Bella, Gabe and Josiah

Josy is finally taking. It’s taken a long time, but in the last two months the words have exploded. He’s starting to use filler words appropriately, making actual sentences. He can respond when you say something, and even tell you about his day. It’s so much fun. He definitely still needs to be interpreted as the words don’t all sounds right and he’s dropping a lot of letters still, but the words are coming out. And he’s not always putting such a huge gap in his sentences the way that he was. He still is sometimes, but not all the time. This week I dropped him off at school and they were headed out to feed the birds. When he got home, I asked him if he fed the birds. J: Wose (Rose) feed birds. I watch birds eat popcorn. Somehow we were walking about monkeys and I told the kids about when I was in Thailand and I got attacked by monkeys and they ate my food, even the plastic bag. The next day on the way to school, Josy said “Monkey eat your wunch. Eat your pastic bag.” We were playing an

The kids were all off of school on Monday. Technically it was a holiday for me, but it also wants since my job is weird, so normally I go in anyway. But this year with Gabe in school that didn’t work as well, so I decided to not try and work from home and instead just enjoy having time with the kids. So naturally, the first stop was the dentist. I was a little nervous when they announced that Josy was going first, but he was a little rock star. All three kids had a good report on their teeth, so that was good. Then while Josy was napping, Gabe and I did a bunch of cleaning, including cleaning out Swimmy’s cage. I scrubbed all of the decorations, but apparently I didn’t do a good job because when I told Gabe to go get them so we could put the tank back together, he decided to clean them again. I walked in on this. He was scrubbing them with the old toothbrush (like I’d been doing) and then used a bunch of handsoap. Hopefully we got all of the soap cleaned off before they went back in Sw

Last year, I was leasing a work train and a guy walked in with an actual pegleg. I couldn’t believe it. But I also had no idea who he was and walking up to someone to ask if they would like to meet your pirates son is a little strange. I told Gabe and he instantly asked if I had a picture. No. Because once again, taking pictures of random strangers is weird. Then this year, I did the same training and he walked in again. I knew that I had to do something. So I found one of the other people in the training that I knew fairly well and asked her if she thought he’d be okay with it, since I still don’t know the guy at all. She told me that he’d totally be fine with me asking, that he loves kids and loves showing off his pegleg and he was very sweet to her kids. So as soon as I finished the training, I asked him if he’d ever be interested is saying hi to my pirate son. He was super nice and instantly said that he’d love to meet him and to bring him by anytime. Well, I happened to be bringin

I’ll give these boys a lot of credit. They tried. They showed up to the basketball game, ready to listen to Bella play in the pep band, even excited about it,  but they just weren’t into it. Hopefully all of the people around us thought they were entertaining, rather than obnoxious.

Valentine's Day around here is supposed to be easy.  We go to the store and buy premade valentines and the kids write their names on them.  Done.  However, this year, apparently I waited way too long to buy valentines because by the time I got to the store, there were none.  Not ever just the awkward ones that no one wanted.  None at all.  So, then we were forced to get creative.  Creativity is not my specialty, but Gabe had a plan and between the two of us, we agreed to cut hearts out of pink paper and stick candy to them.  He was determined to do them all himself, including the cutting, but after two hearts that took a very long time, we agreed that I could cut out the hearts and he could just write the names on them and stick the candy on.  Luckily all he was writing was To: <fill in the name> and From: Gabe, because even that much was a lot of work for him.  I don't know what would have happened if he'd had to write "Happy Valentine's Day!" also... 

Friday was quite the day… First of all, Pat was out of town for work. That made things complicated. Then on Thursday, I dropped something off at Gram and Gramps’ house, from the back seat of the car Josy said “Pease. Mommy. Dop. Me. Off. Damps. House.” Unfortunately, that wasn’t  an option and when I told him no, he burst into tears with a “Mommy. I’m. Sad!” Gram came out and talked to him and that made him feel better. When we drove off he said “I’m. Better. Not. Sad.” So Friday, the schedule worked off differently, so I dropped Josy off at Gram and Gramps and he was a very happy little boy. Gram asked what he wanted to do when he got there and he said “play. Toys. Bam. House.” I don’t think he even noticed when I left. After an hour or so, Gram took Josy to school, so he really got the best of both world. Then Gram picked up Gabe from school because the friend that he normal hangs out with was sick. And that’s where life started to get interesting. The plan was that the boys were goi

We’ve spent the last two years avoiding Covid and we’ve done a great job of that. However, Covid finally found us and it’s made the last three weeks super fun… I got home from Oregon on Sunday night. Monday, Yen texted me to tell me that she’d tested positive. Lovely. After negative tests on Tuesday and Wednesday, I tested positive on Thursday. That out the entire family, except for Bella, in quarantine. Gabe tested positive on Sunday and Pat tested positive on Tuesday. Luckily I was out of quarantine on Wednesday and celebrated by going to the grocery store, which doesn’t sound overly exciting, but it definitely was. Pat and Gabe were out of quarantine on Friday, so they were able to go back to work on school on Monday of this week. However, Josy was still negative, which meant that he had to do an extra five day quarantine after everyone else was done with theres. So he and I planned to be home through Wednesday when life would go back to normal and we would always wonder how that ki