My Funny Valentine

It's been a LONG month since last I've posted.  I have much to blog about.  For starters, the day after my last post, we had our baby boy Henry!  We were at the hospital for the c-section 4 days, during which time the older boys caught colds.  We returned home (and did our best to quarantine) but were only there for about a week when Henry caught RSV and was hospitalized for a collapsed lung.  Yikes.  I stayed in the hospital with him for 5 days.  While we are still currently doing breathing treatments with him, he is doing much better and no longer has that terrible cough.  We just now celebrated Henry's 1 month birthday with a yummy cookie party.  Here are some photos from the party...  He is so cute!

 

BTW, the paper 3D hearts were super easy to make!  The idea came from one of my favorite blogs - How About Orange.  The cookies were also easy and really yummy.  Find the tutorial here.  I used the Martha Stewart recipe for royal icing and it tasted amazing.

Thanks for reading!

Charlie Turns Two

It seems like only yesterday I held this little fella in my arms and rocked this tiny 8 pounder to sleep.  Now I have a little boy who is full of energy and spunk, weighs nearly 25 pounds, lights up a room with his smile, says things that make me melt - like "love you, bra-ber" (brother), who loves to read and to sing "We Will Rock You", who wears his Lightning McQueen slippers everywhere - even to bed with him, can color like a champ, and can give me one look with those big brown eyes and get me to do ANYTHING for him.  Oh man.  I love this kid so much.  He is just incredible.  And every day I can see more growth from him.

It is going to be wild leaving him home with Diva and Poppa tomorrow for a few days to be at the hospital having Baby Henry.  I remember bringing Charlie home from the hospital and just marveling at his big brother Oscar and how much my little boy had grown up.  I know that feeling will be the same watching Charlie become a big brother.  I teared up this morning watching the two of them rock their doll, Baby Sam, in the bassinet I had just set up for Henry.  They were so sweet and gentle!  And then they tried to sing "RockaBye Baby."  Oh good grief.  You don't even have to be crazy hormonal (like I super am) for that to affect your tear ducts.  Geez.  My baby is going to be a big brother. 

Anyway, I am a firm believer in the "Every Dog Has His Day" rule and, mostly by sheer willpower, I have kept Henry's presence from totally effecting Charlie's birthday.  (I know in the future they may want to share a birthday party or something, but for now I don't want my little guy to get lost in the newness of having a baby brother yet.)  We had mostly a family party since Tim and I decided long ago that parties will be every other year.  We did have Tim's ASP college team come since the boys are completely CRAZY about them and Diva (my mom) was here as well. We had a super fun mustache party! 

The boys both had so much fun.  Charlie had been practicing blowing out candles all week long, so he was really ready to blow those candles.  It took him like two seconds to do it!  I had to relight them 3 times for him to feel satisfied that he really did get those candles out.  Crazy kiddo.  I bought some stick-on mustaches for everyone to wear, too.  Charlie's stuck on the longest.  He thought he was so grown up.  He really is my sweet little man!

About the party itself, I made a giant chocolate mustache cake and Diva made some mustache ginger snaps.  I had some felt mustache pins for everyone and some fun photobooth props to play with.  I also served "cuties" (little oranges), sixlets, and chocolate milk - all favorites of my little men.  We also grilled some burgers and dogs and had "beer."  Rootbeer, that is.  Here are some more snapshots of the party...

The party was a great success.  I think Charlie had a blast and he really felt like a big boy.  And tomorrow he becomes a big brother!  Ack!

Thanks for reading.

Maternity Pictures (or the calm before the storm)

Whoo buddy.  I'm nearing the final stretch here and I am relieved, to say the least.  I have eleven days until the little man arrives.  I know there is still TONS of work to do on the house and we are not anywhere close to being able to move our bedrooms upstairs, but I am so sick and tired of not being able to walk properly or cross my legs!  Guys really have no idea what it feels like to have this giant bubble on your belly that is in constant motion and that keeps you from being able to do normal everyday activities.  I seriously cannot sit on the floor without worrying about how I'm gonna be able to get back up.  That sucks.  But I am trying to soak all this pregnancy stuff in now while I can.  We've decided that this fella is going to be our very last baby.  Although now Oscar is trying to talk me into having two more boys after Henry and naming them Max and Alex.  Strange child of mine.  I can barely see myself with THREE boys let alone FIVE!  Me and my mini basketball team.

Happy Christmas

Snapshots

Happy Christmas!  I'm still here!  We all been sick and we're still plugging away at the house, so I haven't had much blogging time.  But we've been celebrating, too.  The boys are having fun with Christmas this year - especially Oscar who has really seemed to grow up these past few months.  Both boys are really growing up fast.  It is going to be wild having Charlie Bear turn two in the next couple weeks.  And then life is gonna get real wacky once January 11 rolls around.  That is the date scheduled for my c-section.  Eeep!  Anyway, a picture is worth a thousand words and I certainly don't have the energy to write more than a hundred or so these days. Here are a few snapshots of our world lately...

