Expanding the Family

On Saturday June 8th the Wilkes family grew by one, Rachel Wilkes and Jeff Marek are officially married and happily enjoying a two week honeymoon in Costa Rica.  Rachel gave me the honor of being her Matron of Honor and challenged me to make the flower girl dresses.  I have to admit that I am very impressed with how well they turned out seeing as I still consider myself a fairly novice knitter and I had to write my own pattern!  My three girls, as well as Jeff's niece, all looked too cute for words in their dresses. 

You never know how little ones are going to do for their first debut as a flower girl, but Rachel lucked out and all three flower girls did a fantastic job.  They all walked down the isle holding their signs that read "Here Comes The Bride," they all did their fair share of standing and looking adorable as well as jumping around a little, giving a little spin on the alter and other adorable 'must have' little children distractions during the ceremony. 

Friday Phone Dump

I am laughing at the title of this post because when I first used this title I pictured it being the first of many Friday blogs with the same title and an array of weekly photos, but sadly that has not materialized.  I don't like to be behind or missing any pieces, yet I have decided that I must move forward.  Working on the premise that I have to go back and blog about all the fantastic happenings I failed to blog about before moving forward is not working, so excuse the giant gap in time (and to Blythe, Jericho, or Amelie, who may read this year and years from now, don't worry your memory books are gap-less). 

Without further ado here is our latest happenings told via pictures because, you know, pictures are worth 1k words!

A common question I get is, "How's the Kitchen Project Going?"  I'll let the pictures tell that story..









How on earth did we get such cute children?  Even when they are a little naughty and get into eye liner, they're still adorable. 


[we may have put our child to sleep in the middle of the table at a semi-fancy function and an older lady may have walked by and said "In our generation we wouldn't have been caught dead doing that."]















You know that list of things in your head that you think would be fun and you have great intentions of materializing on those ideas??  We finally remembered on the first Saturday of the month to send Jason and the older girls to make the free craft at Home Depot and this will certainly be repeated, everyone had a great time!



Blythe, the Artist.





Rodeo Day At Blythe's School - themed days, parties, field trips, I think Jericho looks forward to them more than Blythe because that means we all get to go to school with Blythe and Jericho loves to pretend to be one of the big kids!










Last week we wisked away on an un-expected trip to DFW where Amelie and I successfully found wedding dresses for Rachel and Jalyn!  Sorry no sneak peeks here just pictures of the girls with Tia post dress shopping!







Valentines day....





Oh. My. This one, I just can't get over ALL THAT HAIR and those eyes, those beautiful blue eyes.  She's growing, and we just love her smiles :)







And a little something for me, which I rarely do, but you know it's not everyday your sister in law get's married so when she's getting married and you happen to find a super cute pair of boots that would go GREAT with the bridesmaid dress at the receptions, you splurge and you purchase yourself those boots!  Said boots arrived TODAY :)

The perks of do-it-yourself home remodel

Jason and the older girls headed out to Home Depot to participate in the Free Kids Workshop to build a valentines box and Amelie and I went for a run.  Jason and the girls returned with two cute wooden valentine boxes and a wet saw rented to saw the concrete before the jack hammering begins.

Jason un-hooks the plumbing, we moved the few remaining cabinets out of the kitchen space, I fetched the garden hose and Jason preps the saw.  At first Jason tries to drape a tarp over himself while sawing to see if he can contain some of the debri [insert video that I planned to take, but instead had to be the tarp mover]so he is under a large tarp while I am supposed to pull it forward because you know this sawing action through the cement is going to go really fast so I need to pull the tarp for him.

Amelie is laying on the couch, Blythe is playing in the cardboard house, and Jericho is sleeping.  The hose is turned on, the saw is powered up, and he cuts for about 2 minutes, all the time I am thinking this is REALLY REALLY loud and if I thought there was any way he could hear me I would tell him to stop so I could get some ear plugs and re-arrange the children.  Luckily he stops pretty quickly, I relocate Amelie to the bouncy seat outside and put big sister Blythe on baby duty.  It only took 2 minutes for Jason to decide that tarp wasn't containing anything and that my services would be better spent manning the shop vac to suck up the enormous amounts of water that are spraying every which way and essentially flooding the kitchen.

Round 2, no more tarp, Jason and I both have on safety goggles and ear plugs, and the awake children are outside.  We get a good 8 minutes in and all the sudden the shop vac has gone to sleep, I hold it up against my hand to see if suction is still happening, nope, and the water is getting out of hand, I finally make a large enough motion for Jason to recoginize and he turns the saw off.  Good news, its no big deal the shop vac is just full so we need to dump it and we can keep going.  We dump the shop vac and try again, but still no dice, it appears that the filter is getting bogged down, so we ditch the filter and run it without the filter, problem now is that the water shoots out the intake side of the shop vac.  We still aren't deterred, I decide I can just hold a towel over the intake hole and it can blow water into the towel.

Round 3, Jason is manning the water saw, I am manning the shop vac while holding the towel, we are going strong for a good 10 minutes and then the smoke detector goes off (did I mention it is gas powered?).  So I stop and run go open a few more windows and doors, and start again.

