Friday, December 23, 2011

little family christmas

Today I celebrated Christmas with my boys! I had to do it a little early because the next two mornings I work in the AM and on Christmas day the house is going to be full with family members from afar... ok, just the Brainerd area... so not too far but you know what I mean :)

So last night I gave my boys their Christmas PJ's and we put out cookies and milk for Santa! By morning the boys totally forgot about the whole thing so I actually had a moment to wake up this morning before we dug into presents :)

The boys got up pretty early (6:30AM) so it was dark outside so you'll have to excuse the dark pictures...




 They loved all of their gifts!
I tried to get a picture of my boys in the Christmas PJ's...



 Then this is where I found Gabriel most of the morning...
 Being ever so naughty taking pine needles off the tree...

Then I made breakfast for us. Carmel rolls and scrambled eggs... YUM!!!

The boys spent the rest of the morning playing with their new toys and fighting with their new swords! Uncle Christopher helped them with the toy tool set cause, ahem, I have no idea what goes with what and what not. And since the toy set resembled real life tools, well, I was kinda lost and Gabriel kept asking me how things worked and soon my brother came to my rescue after the umpteenth 'I don't know how it works' from me :)

We ended up going to town to an appointment but afterwards I took my mom (whom is also having a birthday today, HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!) and the boys out to lunch at my work, The Lazy Moose... not that I love work so much or anything that I want to go in on my day off... but have you been to Moose Lake? There is only one nice restaurant in town to go to and I happen to work at it :) I don't mind though!

We got home, I put the boys to bed and ate some pie and then started on supper. I made green bean casserole, creamy sweet potatoes, and herb roasted chicken! YUM!

By the way, I discovered today that it takes a heck of a lot of work to get the giblets out of a chicken if your chicken is not de-thawed completely. Seriously, a very. long. time. I had my hand up a chickens bottom for far too long of a time today...

Ahem.

After supper we made a gingerbread house! Gabriel was so excited and even more so when he discovered things were edible. After discovering things were edible there was less decorating that went on and more eating because according to Gabriel 'I'm hungry and I need more sugar!' lol!


 Did I mention there were some sour candies?




Our final project!

It was such a fun day! 

Merry Christmas! 

Monday, December 19, 2011

St. Nicks Day

Every year I celebrate St. Nicks Day with my kids. The boys write up a letter to Santa...

Gabriel drew a picture of the sword he wanted and the tools...

Eli had a little help from Mama and didn't know what to think...

And then we stuck the letters in their boots...

How cute are they?

We put the boots outside and waited for Santa to come along and take the letters and fill the boot with goodies!

This year they got candy, their Christmas ornament, and a card from Santa :)

This is what Gabriel does when I ask him to hold up his card and say cheese! He sticks the card in front of his face and then says cheese!

The boys thought it was fantastic and loved every part of it!


Then we came upstairs, hung up the ornaments and had the boys favorite cookies, ginger snaps!


I love St. Nicks Day!

Almost one year ago...

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Absent

You may have noticed (or not) that I have been very absent from my blog lately. A very large reason for that would be this...

I have been trying to nurse my two boys back to health for almost two weeks now. Both boys got sick the Tuesday after Thanksgiving and have been sick ever since. They had 100+ degree fevers for 4 days, Eli's peaked at 104+ that Friday, before I took them into urgent care late Friday night along with awful coughs and nasty gunk coming out of their eyes. I hardly ever take my kids in when they are sick, or myself for that matter. Things have to be really bad for me to go to the doctor, and I'm not a huge fan of narcotics, but I knew my children needed something. They both were so sick that I had to help them sit up to take sips of water, neither one of them wanted to eat a thing, and all they did was sleep. Honestly, they looked like the walking lying down dead, just, you know, alive. It was awful.

I took the kids to the hospital in Moose Lake where the urgent care unit was and the nurse and doctor looked them over. The kids pretty much just laid on the table or in our arms and let the doctor do whatever he needed to do. Eli was a little less cooperative at times but still, they were obviously sick. That and they both had pale white skin, little red dots on their cheeks, obvious black circles under their eyes and their eyes were pink and puffy. The doctor looked them over and then told me he really had no idea what was wrong with them. Of course, in different, more doctor like words then that. He said that if their fevers weren't gone in another 3 days I could give them this prescription and hopefully it would knock out whatever the heck it was that they had.

I was not happy.

I took the kids home and put them to bed. The next day I wanted to take them into a different urgent care but it got to the point that if I took my kids in, it would 'wipe them out' and make them worse and who knew if another doctor would say something different, or I could stay home and they could rest and sleep and be far less miserable then if we went out.

To make a long story short, I didn't take the kids back into a doctor because they started to show signs that they were slowly getting better. The first day they actually smiled and were semi their normal selves was the next Tuesday, but neither, especially Eli was 100% better. Throughout the week I monitored both of them closely and Gabriel got better daily and now, he's almost completely back to his normal self. Eli on the other hand I'm still worried about. I thought he was getting better but his awful cough has persisted and suddenly his fever came back. And, odd for him at least, he won't sleep! Eli normally takes very long naps, sometimes more then one, every day. And the last few days he's so tired but he just can't sleep. I feel so bad for him! I went and filled the prescription that the doctor gave me the week before and now we're giving that a couple of days to see if it works.

It's been some really long days (and weeks!) around here. Also, in the midst of all of this I got sick myself and I started a part time job as a waitress at the Lazy Moose in Moose Lake. And, to top all of that off, it's getting down to the last few weeks of school, which means lots of papers and assignments are due. Today is my first 'day off' in what feels like forever because I don't work AND all my homework is done for the week. Alas, there is laundry and cleaning to do and Eli is still sick, but it still feels like a day off to this lady :)

Thanksgiving

Is it too late to blog about Thanksgiving? No? Good. As long as I do it before Christmas, right? Good.

So for Thanksgiving I had no idea what the boys and I were doing until the night before Thanksgiving. We had a few options on where to go and I kept going back and forth between places. Right before I went into class on Wednesday night I found out my brother and his family was coming up to celebrate Thanksgiving at my parents, so I decided to stay at my parents for Thanksgiving as well.

Thanksgiving was full of baking and cooking and all the boys playing. My brother, Nathan, and his wife, Tia, have 4 boys, and with my 2 it was 6 boys total. And the kicker was that their ages were -1, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. It was a lot of fun and the boys all love playing together. This was the kids table...

They were so excited to have their own table! They started sitting there maybe an hour before supper and just kept sitting there until we told them to go do something else because it was going to take awhile for the food to be done. We set up the adult table all purty :)


The food (and dessert!) was so delicious! We all had lots of fun!

The next day Gabriel taught the older two boys how to be crazy and jump off of his bed. Gabriel was by far the craziest one in the bunch, Brendyn and Tyvan were far more cautious when it came to jumping from high heights onto my bed, but in the end they were almost as crazy as Gabriel.




On Saturday Nathan and Tia had to go down to the cities and they left their three older boys behind. We had fun coloring and Opa took the boys trapping. By mid afternoon this is what happened...

We know how to wear children out round these parts :)

It was a fun weekend! What did you do for Thanksgiving?