A Big Birthday and some odds and ends

We’ve had a few fun events in the last few weeks. I now document everything due to my new(ish) Smart Phone, which the kids love. No sarcasm there. They beg me to get out my phone and take pictures all. the. time.

 

I babysat Jena’s kids for a short time a few weeks ago. These two (Lucy and Jacob, who is 3 days younger than Lucy) just rolled around and held hands and cooperated so nicely while I posed them to get cute pictures. It’s interesting to see how much they don’t look like cousins! Don’t worry, Lucy, your tiny mouth will catch up to your head eventually  

The twins had Kindergarten roundup last week. They were so excited and not really at all timid. They read The Hungry Caterpillar and made a craft and played. I had a hard time getting them to leave the classroom. They are really looking forward to going to school with Dominic next year!

Oh, we love this beauty. She is rolling both ways now. Recently, I laid her down in the living room and she rolled herself all the way into the kitchen until she got stuck against a wall. The hair in the back of her head will NOT lay down, even if it is wet. It’s so long now we could put it pigtails, but she, of course, would not sit still to do that! She is so spoiled. The boys love showing her her picture book with all the kids’ photos in it.

 

A new favorite game at the church playground: playing fossils. The boys bury each other in the mulch and then dig each other up.

“Aunts” Beth and Emily stayed for a weekend. We did lots of snuggling and being crazy with the boys . They get SO keyed up with Beth and Emily are here. Having “Bemily” here is like a retreat for me. We could stay up all night talking Jesus and faith and life. They are a really blessing to our whole family.

 

We celebrated the Solemnity of the Ascension last Tuesday by taking Dominic out of school  and going to Subway for lunch. The Church gives so many great opportunities to party! Even in the middle of Lent!

The Deaver Patriarch turned 34 last week. As usual, he couldn’t really think of anything he wanted or anything special he wanted to do. He’s low maintenance like that. We did a little date night after the kiddos went to bed and HE ended up making ME dinner! We enjoyed some wine and I gave him a very unexciting freezer bowl for our ice cream maker because I accidently gave the old one away. How’s that for a birthday present?? We also celebrated with a special birthday breakfast. The kiddos made gifts and we put a candle in his cinnamon roll. The boys were very bummed that we didn’t put 34 candles in it!

And my super selfless hubby let me leave him with all the boys for a day and a half (On his birthday!) while I went to a women’s retreat in Columbus, NE. Lucy and I and 13 other women enjoyed an amazing speaker, Immaculee Ilibagiza tell us her story of love and forgiveness and her survival during the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. It was an amazing weekend with wonderful friends. I was so busy keeping Lucy happy I didn’t get too many pictures except for a few in the car.

This was Heather and I taunting the girls in the other car who gave up sweets for Lent….

 

Happy April!!

The “A” word, the fishing trip that wasn’t, and 8 hours of waterslides

This past week…

We had our dear friends, the Faltys stay with us. We did some bowling, movie watching and lots and lots of talking. Just ask Luke and Marc. The kiddos played together non-stop. At one point, the adults were talking after a meal while the kiddos were playing in the next room. Patrick came in and whispered to Luke, “Pete said ‘Alleluia’ I told him we don’t say that in our home” I love that Alleluia and Stupid are the most outrageous words my kids can come up with.

 

Tons of floor space and 6 kiddos choose to squeeze on the couch together!

We had such a great time with great friends!!

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Took the boys to the park on a beautiful day.  I may have overestimated their energy levels a bit. After two hours and lots of stops, we finally made it around the mile long path. Everyone was pretty much over it by the time we got back to the van (to put it mildly). The first hour and a half were fun, though!

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Thought this pic encapsulated boyhood. Dinosaurs vs army men and Hot Wheel cars.

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We spent most of Thursday morning cleaning, baking and packing in preparation for our weekend trip. I promised the kiddos that if they helped me, I’d take them fishing in the afternoon. I asked for fishing poles for the boys for Christmas and I’ve been looking forward to some good weather to take them to North Park Lake. In my head I imagined my cherubic little boys standing next to the lake with their fishing poles in hand. I’d take some Norman Rockwell-esque pictures of them and we’d have a grand little afternoon.

 

No.

 

I literally spent every bit of the 40 minutes we were there untangling, unsnagging and re-hooking fishing poles, all while Lucy screamed in her car seat. I cast out for the boys a total of 4 times and we caught no fish. We did hook a duck, though, so that was fun. Finally, I just called it quits. At that point, the kids were tired of waiting on me to get their poles ready and they were equally ready to go. As we were leaving, Jackson announced that he had to use the bathroom, and no, he couldn’t wait until we got home, so I sent him and Dominic to the park restroom. After waiting for them for about 5 minutes, I left the other kiddos in the car and went to check on them. By the time I got close, I could hear them screaming for me. I had to kick open the door because it was stuck closed and D and Jacks came out with faces streaming with tears, terrified. I guess it made a good story…

 

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Our weekend trip went quite a bit better…

We stayed at the Ramada in Omaha. The littles loved staying in a hotel and the three beds were perfect for jumping and wrestling.

