Come alive...

I love to watch the transition people make from winter to spring. Suddenly we are bumping into neighbors long forgotten, car windows are lowered, stereos are blaring and sometimes pasty, white legs make their debut. Yesterday while playing outside I looked around and thought, "We did it! We survived another winter." Good triumphs evil, spring conquers winter...at least that is how I feel about it.


I was finally able to pull back the covers on Natalie's car seat and she got her first real taste of the great outdoors. She is soaking it up in large doses, pretty much like the rest of us. Kate has ridden her bike around the block approximately 4,278 times and CJ got her first real bike (with training wheels) and is often found closely trailing Kate.

New bubbles which were unintentionally dumped shortly after taking this photo. And of course they were dumped on the steps inside the house. But it is spring so I just smiled.

I highly doubt this is proper soccer form but she is having a blast imaging herself as the next Mia Hamm...or Jon Hamm. I don't really know much about soccer. Kidding...I'm totally kidding people. 

Kate can read now and CJ loves to listen. This is a dream come true on multiple levels.


A big girl in her high chair...without a cover. I have no idea where it is but at least we still have the chair! 


Dyeing Easter eggs. CJ honestly wears that dress five out of seven days a week. 


Different day, same dress. Here she is wiped out from the outdoors. 
Oh, and notice the hole in the slip cover on this couch? The largest sized girl in the house took a scissors to it. She lost scissor privileges for 110 months or something close to that.

Tickle time... 


Here the big girls were drawing so I set Natalie in her bumbo chair on the table to watch them. Natalie quickly got her little baby hands on the napkin holder and proceeded to ferociously lick napkins. The big girls laughed so hard that no sounds came out of their mouths. Love those kind of laughs! 


Happy Monday to you!
It is going to be a great week!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

October things...

Image
It has not been the easiest October on record. Kate had a couple of hospital visits to Rochester but she is somewhat better at the moment. She continues with chemotherapy and has not been back to school for quite some time but she is doing her best to set aside time for online school work between naps, loving on cats, and hanging out with her family. I was able to get the girls to visit their great grandma in western Iowa a few weeks back. Here's Claudia shortly after arriving at great grandma's house. She is very into jewelry and lots of it. Grandma had several questions for her about the number of bracelets and thankfully Claudia loves talking about them. Many she has made, some were gifted to her...it's a lovely hodgepodge of middle school girl goodies. Clearly the girls and I were blessed with height genes from relatives not named great grandma. We spent time relaxing, taking four wheeler rides, eating candy and we also received a visit from my aunt and uncle. Aunt Deb
Read more

The dark day of June 27th...

 June 12, 2023 We typically don't share a lot of updates about Kate's health, primarily because she wants to remain "a normal teenager." However, we still get asked how Kate is doing and I started thinking maybe it's okay to share updates now and again. Most people care about her and our family, some others could maybe be labeled as "tragedy junkies," but I'm going to operate under the assumption that most people have the best of intentions.  Today is June 12th and we are quickly approaching the dreaded dark day of June 27th. Have you watched, "Gilmore Girls?" It's a witty, comforting television show from the early 2000's. In it one of the main characters has what is dubbed, "a dark day." This is a day the character dreads each year and in response he goes into hiding from the world with no communication. Well for Kate, and the rest of us to some degree, the dark day of the year is June 27th and that date is closing in on
Read more

The other side of the dark day...

 Kate's dark day of Jun 27th came and went like any other day. Kate swam 100 fly in the Independence meet and finished 1st (she was the only swimmer in her age group to sign up, but who cares about details) and then she and Matt hopped in the car to drive up to Rochester for next-day appointments. The worst part of Kate's dark day was probably Matt trying out the Grimace meal at McDonald's. It was death by milkshake and yet he drank the whole thing. Can't let food go to waste, or something.  We braved June 27th with dread and came out on the other side. We enter year three into the cancer life. Two years of appointments, scans, blood draws, IVs, endless chemotherapies, daily medications. It is difficult to remember life before all of this, when Kate was able to get up at 6 a.m. to swim, play basketball, ride her bike, go to school and chase her sisters. We've all adapted even though no one wants to. Hand to God I keep hoping to have a tantrum and wake up from whatev
Read more