Thirty-Two

That's how old I am folks.  Heading right on into my mid-30's and I'm not even upset about it.  I wanted to be 30 for so long.  I got married young and started having babies youngish so for a long time I felt a lot older than I was.  Most of my friends who are Mom's are all older than me by about 5-6 years and so when I had 3 kids by the age of 28, everyone who met me seemed shocked. People who graduated High School with me are just now starting to have their kids. I definitely grew up a little faster than all of them and I couldn't wait to finally be in the "30's" club.  Now I still feel a lot younger than most of the Mom's at the girls' school, but at least I'm not in my 20's anymore!  The only downside to being a young Mom, is that kids age you very quickly! My 32 year old childless friends have time to worry about their skin, they get to sleep longer, they don't have to rely on goldfish and chicken nuggets in their diets, and their stress levels are exponentially lower.  That means they look 25 while I look 45.  The upside is, when Sully graduates High School, I will only be 47.  When their youngest children graduate High School, they'll all be in their mid-to-upper-50's.  I'd way rather be a young empty-nester than an old one, hahaha!  Shawn and I didn't get much time together before we had Lucy, so it will be nice to have "our time" to travel and live alone while we are still young enough to enjoy it, and not old and crippled!

Cheers to THIRTY TWO!

It was a good, relaxing, stormy birthday. I love a good thunderstorm and that’s what was delivered!⛈I’m also generally not a fan of dessert, but Shawn found 2 tiny slices of cheesecake at the store, just so the kids could help me blow out a few candles🍰😊And last but not least, I got my annual crab with the “secret sauce” so I went to bed one happy lady🦀 We finished the day off snuggling on the couch and watching TV. All of my favorite things wrapped into one day. I’m pretty lucky. Thanks for making me feel like a million bucks everyone. You’re all so kind to me💕💕

Shawn is branching out a bit! He made me the MOST delicious Egg's Benedict for my birthday breakfast! It was SO yummy that I even ate seconds of it for lunch!

 Some women might want diamonds, but this is the kind of the jewelry that makes me heart smile.

 

Lucy was in charge of "taking pictures" of me blowing out my candles.  She really zoomed in there and made sure she literally took the pictures of me blowing out the candles, hahahaha!

Also, Spring Break came and went.  We had beautiful weather and played outside almost every day! As part of my birthday present, I asked for a Dome that the kids could play on.  They spent HOURS on it! Shawn doesn't like how hard it's gonna be to mow the lawn (oops)o, but the kids absolutely love that thing.  It was money well spent!

We also went to a couple of different parks, fed the ducks in our neighborhood (they were even letting Sully pet them!) and did some crafts on the 1 rainy day we had. I am so happy that we had such great weather almost all week! Made for an easy, breezy, relaxing spring break! Best of all, Shawn and I got to sleep in every single day! (Well, the days he was home and not out of town!)

Now we only have 40 days of school left so the countdown has begun!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! (...and a few more updates!)

🍀Jury’s out on whether or not they’re lucky, but they sure are charming so I think I’ll keep ‘em😜💚😘💚😘🍀

We set up a trap the night before and guess what?? The back of the Lucky Charm's box provided a pre-made trap so this time, I didn't have to make one! Lucy was so sure we would catch a Leprechaun this year because "Professionals" designed that trap and she said "it just HAS to work!"..... Unfortunately, even the pro's at Lucky Charm got it wrong. Laddy the Leprechaun escaped!  But not before he left a few golden chocolate coins for the kiddos. I wonder how many more years we will keep trying to catch those darn leprechauns....

We had our traditional Corned Beef and cabbage for dinner.  The girls call Corned Beef "Red Chicken" and they LOVE it (Lucy started that;) )! They don't like the potatoes or cabbage, but "red chicken" is one of Lucy's favorites! I also always make a loaf of homemade green bread, a green veggie as a side, and green Sprite. Green, green, green! Sully wasn't into the bread.  He thought it was cake so he was quite disappointed when he took a big bite, haha!

It was a BEAUTIFUL day.  The kind of day that brings a warm Spring evening along with it.  It's the first time this season that the night weather was pleasant as well, so Shawn plugged in our porch lights and outside TV and we watched TV and played darts after the kids went to bed.  It was a perfect night!  We haven't done that since Fall :)  

It is Spring Break out here and it's been great so far.  The girls got their iPads taken away almost 2 weeks ago for bad behavior and I LOVE it when they don't have their iPads.  They are so much better behaved!  It is so true- screens cause anger and irritation! They don't have school for 10 days and although I promised them they could earn some screen time back this week, I have loved the hiatus.  The weather has been wonderful and they've been playing outside ALL day long and crashing hard at night.  It's been awesome. One of our swings broke today when Lucy was on it, so that is a bummer- it's not fixable and it came down on her pretty hard :(.  That playset in our yard is falling apart.  It's sad!  It's 12 years old though, and it has held up really well.  Our kids have had it for almost 3 years now and it has been played with constantly.  I don't know if it will last another Summer; it's in pretty bad shape.  I will be sad to see it go and so will they!  It was one of the main reasons we moved into this house!