Seeing Santa...

Our Advent Calendar...

Stringing Lights...

We have a fireplace!!!

Meet Domino, our house elf...

Making Gingerbread Cookies...

The one day it snowed...

Sweet Smiles...

Thanks for reading!  Happy holidays to you!!!

Turkey Day 2012

I'm thankful for this weekend.  Hope you guys had a yummy turkey day too!  We had my folks up for the holiday and were able to celebrate both Thanksgiving AND my mom's birthday AND even a little bit of Christmas, all in one visit.  My dad and Tim also got baby Henry's room drywalled and mudded.  Here is a glimpse of some of what happened... (Note that the birthday cake was decorated by Oz and Charlie.  They were SO proud of how it turned out! And also that Oscar is drinking apple juice out of a grown-up cup.  He knows how to celebrate.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Gender Reveal Party (back in August!)

So, I've decided to finally blog about that crazy gender reveal ice cream party we threw the week before we moved to Tennessee!  Just a side note here - if you want to remain a sane person, never try and host a big party when you literally have a week-and-a-half notice about an impending move... especially when you have small children.  There will be tears, much frustration, and most likely injuries.  But it will be memorable, that is for sure.  Maybe that is why it has taken me so long to post about this - the shock had to wear off! 

Back in August, we decided to have a gender reveal party to announce to all our friends if we were having a boy or a girl for our baby #3.  This is something we did with our second kiddo 2 years ago and it was so much fun finding out what we were having while being surrounded by our loved ones (and not being racked with pain from childbirth).  With Charlie, we had a bakery put colored frosting into some special cupcakes that we all bit into at one time.  With this baby, we decided to do something different and something more special for our boys - a balloon release.  Oscar (our 4 yr. old) was determined that the balloons were going to be pink and Charlie (our almost 2 yr. old) was just excited that there would be lots of balloons.  We invited lots of our good friends and some family up to spend the afternoon with us for the reveal and an ice cream social. 

(click on the pictures to see them larger)

How much fun we had!  It is true that everything was a bit on the crazy side, being that we had JUST found out that Tim had gotten a great job offer and that we'd be moving the following Saturday, but luckily I had already prepared most of the decorations and games the week prior, so there was NO WAY I was cancelling this party.  Besides, it gave us a great opportunity to have our own farewell party, too.  

About the party, the decorations and print-outs were mostly yellow, white, and grey with some neutrals thrown in for good measure.  I wanted the star of the show to be whatever color came out of the balloon box.  We had folks choose either a pretty yellow bow pin to wear if they thought we'd be having a girl or a black felt mustache pin if they voted boy.  It was an ice cream party, so I had yummy vanilla ice cream with tons of different type of toppings.  Most of the food I served was white, just to keep in the color scheme.  (BTW, it's REALLY hard coming up with white foods!)

I served cucumber sandwiches, veggies in clear cups (with ranch dressing at the bottom), white meringues, candy-dipped marshmallows, powdered sugar doughnuts, vanilla cupcakes, and the sugar cones were also candy-dipped.  (And contrary to popular thought, the "B" and "G" on the table do not stand for Battlestar Gallactica.  I was going to make a little sign that said "or" to put in between the letters.  I ran out of time.) 

The games were a blast.  Tim and I created our own version of "Baby Scattergories" and we also did a funny Mad Lib for people to fill out.  The best though was a candy game I found on the internet.  Too funny.  I plan to do an entire post just on this awesome game (and maybe even a printable for interested folks).  We also had pictures of ourselves to cut up and a chalkboard for people to "design" our child.  And then we posted the boy and girl names we picked out, mixed in with a few others, for people to guess the correct one.

Finally the moment of truth arrived!  The balloon release!  Would it be pink balloons or blue?  (Our good friend Karen filled the box up, so she and the ultrasound technician who wrote it on a card were the only people who knew...

Blue!!!  Oh man!  Yet another boy and I keep my status as queen of the household!  After the release, we announced our boy name to everyone as well.  (I was tired of the name Oz and Charlie picked out for baby: Marshmallow.  Yeah.  Try having someone pat your tummy and call you marshmallow.  That doesn't feel super awesome, regardless of how cute it started off being.) 

We're gonna call our next little man Henry.  Henry Evan Bomgardner.  And we can't wait to meet him.  (The countdown is on now!  We've only got about 8 weeks left!  Eeek!)

Thanks for reading!