The Rest Of The Weekend

Yesterday I took the boys to the Botanical Gardens. They have done a lot of remodeling since we were there last year and it is really nice!

The butterfly garden was filled with many butterflies of course.
We got to witness a lizard stalk, attack and eat a butterfly. The boys thought that was pretty interesting.

I'm not sure how butterfly's mate, but these two were stuck together and flying all over. Little Man said: Oh how cute, a mama carrying her baby:)

This morning my Mother-In-Law took the boys to see the implosion downtown.

As Big Man explains it, it went bang bang bang and then there was a lot of smoke.

Little Man was a little scared by all of the noise, but he wouldn't stop talking about it.

Tonight the boys were building houses out of blocks and were pretending to blow them up. I'm sure that trick is going to be around for a while.

Busy Day

When we picked Big Man up from school today we drove straight out to lake pleasant because the boys were going to get a ride on Cecil's boat. I'm not sure if Little Man has ever been on a boat before, but they were both so excited! So I followed behind them to take the boys back into town since hubby and Cecil were going to fish afterward.

Hubby took them around for about 20 mintues and then the boys got off and we drove back. For me it was not worth the hours of driving for a 20 minute boat ride, but to the boys it was worth it, though, and that's all that matters!
We got back into town and dropped Big Man off at his Grandma's house and he went to the D-backs game with my brother and sister-in-law and my neice. I stole this picture off her facebook because they look so cute and because he is awake here.

This is him last Friday at the game. He was having a horrible night and so cranky. I knew he was very tired by the way he was acting. He stayed awake for the entire game and the fireworks but fell asleep during the extremely loud Mercy Me concert. When we were walking back to the car he said: Why did they have to start playing lullaby's for? They put me right to sleep! LOL. And just so you know, he picked out his own clothes...

Hubby was working so I had taken the kids by myself to the game and met up with the rest of my family. I don't think I will be doing that again because when it was time to go (granted it was 11:00) neither of the boys wanted to walk since they were basically asleep. So, I had Taylor in the front carrier and Little Man on my shoulders and thankfully my Dad walked us to the car and carried Big Man part of the way. I was definitely getting some strange looks:)

She Is Going To Be A Tough One

The boys have started including the baby in their wrestling matches. They think it is fun to roll around with her.

She obviously loves it too. She will go up to the boys and throw herself at them and they will fall backwards like she tackled them.
Any kid she sees on the ground, now, she will go up and try and lay on top of them or push them around and just laugh. I hope that she isn't going to be the church nursery bully!

She got her first tooth last week as well! She is growing up way too fast.

Strawberry Shortcake

Wherever I am, she is right there too attempting to help.

Whether clean or dirty she will lick whatever she can pull out. And yes if they are clean I still proceed to put them away, so you are warned if you are coming over to eat at my house!!
Tonight is only the second night in her life I am going out without her. I know, I have no life...or maybe it has something to do with her still not taking a bottle! My Mom, sister, sister-in-law and I are going to see Legally Blonde the play at Gammage and going to eat at Olive Garden to try their new gluten free pasta dish-Yum. I hope hubby has fun with the 3 kids, actually I just hope they are all still alive when I come home:)

Photo Shoot

My friend April came over and took some photos of the baby for her 8 month pictures. Here are just a few of them...I think she did such a great job!!

She is going next week for her calendar photo shoot so I hope she is happy there and they can get some good pictures too!

Double Whammy

Big Man got sick this week. At first I thought he had a cold, then yesterday when getting ready for school he started puking and spent the rest of the day in the bathroom. Now I feel like I have both a cold and the stomach flu. It's not terrible, but just bad enough that I don't want to do anything which isn't good when you have 3 kids at home. Having Big Man home the last 2 days has made me so thankful he is in school. The mess is so much worse when he is here and the boys constantly fight. I also told my husband to never agree if I say I want to homeschool. Just trying to complete the pages that his teacher sent me for make-up work made me want to go put my head through a wall. Trying to get him to complete his homework 3x per week makes me a little batty as well! It really is only the handwriting stuff that he fights and for homework they have to write 1 or 2 letters 36 times each along with a phonics or math page. Anyways...enough of my complaining he is going back tomorrow and I'm so happy. My Dad is going to drive him which makes it an even better day because I don't have to get us all up and ready. I can all tell tomorrow will be a much better day, now if I can just find a way to block all exits from the living room so the baby can't escape while I lay on the couch all day and snooze :)

Lego's

If you didn't make it the Science Center's Lego exhibit you missed out! The kids had a great time dressing up as knights and princesses and building with Lego's.

