Life Right Now

I have no pictures for this post, just a bunch of thoughts from the last week or so.

• I feel really front-heavy now. My belly feels heavy, especially when I sit on the floor and it starts to get sore after a while (and makes my back hurt). Only 12 weeks to go!! Feels like a long time for this baby to get bigger and make me more uncomfortable, but not that much time to get ready. The child's name is still very much unknown and we aren't very good about actively talking about it. I think Ben and I have officially brought it up maybe two times. Yikes. I have to pee all the time now and the heat makes me nauseous. I have felt far more nauseous with this pregnancy than the first two, and I'm totally blaming it on the time of year. A guy at church today (prob. about 50 years old who has four kids) told me I seem like pregnancy agrees with me. I told him I can smile and look happy at church, but that doesn't mean the pregnancy is going that awesomely. I'm tired of the nausea. The only upside is it keeps me from overeating or gaining too much. The high heat and humidity last week made me feel really gross. Enough complaining :)
• Eli has stayed dry for almost two weeks now. This is huge. I'm not sure what happened, but he is very motivated to play Angry Birds Rio at the end of the day, so he stays dry. He doesn't always get to play it because it tends to rile him up before bedtime, but it's still motivating and he's finally noticing when he needs to go before it's too late.
• Funny enough, Charlie hasn't pooped in his underwear in weeks either. Ben and I suspect he was copying Eli in his own way or just trying to get attention. It's still a chore to get him to go on a regular basis, but there is major improvement from before. I told my friend the other day though that I felt like I had won a war that night by getting Charlie to poop on the potty (he kept resisting even though we could tell he needed to go).
• Enough TMI for one post. My dad will say it's a little much (the potty talk). :) It helps me keep track of how long this has been going on though and I hope it makes someone else out there feel better if their child struggles with potty training. I just happen to have two that struggle. :) 
• Charlie is in a really funny age. Says hilarious things, pretends a lot in a high-pitched voice, and loves to copy Eli, who mostly loves the attention and can be extremely sweet to Charlie. Last night we decided it was way overdue to take the steri-strips and band-aid off of Charlie's forehead over his stitches scar because they had been on for two weeks+ and after going to the beach, there was sand and other stuff stuck in there. We gave the boys a bath and told Charlie we were going to take the strips off and he flipped out. Eli kept coming up with sweet things to cheer up Charlie and help him be less scared. He even offered to draw him his own funny Angry Bird guy and cut it out. I thought it was sweet that Eli was considerate of Charlie's anxiety and trying to distract him. We finally got the band-aid and strips off without too much pain on Charlie's end :)
• This afternoon, Ben got home from doing church stuff for eight hours straight (went to our ward for the first hour, then left to speak in a city ward since he's on the high council, had a meeting about physical facilities needs at that building, and went home teaching) and was totally zonked afterward. He fell asleep on Eli's bed while the boys were up there playing and the next thing we knew, the boys had torn up their room, stuffed animals were covering the floor, their clean underwear and socks were strewn around and they spent their time jumping on Charlie's bed and being crazy with the stuffed animals. It required quite the cleanup afterward. I think it's funny Ben slept through it all. I was downstairs trying to get visiting teaching assignment emails out and attempting to ignore the chaos upstairs :) 
• Last week, I was carrying a bunch of loose things (water bottles, a chair, a magazine, and my phone) walking over to the kids' tennis class and dropped my iPhone on the cement. It shattered despite having a case (I think it landed on a rock). I have a warranty, but they send it in to get replaced and gave me a Droid loaner phone for the time being. I really miss my iPhone. There really is no comparison and I can't wait to have an iPhone again. 
• Our closest couple friends got a divorce a few months ago. I'm still really sad about it and get frustrated when we talk to the husband. It's hard watching someone you care about make stupid decisions. Another friend's husband also went off the deep end and they are getting a divorce. I feel like we have entered that phase of life where divorce is more common among people our age and it makes me really sad. 
• Our summer has been really busy. Eli has OT twice/week to try to get his fine motor skills up to speed in time for kindergarten. The boys have swim camp a few weeks this summer along with their regular swimming lessons. They're doing soccer camp for two weeks this summer, a library class, tennis class, playgroup at the park once/week, and between all of that, it feels like we're running around all the time. I may take a hiatus in August when I can't move anymore. :) All of the exercise is really good for them, especially Eli. But it's exhausting!!
• To end on a positive note - we've started reading longer chapter books to the boys as part of their bedtime routine. We finished Charlotte's Web a few weeks ago and Eli especially loved it. I am amazed at how much he retained and how excited he was to read a chapter each night. We read the book, Something Wonky This Way Comes, and it wasn't that awesome. But how do you follow such a great book like Charlotte's Web?? :)

Last Day of Preschool

I was really, really sad about preschool ending this year.

I will admit to crying before the day started, during preschool, and after on the drive home :) Some of it I'm blaming on pregnancy hormones, but I probably would have cried if I wasn't pregnant. Eli getting older is really hitting me hard!!