Anyway, the forecast for the rest of the week looks perfect so I'm happy to say we will be outside most of the week.  Spring- Thank you for FINALLY showing up!!

March has just been FLYING by.  I can't even believe it's already close to April.  We have less than 2 months of school left! How is that even possible?!??!  We've had Jump Rope for Heart, Dr. Suess Week, Sully's been thriving at preschool, and we are seeing all the flowers blooming everywhere.  It's been a good month :)

He’s a lot younger than both my girls were when they each started preschool, but he also needs it WAY more than they did at this age! His sweet teachers are the only ones who can tame this wild boy and he loves school so much! 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 

Green eggs and ham day! Lucy was gagging just thinking about it, but Piper kept telling her to “stop being dramatic- it’s JUST food coloring, Lucy! It tastes the exact same as normal eggs and ham!!”🤣🍳

One of my daughters wanted to participate in Wacky Wednesday, and one of them did not... this is the one that chose not to.
Hahaha, just kidding. 😂

And last but not least.....

For a Christmas baby who’s birthday kind of gets lost in the midst of the holiday season, we give her “Pi Day” too. Just a little extra way to make our Pi Baby smile <3
She got a new shirt and a new DVD for "Pi Day." Love this Pi Baby!

My Baby Boyfriend is 3

** INSANELY LONG POST AHEAD!***

Where do I start with this little monster… Sullivan is by far my most challenging kid! And if you know my kids you know that my girls are hard too. So I pretty much have never had the experience of raising a child that was easy!😆 (Piper started out easy but when she turned two she gave a new meaning to the “Terrible Twos.” And she’s been kinda hard ever since. Except for when she’s home alone. She’s actually really good when it’s just one on one with her.) Sullivan on the other hand, is only easy 20% of the time! Then he's good (but not easy) another  20% of the time...but 60% of the time he's naughty😆) He is exhausting from the moment he wakes up in the morning ‘til the moment he goes to bed at night, and even the night hours in between! And he still hasn’t mastered the art of sleeping through the night… He’s THREE y’all!😭

Oh my word this boy will probably be the death of me. I honestly don’t even know how I’m still alive today. I think about him and my whole body just gets tired. You think I’m being dramatic but spend an hour with him and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

The thing is, he came out of my womb demanding. He wanted to eat all the time, be held all the time, wanted somebody giving him attention all day every day. And for three years he’s kept up these demands. He doesn’t always play by himself happily; he always wants somebody playing with him. He says all day every day “Mommy, come pway! Come pway! Daddy come pway!” When he wants something he doesn’t ask for it nicely- he just starts screaming in your face to let you know that he wants/needs something. There’s no “Mommy, can I please have this?” Nope! He runs up to you screams that he wants something, throws his head back and then just keeps yelling for it until you get it to him. He’s so extremely stubborn! Getting him to say “please” is a chore! He’s SOOO  stubborn! And I can be stubborn too; I will sit there and argue with him for 20 minutes telling him “no” or “you need to eat” or “you need to stop screaming” or “say please.” But he won’t back down. Geez- even writing this I’m getting tired again… I just laid him down for nap but he won’t sleep.  Naps are pretty nonexistence these days…. It’s devastating! Usually he drinks his milk and then just plays in his room for 30 minutes before I unleash him back into the family room. He’s a menace.🤦🏻‍♀️

His one redeeming quality (and this is something I absolutely adore) is that lately he has decided that cuddling is actually a good thing. However, he only cuddles when he’s in a full-blown meltdown. So you have to endure that temper tantrum in order to get the cuddles. He’ll be having a meltdown and the only way to calm him down is to say “do you want to sit in your Rocking chair and let me hold you?” He’ll say yes and he will gather up his bunny and his blanket (both of which he’s still extremely attached to) and we will turn on some lullabies in his room and I will get to hold him like a baby and rock him and cuddle with him for a good chunk of time. Those moments are almost worth the intense meltdowns. I absolutely love holding him and rocking him.  It is my favorite thing in all of the world!😍

Anyway, before he turned 2 he was actually a pretty cool little dude. Yes, he was demanding but he was always pretty happy as long as you were paying attention to him. He didn’t seem to cry more than a normal baby. I loved our one-on-one time and I really cherished those rare hours. 