They had an area where you got to pretent to fight each other that the boys loved. I know this has a specific name but I just can't think of it right now!!
The rest of the Center was pretty cool. Here is Little Man laying on a bed of nails.

I'm going to be pretty sad when the library no longer has the culture passes since I get at least one per month:)

Out Of The Garden

I have been getting lots of zucchini's so far this year! I just had to take a picture before I shredded them and baked. I have been making fried zucchini, a chocolate zucchini cake, zucchini bread and morning glory muffins with my stash. Yum!!

So Big

Look at how cute and big my nephew is getting at 3 months!

Moving On

So I have totally neglected my blog lately as well as many other things and I'm trying to get back on track. Here are Big Man's second first day of school! I love his new school, he loves his new school so it was definitely a good choice.

You can definitely tell it is the first day with all of the cameras. It is a very small school, I think there are 70 kids total so all of us parents see each other every day. I know that there are a couple of athletes kids that go there, probably no one I would recognize except for a certain famous boxer with a crazy tatoo on his face. Twice last week I walked up to the school in his vicinity. Kind of a strange feeling:)
I may have all ready posted this picture, I really can't remember, but it is just one of many I take of Big Man building things. I think he has some engineering tendencies because he will say I'm going to build this...and he will go build whatever he says quickly with blocks, lego's, or whatever these are called. This is a giraffe.

My baby is doing so good. She is much happier now, although you can't tell in this picture! She is definitely trouble as she has been increasing her crawling speed daily. Her favorite thing to do when she is free to roam is to go down the hall and look at herself in the mirror for a while and talk and smile at herself. When she gets done with that she will crawl in her room and play with her shoes. She is definitely a girl.

She enjoys terrorizing her brothers and destroying anything they are playing with and she loves to play with the dog. It is a good thing the dog is patient. She just lays there and lets babies do what they want.

I don't know why, I just like this picture. It was after a long time of fighting with her to lay still after her surgery while the Dr's were adjusting medications to sedate her. Once they got everything figured out she just looked so peaceful. I would say that she is 99% healed. Her incisions look so tiny and are almost healed. It is amazing to me that they fit a camera, the device that is now in her heart along with the tubes and whatever into the holes. We have to go back in 6 weeks to make sure the device hasn't moved and then every year to check to make sure that as her heart grows the artery still remains blocked.

Now it is time to get back into reality. All I can say is it is a lot of work to get Big Man to school everyday. By the time I get all 4 of us ready, get his lunch ready and get him to school by 8 I am exhausted and feel like half the day should be over! Tomorrow we are going to enjoy the holiday from school and work and go to the Phoenix Children's Museum (thanks to a cultural pass of course!) My hubby has never been there and he is so excited to go with us and play instead of having to go to his boring job:)

Discharged

We are finally out of there! The baby didn't really wake up until about 10 last night. She was sedated a lot longer than we thought she would need to be. They kept turning it down in order for her to wake up a little because she wasn't breathing enough and even after that it still took hours for her to come around. We had to stand over her and poke her and try to rouse her to breathe, it was very stressful! Then last night she had a fever and her heart rate was high (190's) so they gave her more meds and were watching her closely. I didn't think we were going to be able to leave today, but she was fine this morning and all of her tests results were perfect so we got to go. I don't think the baby could have handled having all of the cords attached to her any longer. All morning she was pulling them off and picking at her IV.

My sister had called me the night before the test to tell me an old friend of hers from school had posted on his facebook that his son was having heart surgery the same day as the baby and to look for him. Since there are only 2 places in AZ that do pediatric heart surgery's I was looking for him and he ended up being in the room next door while we were in pre-op so we got to talk there and we had rooms close to each other in the ICU as well. It was neat to know someone else there as well. His son was doing great when we left so that was good!

Thanks everyone for all of your thoughts and prayers and for watching my boys. We really appreciate it. I am so relieved this is over and feel like now I can move on with my life:)

Still Recovering

She is still doing pretty good...still has not woken up yet, though, because they are keeping her sedated. Once she is awake I will be happy because her breathing rate keeps dropping too low from the drugs and stressing me out!!

She's Out

I'm not allowed in yet, but she is in the ICU and doing well!

So Far So Good

For not having any food and being extremely tired she did awesome this morning. She just played in her crib with her new doll. They were able to draw blood, it was horrible and I couldn't watch, but at least they got it. She just went in about 10 minutes ago and they gave us a pager so we don't have to sit in the waiting room. So we are just trying to waste time and hope the next few hours go quickly!