We spent a total of eight hours at the Coco Keys water park. It was a blast! The boys did the waterslides over and over again.

 

Jake and Lizzy and Chris joined us, too, and extra hands and eyes were very helpful! Luke and I took turns taking Lucy and Leo back to our room to take naps but the three big boys played hard all weekend long.

We also went to the Amazing Pizza Machine (or as Leo calls it “Amazing Ma-Pizza Machine”) for dinner and sat in the Sports Room. Our sports fanatic, Dominic, was completely glued to the Louisville vs. UConn game, as if he’d ever heard of those teams before.

We did so many arcade games that we vowed to never again buy so many tokens. We were there for hours trying to use them all up.

And I forced them all to sit and take a family photo.

Take one. Leo was hating it.

Take two.

Take three. Good enough.

We took a family picture in the same spot last June when Lucy was just a little unborn peanut.

And then we won all kind of junk just for playing!

 

It was a surprisingly refreshing weekend! And now we are all going to bed early!

 

Have a great week!

Our Life

 

What new year’s resolution to post more on my blog…??

 

I’ve done it. I’ve entered into the teenybopper world of “selfies.” Welp, if it’s good enough for Bo Pelini and the Pope….

Got a few days of good weather intermingled with the –8 degree weather. We met some friends at the park.

 

And Leo rode on the spaceship thingee with Naomi. These two are so cute. At Leap ‘n’ Learn, I caught them running around the track together holding hands. So sweet. At 14, not so sweet, but at 3, so sweet!

Thanks to gift certificates from G and G Deaver, we were able to take each of the boys, individually, to Subway for adventure nights. I took Patrick and Leo and Luke took D and Jackson. As per our m.o.s, I took pictures and Luke didn’t. It is a real treat to spend some time with the kiddos one-on-one. Life gets so busy and some days the only real time I spend with them is putting them to bed.

This was one day at the playground when D decided to read while all the rest of us played… #firstborn

I took Lucy swimming for the first time a few weeks ago. I got her all dressed in her cute swimsuit, loaded her up and she was sleeping by the time we got there! I debated waking her up because I so wanted to take her in the water. Finally, the giddy-first-time-mom-of-a-girl part of me beat out the rational-never-wake-a-sleeping-baby part of me and I got her up to join us. She was pretty much indifferent to the water. She didn’t love it but it didn’t scare her. I toted her around on my hip while the four boys all yelled at me incessantly and simultaneously, “Mom, watch this!” “Mom! Look at me!” “My turn for you to watch me!” It is honestly exhausting just spending an hour complimenting them over and over and over again. But it is really fun to watch them develop their swimming skills. They are all such little fish and the three big boys are fairly confident swimmers!

We’ve had a few days off school lately. A few Fridays ago we went to the Children’s museum and Valentino’s for lunch. There were 20 kids and 5 adults. The kiddos were awesome, but you can imagine the chaos that 20 small children brought to lunch. We adults mostly just inhaled our food between filling plates, getting forks, getting drinks, cleaning spills and filling plates again. Mostly, I schedule play dates with friends for my own sanity, but there wasn’t much adult chat at this particular play date.

I took two of my students to an all day Choral Clinic. It was a great learning experience and Lucy tagged along for the day.And 4th grade girls LOVE babies, so she was well entertained.

My parents visited. Lucas had a basketball tournament and we enjoyed housing the three of them and getting to see Lucas play.

This little boy is sick again for the umpeeth time this winter. Poor kid. Today, he coughed so much he eventually threw up all while moaning, “Whyyyy??? Whyyy??” Now THAT will break a momma’s heart!

Leo is so hilarious lately. His little vocabulary is exploding. He loves to say, “Mom, that’s hilarious” or hug me and exclaim, “I’m SO proud of you, mom!” And he really loves to tell anyone who will listen that he got to have cheese crust pizza after going poopy in the potty. Very important information to disperse here, people.

We babysat a friend’s baby recently. Her name is Lizzie, and it was a real downer when Leo got up from his nap to find that she was here and not the Lizzy he was expecting. “Mom, when is big Lizzy getting here??”

Dominic finished up his YMCA drama club. He played the Big Bad Wolf. He’s a pretty good little actor and he really enjoyed it. Of course, my dream is for all my little people to sing and act Stage mom much?

Jackson was Star Student at school about a month ago, but between sickness and snow days, Luke was just able to read to his class this week. Pretty cute.

This little lady is rolling from back to front all the time (but not the other way, to her frustration). She weighed in at 13 lbs 8 oz, in the 24th percentile at a recent check. We moved her out of our room this week at night in hopes of getting more than 45 minutes of uninterrupted sleep at a time. It hasn’t been going great and we had a pretty tired week, but hopefully she’ll get it figured out soon!

 

Have a great week!