used to.  This has earned him the nick name of "Squishy".

I had thought that he would be born in December, but he wasn't having any of it.  He decided that New Year's Day seemed a much more appropriate Birthday for him.

I went to bed on New Year's Eve at about 9 o'clock ( I know, totally lame, but I am so glad that I did).  Ken and I had spent the whole day at doctors' appointments for his knee.  As a side note,  He is on crutches, and has to have surgery in just a few days.  Anyway, I went to bed early thinking that I would remain pregnant forever.  I woke up at about 1:30 in the morning for a normal pregnant lady pee moment.  I got a huge contraction.  It was so out of the blue.  I continued to get them hard and fast.  After an hour, I decided to wake Kenny up, who had only been asleep for 2 hours, because he decided to stay up until the new year.  I also called my midwife.  Things were happening way faster than I planned.  Sarah, my midwife, lives about 50 minutes away, and was coming right then because she was going to fill up the birthing pool and get all of the other things ready because, well, I was in labor, and Kenny was on crutches and not supposed to stand.  

Before Sarah got to our house, I told Ken that I thought we needed to start setting up the pool because things were picking up.  The two of us tried to get everything set up.  When Sarah got there,we started to fill up the pool.  At his point  I was in hard labor.  This was new terrain for me.  My shortest labor prior to Micah had been 10 hours long.  There was lots of mentally getting in the game before the stages switched.  This was different  I had been in labor for a little over two hours and felt like I had to get in the pool.  The pool wasn't even full yet, but I got in anyway.  This is where things got a bit intense, but I tried to stay positive. Sarah was such a calming presence to have around.  After about another 45 minutes  Micah came barreling his way into the world.  My other two boys were still asleep in their beds.  Micah came into the world squealing and loud and perfect in every way.  Shiloh woke up to the baby crying and came out.  He was so intrigued by the cutting of the cord and all of the commotion that was going on inside the house.  It was totally his sort of environment.  He loved on Baby Micah.  Eli slept til his normal time.  When he came out of his room we asked if he wanted to come and touch baby Micah, he said, "no" and walked away.  E still seems a bit indifferent towards him, but I think he is warming up.  We are so happy to have our third little guy join the family.

Here is Micah sleeping on my chest just an hour or two after coming into the world.

Me and Micah a couple of hours after he was born (ps I love having a baby at home for many reasons, but one is that I get to go lay down in my own bed afterwards.)

Eli, Me, and Micah.  E only gets close to baby if he gets to cuddle with me too. (Notice Ken's hand holding Eli next to me, silly kid)

  

Shiloh insisted on pulling a funny face in his picture with daddy and baby.  What a silly boy.

Me and Ken and Micah.  This was taken right before Sarah left yesterday morning.

Happy New Year to us!