Mommy.... It's my favorite name

I often tell the kids in a joking way to “stop growing up” or after they do something that is helpful or have good behavior I’ll say, “how did you get so grown up?” they usually just laugh and love the praise and acknowledgement, not really saying anything in return. It is no secret that Jimmy talks A LOT! (I mean he NEVER stops) Sometimes in the mists of dinner, bath, bedtime, homework, the dog, grocery shopping, trying to talk to the hubs, it can get frustrating to never have a moment of silence when that little dude is around. He often moves down on his discipline chart at school for that very reason. When I pick him up from school to ask what color he ended on and his eyes drop. “I was talking to much again.” It’s frustrating and slightly amusing, but I worry about him going to Kindergarten. He is SO much different than his big brother, and I hate when people compare the two, Jake is stereotypical first child (not that that also doesn’t have its downfalls) and aims to ...

I started this blog as a way for the boys to read stories about themselves when they got older, stories that I would inevitable forget, because life is busy and sometimes the day-to-day stories can get lost. I have not written in a while and I hope to do a little better this year. March 11, 2016 My boys are ALL boy so much of the time.... that is it utterly exhausting. (If you are not sure what "ALL Boy" translates too, please come over and babysit my children for me J .) While they love each other fiercely they are also each other’s biggest competition. Everyday someone is faster, stronger, taller, eating breakfast faster, putting on shoes sooner, getting dressed by themselves better, playing star wars better, better batter/catcher/runner, made more baskets/rebounds/points, …. The list goes on! The “friendly competition” at any time during the day can turn from friendly to ‘death-match’ in about .2 seconds. And as crazy as it sounds ends almost as quickly as it star...

After having kids I rarely use the words, peaceful, blissful, or perfect to describe my house….before kids I would have.  Before the boys we had a coffee table that actually had items on it.  Soon after kids came all those items were quickly removed to protect their value and my sanity from keeping them out of their little hands.  My husband and I would come home from work to make whatever WE wanted or “make it easy” and go out to eat for dinner.  After children the 5 out of 7 nights of the week there is at least one of us that is not happy with the dinner option….(yes sometimes that is even me…… I don’t want to have spaghetti again tonight!) It almost makes me laugh out loud as I type this how “easy” it used to be to ‘go out for a quick bite.’ Even if it is just Jared and me, we have to have ‘systems in place’ to even go out. And if we bring the boys, there is nothing ‘easy’ about that dinner. Usually bribery is involved, bribing them to sit still and eat...

Is it time for a drink? Oh wait; it is not even 8:00am yet. This was my thought today after getting both my boys and then myself ready for the day. I always wonder as I am going through mornings of complete chaos if other moms out there are doing something similar or if I am the only one who has kids that make me run from one end of the house to the other like a crazy person. Some of these crazy mornings wouldn't be AS crazy if I could leisurely get up from a great eight-to-ten hours of uninterrupted sleep.  But that is NEVER the case, I hit sleep one to many times mainly because sometime in the middle of the night my four year old got scared of the monster that comes into his room at night from under his bed and has crawled into MY bed to sleep with us/lay on top of me. (I am so used to it now that I am hardly fazed by sleeping with another human lying on top of me.) His little brother however has slept in his bed all night by himself and decided to get up at 5:15am. Thankf...

Event-filled weekends always sound like a fun time but when I factor in that I have a two year old and an almost-four year old situations can go bad just as quickly as they started.  We planned a busy weekend in St. Louis and had many different attractions to go see, but after being off our “normal” schedule for almost 24-hours the boys started to hit a little bit of a wall. Our Saturday brunch went well, and we were going to go back to my sisters to take a nap, well…this didn’t happen.  No naps after a VERY busy night/day proves to be the start of a downward spiral for my little munchkins. The rambunctious-ness started that only happens when they are so tired that they are looking for things to do or ‘get-into’ to keep themselves awake. This usually isn’t ‘good’ things and when corrected they are so over-tired that a small “NO-NO Jimmy!” or “Jacob, I already told you once!” turns into a stage five hurricane sized tantrum. So instead of staying and resuming fun...