Well then he turned 2 and everything changed! He became the world’s hardest toddler ever! He has broken so many things in my house, destroyed walls, chewed chunks out of the wood in his crib, taken bottles of lotion and Desitin and powder and sprinkled/sprayed/oozed them all over our house! He eats toothpaste, he turns the sink on and floods the kitchen or bathrooms, he loves clogging the toilet with an entire roll of toilet paper, he held us all hostage one day when he turned the outside hose on and wouldn’t let out of the house without spraying us all while he had an evil look in his eyes. While I’m cleaning up one mess, he is making another. Did I ever blog about the day he dumped an entire sandbox full of sand in my bedroom? Yeah... that was fun. He is quite literally the Tasmanian Devil. He just rips through the house and destroys everything in his wake! And I think I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on cough drops because he always seems to find them and can eat an entire bag at once. Good thing he’s growing out of that phase a little bit, but he’s moved onto gum... yay…

I actually think the getting-into-everything phase is slowing down a bit, thank goodness!  He still plays really hard and he still wants attention 24/7, but like I said, I think the “Wrecking Ball” part of his personality might be coming to an end. Or at least there seems to be an end in sight…

Him and his sisters fight like cats and dogs every day. Where they used to get along beautifully, now they just steal each other‘s toys and make each other mad. So when the girls are home there’s always crying and yelling happening. Have I painted a picture of utter chaos within my house yet? That’s what I’m going for because that’s the absolute truth! Hahahaha!

My hope for his third year of life is that he will lose his curiosity of what it would look or sound like to break everything in the house, that he decides that when we wakes up at 3am, it's not time to turn the lights on and play but rather just go back to sleep, and that he figures out that running around outside naked when it's 25 degrees is not he right thing to do.  I hope he will be able to start playing by himself better without demanding my undivided attention every waking minute of every day. I hope that him and his sisters will start getting along better. I hope that I can start running errands with him and he won’t flip out while we drive. I hope that he will start saying “please” and “thank you.” I hope that he will start sharing better.  And I hope he’ll become a little more independent.

The one thing I don’t want him to let go of is this cuddle phase that I mentioned earlier because those are the moments my heart beats for. I hope he keeps his silly personality and his love of making all of us laugh daily. And you know… Despite everything I’ve just written… I love that boy fiercely! I love him more than I can say. I kiss him all over his face every morning when I wake up and I beg him for hugs and kisses throughout the day. I tell him how much I love him over and over again because it’s true and I could not imagine my life without him in it. I don’t even want to think about not having him as my son.💞

A few things about Sullivan that I want to remember rather than just the drama… His favorite color is “lellow”. He still is just as obsessed with cars and trucks as he was at this time last year. He loves helping his daddy fix things. He will sit with Shawn and pretend to use his tools right next to him for as long as it takes for Shawn to do any project around the house. He thinks that Shawn is a celebrity and totally worships the ground he walks on. Every time Shawn is traveling, he’ll asked me a million times a day “where Daddy go?” “When daddy home?” (Speaking of asking that question… Every single morning when he wakes up after the girls have left for school he asked me where his “Sissy’s” are. Even though he knows I’m going to say “Sissy’s at school, Bud!”) He loves watching choo-choo while he eats his breakfast in the morning. In fact we have not had breakfast at the kitchen table with him in months. He refuses to eat in the kitchen at any meal. He hates sitting down for dinner and he won’t eat lunch or breakfast at the kitchen table because he wants to have shows playing while he eats. The boy is the pickiest eater in the world so this is one of those “choose your battles” situations and I always let him eat in the family room because it’s the only way I’m going to get him to eat. So yeah, part of the reason why he is so hard and stubborn and spoiled is because of me… (I know :( )But sometimes you just have to let them eat where they want to eat so that you can get stuff in their belly. He doesn’t eat with us as a family at night either. If he sits at the table he’s playing or screaming or fidgeting or yelling at his sisters for looking at him so we just let him play while we all eat because it’s much more peaceful to not have him at our dinner table. How horrible does that sound? It’s not even something that I feel OK with admitting! But I spoke to a behavioral therapist about it and she said to do it, so I do. I am embarrassed by it and I don’t like to talk about it because I feel like a failure. But remember the first line of this blog? How I said he’s my most difficult child ever? I feel like no one has the right to judge me unless you’ve spent time with him… He is so hard! Oh man… 