Here is their preschool class, missing one little girl who was out of town and adding a sibling or two. 

Rebekeh (one of their wonderful teachers) went all out this year with their teacher gifts. She gave the kids the book, "Oh The Places You'll Go!" with an inscription from both her and Nancy, the other teacher, with the idea that we'll have Eli's teachers write a note each year as he finishes a grade of school. The bags also had little photo books for each child with pictures from the year. 

Here is Eli with one of his favorite friends, Evelyn, and then Evelyn with Ava, his other dear friend. He needs some little boys his age to play with!! All of his good friends seem to move away :( Sad. These girls will be here for a long time, but they won't be at the same elementary school. Eli doesn't have any friends going to school with him in the fall, which makes me nervous, but I'm hoping he'll make friends quickly. 

all of the crazy kids playing in Nancy's back yard. The boys have always done this Montessori setup, or Nancy's home preschool (she teaches at a private montessori school in Evanston as well).  I love the multi-age group and that Eli and Charlie could be in preschool together. Charlie is really going to miss having Eli around next year!!

here's Eli with Nancy and Rebekeh:

both boys with their teachers:

more friends piled in to the shot :)

the boys and I - this shirt doesn't make me look as pregnant as others for some reason (see the Father's Day post also from tonight - I look a lot larger there). It helps that I'm sitting down/hiding the belly too :)

love these boys and their cute ages!

Father's Day Week

I haven't blogged in forever. It's kind of daunting to start back up, but I'm going to attempt it again. I'm too tired to rearrange these from how they loaded, so just know they aren't in chronological order and I'm trying to get back into this :)

First, a group shot from Father's Day today. This is a terrible pic of me, but fun of everyone else, so I'm posting it! We had our friend (and Eli's primary teacher), Maraley, over for dinner too - she's the one taking the picture. We had a fun dinner, but I was in the kitchen from the time I got home from church at 1 p.m. until we ate dinner at 4:45 p.m. (hence my exhaustion). I gave my dad and Ben customized iPhone cases (from Uncommon - love their cases) with a picture of the boys on the back, and I also gave Ben the materials to make homemade bubbles. 

Eli is very into doing tricks with bubbles ever since we saw a show by The Bubble Man in Madison, WI last month. The bottled stuff never works that great, so Ben made a bubble solution out of karo syrup and dishwasher soap and it worked really well! I'll have to get some pics of Eli and his huge bubbles. 

Here are some pics of Ben and the boys after my family left and we were out on a walk before bedtime tonight. Eli and Charlie love Ben so much and are lucky to have such a fun dad. Charlie insisted on wearing his flip flops on the walk, but totally biffed it while running and skinned his right knee, so Ben scooped him up and put him on his shoulders. 

 

These next pictures are from a few days ago when my parents went to a nursery near our house to see HGTV's Jamie Durie speak and sign his new book. They came over afterward and hung out with us for a little bit. Here is Charlie having fun being pushed on the swing by my mom :)

Here's were they are really out of order... I tried to take some cute pictures of my parents with the boys, so they are interspersed below. 

Reading books with the kiddos - 

More pics with the four of them - 

Then Ben came home from work and distracted Eli and Charlie :)

Happy Father's Day to the dads in my life! 

Ben's Ragnar Relay

Last weekend, Ben ran in a Ragnar Relay from Madison to Chicago (with a group of 12 people from our ward). They collectively ran 200 miles, through farmland, towns, and cities, starting early Friday morning and ending Saturday afternoon (so they ran through the night). Ben ran on Friday early evening, then 2:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. It was ridiculously hot and humid that weekend and at one point it was in the mid-90s when they were running, which is miserable!!! But he says he had fun and there were lots of bonding in the group over their crazy conditions. 

In the meantime, I was home dealing with the boys by myself, which would have been no big deal, except that Charlie got a stomach bug on Friday afternoon/evening (throwing up in my bedroom and in the car - both not my favorite places for a child to vomit!!) and then I got really sick on Saturday and wanted to throw up, but it never happened. Just had extreme nausea and exhaustion. I was so relieved when Ben came home on Saturday night and could help put the kids to bed, because I could barely function. 

On Sunday, I stayed home from church and slept the entire three and a half hours that Ben and the boys were gone, because I still felt crummy and wiped out from the bug. By the afternoon, the boys were totally restless after a weekend of inactivity, and it was roasting hot outside, so we busted out the sprinkler to water the grass and let the kids run around and have fun.

Poor Charlie really wanted to go to the "secret park" (near our house that we don't go to very often but had recently) and kept saying, "Can we go, pretty pretty please?? MAY I go to the secret park, pretty pretty please?" :) Ben could barely walk after running a total of 17.1 miles over the weekend and I could barely walk from feeling nauseous and weak, so we were total disappointments to Charlie that day. :)

 The boys did lots of fun bubble activities too (can you tell Eli is totally obsessed with bubbles right now??).

Here's Ben trying to recover from not sleeping Friday night and being so physically wiped out. He recovered and managed to go to work the next morning!