Blogging exile!

I'm back!  WOOT!  I've been attempting to blog for the past month but I could NOT get my blogger dashboard to load and today it loaded!  YAY!

So much has happened in our little world in the last month.  I know we had at least one more muffin tin meal I didn't get to post about - I'll put it up on Monday.  And Easter happened.  Lots of cuteness there.  I'll put some pics of that in this post.

And now that I am finally able to access this I can't think of a darn thing to post about.

I suppose I could post about the toddler stage of life.  Hello, my name is Samantha and I am the mom of a toddler.  I have been the mom of a toddler pretty much non stop for the past 5yrs.  One might think that I would be pretty numb to the toddler stage by now but I am not.  The toddler stage includes some total cuteness and some seriously challenging moments.

For example - adorable toddler is doing something so completely naughty but they have that toddler eye twinkle and tiny toddler grin.  The cuteness of this moment is obvious but the challenge is NOT laughing at the cuteness.  I have at least one of these moments EVERY day with Princess.  (We do not really call her princess in real life, we call her Sis mostly.  Sissy, Sierra, and Colton's favorite nickname which is oddly starting to catch on - Sierry, but I never call her princess anymore.)  Oh and I do still call her baby girl.  Of course that is beside the point.

Ten things I wouldn't trade about my toddler:

1 - watching her explore her world and discover new things about it.
2 - watching her learn independence even though it can be super maddening if we're in a time crunch and she insists upon putting on her OWN clothes or socks and shoes (she does the socks pretty well actually).

she was certain she could put her own dress back on after lunch. lol

3 - watching her love her brothers.  She wakes up from a nap and runs straight to hug a brother it's totally adorable.
4 - her wanting to be included in what we do.  Again it has it's maddening moments but it's also kinda sweet that she wants to do "school" when her brothers do.
5 - reading with her.  She loves the touchy feely books esp and lift the flap books are also a big hit with her (if I can keep her from ripping off all the flaps of course - see challenge!).
6 - tickle time.  she tickles her own belly and that right there is totally priceless
7 - Snuggle time - sometimes I am so touched out I could live the rest of my life without another human being grabbing at me, but her snuggles are still just so wonderful.  Laying with her head on my shoulder, sucking her fingers, and snuggling.  Thank goodness she's a small child.
8 - her communication - someday she's going to speak clearly and in full sentences, but for now the few words she does say, and most importantly grabbing me by the hand, dragging me where she wants me, and pointing at what she wants does the trick.  And it's so darn cute.  This morning I got up to get myself breakfast but she clearly wanted me to follow her, so I did.  Into the bathroom.  Where she climbed into the empty bath tub and waited for me to turn on the bath.  Seriously?  Words could not have made that any more clear. Needless to say my baby girl is freshly bathed.
9 - her helpfulness - she loves to help me clean.  She loves to help with laundry and sweeping and emptying the dishwasher.  She does the work of three brothers. hehehe
10 - The toddler stage ends!  It does, I see in my boys that they are past the toddler stage.  And while I'm enjoying the toddler stage, I won't lie, I'm happy that it doesn't last forever.  There IS too much of a good thing.

And now without further ado here are some pics from Easter:

Toddler Tude!

My beautiful children.

my beautiful children and handsome husband.

And one more of my baby girl:

So if you have a toddler make sure to give them extra snuggles today because toddler hood feels like it will never end but it WILL end.  It really will.  Don't ask me what comes next because I hate to burst hopeful bubbles.

A long hiatus

I might have mentioned before but it can't hurt to say it again, life with four monkeys is totally busy.  Time just completely gets away from me.  And before I know it I've lost three weeks in the blogging world.

That definitely doesn't mean that life has stopped.  Life has gone on.  The kids have gotten even bigger.  Sierra has learned some new words and other skills.  I've concluded that we'll be creating our own around the world adventure for the next year and a half for our social studies portion of school.  I've worked on getting the house cleaned back up.  Again.  And again.  And once more now.  Forever and ever. 

And I've decided to limit my computer time for the next month or two.  That does NOT mean that I'm ignoring the blog though and I promise to have new posts up soon.  It does mean that I'm spending more time WITH my children and with the housekeeping stuff I struggle with.  It's all good.  I think in the end it's going to be a huge blessing to me and the kids and our family as a whole.

Once I replace my now non-working camera I will do muffin tin Mondays again.  I tried to snap pics of our muffin tins last week but that's when I discovered the camera was completely dead.  Gone.  Needs to be buried.  Bummer.  In the meantime it's March which is national reading month - so go curl up with your babies and some great books and spend some time reading together!

Family Saturday

Oh what a great day.  We started off the day by getting the kids ready for a "surprise".  The surprise involved something cold and required several layers to be warm throughout.  So we spent probably 20 solid minutes getting the kids in jackets, coats, hats, and mittens.  They were fairly cooperative this morning though, which isn't always the case, but was sure a blessing that started our morning off right.  Then we set off with a few blankets in hand for a ride on the "Polar Express".  Now our children are huge train lovers.  We live two blocks south of the train depot and you can see one of the main tracks from the corner nearest our house and the boys have spent a lot of time in warmer weather sitting at the corner watching the train move back and forth.  This particular train is just for paying passenger rides - like a tour type thing.  I looked into it when we first moved back here to my home town and with four children it's just cost prohibitive for us.  So when I heard that our local library was doing a Polar Express program ON the train this month I called up the library asap and got on the waiting list.  In the end we were blessed that we were able to get on.  So we walked to the tracks because with four kiddos walking was probably about equal in time to loading up the kids, driving there, parking, unloading the kids etc.  And frankly it was a lot simpler to walk out the front door and direct the kids to keep walking.

So we headed off the two blocks to the train.  At this point the boys were starting to realize where we might be going.

Once there we got our tickets and hopped on the train.

There were two coaches and one coach got to hear the story "The Polar Express" on the way to the "North Pole" and then we swapped coaches while those kids met Santa and we got to hear the story.  They had a giant screen tv that displayed the pictures from the book and a man dressed as the conductor read the book.  It was very cool.  Then we got to go to the north pole and meat Santa too.

Now I took pics of all the kids but my flash only works properly when it feels like it and it didn't feel like it for the first two kids.  I feel badly about it but that's life.  So Santa gave each of the children a bell like in the book and a little hot cocoa packet with a candy cane.  Very cute.

After this we boarded the train and headed back to the station.  We took the kids to McDonalds where a whole group of our friends (who also were on the train) were meeting up for lunch and play.  I didn't take any pictures of that.

We all relaxed during nap time and then late in the afternoon we worked on a project I'll post about tomorrow.  Then we decided to have our cocoa from Santa and watch Rudolph.  We have it on DVD so we just watch it whenever it suits us during this season.  Love that movie.  Love the line about getting the women folk back to Christmas Town. It cracks me up every stinking time.

Sawyer loved the singing snowman and especially appreciated when he pulled out his ukelele.  Sawyer grabbed up his own "guitar" and played along.

A few more pics of the kids enjoying the movie together (and ignore the mess it's a lived in house on a Saturday, what can I say?  The living room was spotless and vacuumed at one point yesterday.)  

Sierra was intentionally hiding from the camera.  It was super cute.

She was happy to give me a "cheese" though when I asked her to.

Colton was too engrossed watching to eat much of his make shift dinner.

It always amazes me how much kids move around during movies and yet still seem to enjoy them.

Except Kayd.  He seems to have the sitting still thing down at the ripe old age of 6.

And that was our fantastic family day.  It was such a blessing to make these memories with the kids.  Truly.  Next weekend we have more fun family memories to be made in store too!