But his laugh is so cute and when he laughs, the whole room laughs with him- it’s infectious! And he loves holding my hand when we cross any street because he is very aware of cars in parking lots. He loves sitting by Shawn and watching dinosaur shows (Jurassic Park) or football. He loves throwing blankets over peoples’ heads and saying “where Mommy/Daddy/Sissy go?” And every time I uncover my face and say “here I am!” he squeals and laughs with delight like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever seen/heard. He loves to pretend to fall over like a drunken sailor and laughs so hard every time.  He makes the funniest faces ever, just to see you smile. Those things never get old. Those are the times when I truly LOVE being his Mommy. I have so much fun with him when he is in a good mood. He’s hilarious and he knows it. So when somebody starts laughing at him doing something funny he’ll do it over and over and over again because he loves to make people laugh. And when him and his sisters do get along, it’s the cutest thing ever. Because I mean, as a Mom you always love seeing your sweet kids getting along. He loves to brush his own teeth and hates it when we try to help. He still loves sippy‘s of milk. He loves waffles for breakfast. He loves dinosaurs. He calls them “Raar’s”. He loves the dollar store and knows exactly which aisle all the little cars are in and he will run to them as fast as he can and pick out the one that he wants the most. He likes going to the gym daycare. He’s obsessed with candy. He had a hard time going to preschool at first but he’s getting way better. He loves putting his shoes on. He loves going outside and playing. Even when it’s frigid out he’ll sneak outside without clothes on! He loves our pets but they don’t always love him😂

He runs around the house all day pushing his big Tonka trucks all over. That kid has a six pack because he’s literally bent over those big cars all day zooming through the house. You have to watch your feet when you’re around him because if not, he’ll just bulldoze right into you! I can’t even tell you how many foot and ankle injuries all of us have sustained because of Sullivan!

I think this next year is going to be much easier because, although his speech is a little delayed, fortunately it’s getting better every day. I think a lot of the reasons that we struggle with him is because we can’t figure out what he’s trying to tell us and it makes him extremely upset and in turn, it causes us to be upset because he’s yelling at us.  I just think that this upcoming year is going to be easier because as he progresses, there will be more open communication between us. Its getting better every day!

I don’t think he suffers from anxiety the way Piper did, but I do know he will have a diagnosis of ADHD someday... I think he is amazing and smart and knows exactly what he wants but the speech has been a little slower than it was with the girls’ so it’s a struggle at times. But when this boy decides that he loves you, he really loves you! You become his everything! He will cling onto you and you will know without an ounce of doubt that you are loved and looked up to! I know I’ve painted him as a hard child (because he honestly is)… But he also has a very sweet and VERY SILLY side to him. He’ll make you laugh ‘til you cry and he will make you feel so special because of how much he wants you.😍

Sully, I love you more than all the leaves on all the trees. Even though you might bring me to my knees in frustration each day, you are also my ray of sunshine. You’re the light of my life. 

You’re mine. Happy birthday to my most favorite son ever.💙

His birthday festivities started earlier this week when Ninny took him on a birthday date. I will copy and paste her captions from Facebook since it was HER time with the almost-3-year-old.

"I got to take this handsome little guy on a birthday date today. Just the two of us. He was a perfect little gentleman. His mom thought I had the wrong child when I told her how polite and well behaved he was the whole time." #eatyourheartoutladies

"His toy that he wanted over everything else in the store! He's pretty stoked!"

 "He obediently ate his whole lunch before he went to play in the cool kids play area."

Then on Saturday we started his day out the right way with breakfast in bed! He was SO tired when we woke him up so it took a little nudging, but when he saw that we were bringing him a tray full of food he got so happy and excited! It was so sweet!

Then we opened birthday presents early so that he had all day to play with them. He loved everything he got! He thinks the Lincoln Memorial on the back of five-dollar-bills are trains and so he kept pointing to the money that he would get in his cards and saying "Choo-choo!!" 

 

The day was pretty low-key. I'm still not feeling that great so we didn't do anything special.  It felt like a normal Saturday with a few presents and a few "Happy Birthday" songs thrown in the mix.  But you know what? Sully was happy.  He never once acted "entitled" or cranky.  He was fine with waiting to open presents, he was fine with waiting to eat his cupcakes, he was fine with just going with the flow! It wasn't normal "Sully" behavior  but maybe that just means he's getting better now that he's older! :) He's a cool little dude who didn't act out on his birthday like his sisters usually do! He was just happy! I love him. 

Doesn't 3 sound so old? I can't believe my baby is not a baby anymore... us Mom's will always ache for the "baby" days and mine seem to be officially over. My heart broke a little on Saturday. But, happy birthday Sully man. You are LOVED.