What a week!

We had a rough week. Everyone was (and is) sick. The house hasn't been cleaned in days. I barely had enough energy to cook dinner (and never early enough in the day to do my usual crock-pot dinners).

Thursday? had the promise of being a horrible day. Half of the kids were up before Ryan left for work (translated: they were up WAY too early). I was going on about 4-5 hours of sleep (remember I am sick, so I need MORE sleep, not less). I decided pretty early in the day that we needed play around and not do anything important or else I would go absolutely crazy.  So, I asked the kids to clean the family room while I packed a sack lunch for all of us. When we were all finished, I grabbed the stroller, a blanket, and a book and we headed off to the park. We set up 'camp' under the shade of a large tree, ate lunch, read some Magic Treehouse, and played with the toys. Aimee enjoyed laying out on the blanket! It was a nice cool day in the shade and had a very nice refreshing breeze. I think that was the day that was actually below 100 degrees. Ah, it must be getting closer to the beautiful Autumn weather! That was a good day.

Jayke had his first experience with a homework excuse. Yep, the neighbor's pool swallowed his homework. It really was funny. He was so proud of his work that he went to the back fence to tell his friend about it. She couldn't read it when he held it up, so he tried reading it to her. She couldn't hear him very well, so he decided to make a paper airplane out of it and fly it over to her. Needless to say, the airplane did not make it the 10-15 feet it needed to in order to make it over their pool fence. At least it did not land IN the pool. I checked over the fence and saw it, so I called the parents and asked if they could kindly send it back.

Ethan has been VERY sick. He always gets more sick than everyone else. He woke up Saturday early morning with a pretty good fever. He had already been sick for a week with no fever, so this was a warning sign for us. His cough was extra bad and his breathing was shallow and rapid. I called the nurseline with our insurance and she sent us to the ER. We waited there for 2 1/2 hours and still had not been triaged yet. The crazy thing is that there were 5 other people that came in after Ethan with the same symptoms and they had all been triaged, treated and released in that 2 1/2 hours. When I had finally had it waiting for them to triage him, I went to the front desk and told them we were leaving to go to urgent care. She started looking for his name on the list. She looked through two different pages several times to find his name and couldn't so she started to look higher up on the list (meaning he has been waiting for a LONG time) and finally found him. Arg! That made me even more mad. When Ryan took him to Good Night Pediatrics, they were in and out in just a few minutes. (He left the house at 9pm and he said he was home at 10:30.) Anyway, they did a chest x-ray and saw smears in his lungs and could hear the fluid in his lungs. So, he probably has the startings of pneumonia. Hopefully he will start getting better now that he has some steroids and antibiotics. Ethan is also learning how to read. He can sound out most 3 letter words. He is starting to notice print in the environment and tries to read things. He even asked me for his reading lesson earlier in the week. He loves learning!

Kate is acting her age and her gender. She is finally starting to potty train, but only b/c I changed the rewards to money. We had tried basically everything to make her go, but she would never do it willingly. She had this pathetic little walk that she would do on the way to the potty. She would shrug her shoulders forward, lean her head down, and take 1 inch steps, literally! When I told her to go she would say "I am going" in this annoying voice like teenagers do when they don't want to do something. It's a mix between a snotty, grumpy, and disgusted tone. You know that voice that is a tone lower than normal that the snotty teenage girls do? Yep that's the one. I wonder where she learned it from! So, I changed her incentive to include money. She now gets a penny for every time she goes on the potty. She is filling up her money container pretty quickly. I can't remember her having an accident in the past few days, although she did have some earlier this week. So, maybe this is finally the trick, (hopefully). BUT despite all the moodiness, she is a really sweet girl. She is always loving on everyone. She is always quick to remember to thank people. And is always trying to be a good mommy to her babies and her baby sister. She always asks me, "This what mommies do?" and tries to mimic what she has seen me do.

Aimee is so cute at this age. She is 4 1/2 mos now. She is a pro at rolling over (she did it the first time when she was 3 mos old, to the day). She is trying to crawl, but gets really frustrated with it. She gets her legs under her and can push, but her arms aren't strong enough to hold her whole body up yet, so she gets carpet burn on her little cheeks. She has successfully grown out of all her infant clothes and is now in the 12 month clothes. We are still squeezing her into a few of them, though. At her appointment a week ago, she weighed 17 1/2 lbs and was 26 inches long. Ryan calls her the michelin man because of all her rolls. Boy, are they cute! They are still small enough to be firm rolls, so there is no dimpling on her, just cuteness! She is smiling all the time now. She does the big, mouth-wide-open-like-I-am-eating smile, but she still has her simple curl-the-edge-of-my-lips courtesy smile for when she really doesn't want to smile.

Ryan is working so hard for us. He works 6 days a week, at least 8 hours each day. He is wore out every day! Poor guy. At least he gets to work along-side his friend for 3 days a week. He is looking for a good-paying full-time job, but has been unable to find one yet.

In my freetime, I am trying to learn how to quilt. I have done a few 'quilts' before, but they aren't really quilts in the sense that they can be family heirlooms. I want to learn how to make quilts like people in the 1600-1800's made them. I am starting with a paper piecing quilt, just to learn the basics of quilting w/o getting too overwhelmed with it. I am just using scraps of material from when I made the cloth diapers for the girls. It is turning out really cute, but it is also turning me into a cloth hoarder. I can't justify throwing any scrap of material bigger than 2"x2" away! I am also trying to re-fashion my wardrobe. So far, I have turned one of my preggo shirts into a skirt and am in the middle of turning one of ryan's old dress shirts into a peasant shirt for me. It's crazy how just one "new" outfit can make you feel so much better about your wardrobe, even if they aren't "new".

As a family, we went to watch the Mexican Brown Bats fly out of their 'cave' at sunset a week or two ago. I had always heard there was a bat colony that lived in Phx, but never knew where it was. I was under the impression that it was somewhere north of the valley in a cave. Nope. It is right across the street from the Biltmore and it is in a man-made tunnel. We got there right before sundown and found a place to sit. Right as the sun went down, the flying insects got really bad. They were all over the place. I think they liked my shampoo, but they were really everywhere. About 10 minutes after sunset, a few bats started flying out of the tunnel. Then, they started coming out in waves. There were tons of them! After a wave of bats came out, you could look at the horizon and see the bats against the sunset. It was really cool. You could see them flying around the neighborhoods, just above the treetops. After several hundred/thousand bats flew out, it started to smell really bad! I don't know if it was the bats that smelled or if it was the air they were pushing out, but it was bad! They kept coming out in waves for a good 1/2 hour before we finally decided to leave (they were still coming out). It was getting too dark to see them unless you were right next to the tunnel and Aimee was getting really fussy. I would guess that we saw several thousand bats come out. There was a lot more than I expected to see! The kids really enjoyed it and couldn't stop talking about how stinky it was!

We also had the opportunity to go to Usury Pass and have a class on scorpions. The park ranger did an hour presentation on them and we learned a lot of useful things about them. He had his pet scorpion, Harry, in a little habitat at the front of the room. Afterwards, he let the kids come to the front and look at Harry under a blacklight. After the class, everyone was supposed to go on a hike with blacklights to find scorpions in the desert. We were going to go, but Ryan was getting tired and Ethan was really sick, so we decided to go home instead of taking an hour-long hike after the kids' bedtime. We'll go with them next time Ranger B hosts the hike. Jayke really loved learning about scorpions.