Round 4, at this point we are more than half-way done and Amelie and Blythe seems to be content soaking up vitamin D.  We get about 3/4 of the way done, I am sucking up water like a mad man, Jason is sawing away and then, it was just like the movies, just like Hollywood, W.A.T.E.R shoots up to the ceiling and I shout, "You forgot to turn the water off??"  Jason turns off the saw, I am desperately trying to suck up the water, Jason has his foot over the sawed water pipe and I yelled, "Where's the water turn off?"  Jason has me put my feet over the water spout and he hauls ass to the water off.  On his way he manages to do a classic cartoon face plant.  He is sprinting like his life depends on it, see's a large cardboard box and mis-judges, clips it with his foot and face plants on the sidewalk....but that doesn't stop him he continues on-ward to the water off.  I am standing over the water leak, but there is still plenty escaping, adrenaline pumping, wondering how long this water is going to keep pouring into our kitchen and whether or not we can claim it as a flood.  I have to admit that I was also thinking, darn it, I even did my hair today and now I am DRENCHED!  Jason gets back into the house and we just look at each other and laugh.  We have ourselves about 20 seconds of laughter and then turned the shop vac back on to start the water clean-up.  Jason reminded me that he couldn't turn the water off because we needed the water hose to operate the wet saw, oh.yeah.didn't think about that, just remembered us discussing turning off the water when he was jack hammering in-case he hit a pipe.

Jason says "Well I guess we have committed to the plumbing, I'll jack up the concrete and then we can call a plumber on Monday."

It's a good thing we hosted our dinner party with 8 adults and 9 children last night.  If we can pull that off with no kitchen, imagine what we can do once this project is done!

"What are you doing with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver

Catching up...A little

Wow, I am behind on blogging.  I have been spending most nap times since the arrival of little A working on my Creighton Practitioner clients and paperwork.  Just today I had time to sit down and work through some pictures and do a few memory book pages...yes they go back to the night before Amelie's arrival and then I only made it to 3 weeks (Thanksgiving), but hey its progress.

Life with 3 has been a really easy transition for all of us.  The girls adore her and love to hold her and kiss her and get chased off by me when they try to love on her while she's sleeping.  Blythe is very helpful running to get a burp rag, a diaper, a wipe, some water, etc.  Jericho is the entertainer, keeping me entertaining during nursing and entertaining Amelie too.  She has jumped feet first into the big sister role and is doing a great job.

Blythe was recently moved up to Pre-Team in gymnastics so now we are re-arranging our schedule a bit to accommodate her new class, which also means going to the gym two times a week since Blythe and Jericho are no longer in the same class.  She continues to thrive at PreSchool and loves it.  The awesome free ballet program has ended and she is missing the Ballet.  She asked me today "When is Ballet starting again?"  The local studio around the corner is booked till next Fall so it's going to be a little while before this ballet loving girl gets to start that again, but I am sure she will get by on her freestyle.  She is SO not like me.  I will be scrolling through the radio and skip by a classical station and Blythe will stop me and say "can we listen to the pretty music?"  I do my best to refrain from making a face, but really Blythe, classical??  I guess it's the ballerina in her.

Jericho is just plain funny.  Between the funny faces she makes and the expressions and the things she says, it's like living in a comedy show every day.  She loves to help out in the kitchen and has taken to crafting like big sister.  She can attack a piece of paper with stickers in seconds and sometimes she hasn't been able to contain her naughty side and the stickers have been found on items other than paper, but hey she's 2..right, oh wait NO she's now 2.5, how did that happen?

Amelie is a great baby just rolls with the punches, but what choice does she have with 2 big sisters with a demanding social calendar.  She is ooh'd and ahh'd over everywhere we go and gets daily comments that usually go something like "WOW..look at all the hair,"  I proudly smile, like I had anything to do with it, but hey I'll take credit.

As for me, I couldn't be happier.  I find myself in awe that I have this life of being a Mommy and a Wife.  I notice it the most when we are sitting together at Mass and I see other people giving smiles and glances and looking at their spouse either in remembrance of the days when they had little ones or the days they see in their future.  I mainly identify with those wishful eyes as it feels like just yesterday that Jason and I were sitting in the pews at St. Mary's smiling at little babies and dreaming of the day when we would have some of our own.  We all get up for communion and I can't help but smile as Blythe leads the way with her hands crossed over her heart, then little Jericho following behind her doing just as she does...pure cuteness and amazement of the little people we have created.  Just this Sunday two different people came up to me and said "You are a great mom, what great kids," and "Wow, your kids are like angels at church."

You would think that by the 3rd kiddo I would be an expert diaper bag packer.  Perhaps I am, but I guess that means I would actually have to pack the diaper bag and not just grab it as I run by it on the way out (or run back in for it).  I don't know if it was the 10 months between having a kid in diapers or just Mommy brain, but in 2 months I have manged to have 2 quite humorous diaper tales.  The first one goes back to when Amelie was 2 weeks old and we went to the San Antonio Zoo.  Amelie had been happily snoozing away, or so I thought, for several hours and it was lunch time so also a good time to nurse Amelie.  I pull her out of the stroller to find poop EVERYWHERE.  All up her back, etc.  I had her in a disposable diaper, using up the last of what we had before transitioning into cloth diapers, and I was quickly reminded on why I do NOT like disposable diapers.  The only blow-outs I have had have been in disposable diapers.  Anyways so here she is exploded.  I put down the diaper pad to change her on the picnic table in 40 degree weather.  I didn't think about the fact that it was freezing and I was going to have to strip her down to nothing.  So here is a 2 week old baby screaming bloody murder flailing her arms everywhere, now scattering the poop from the lower half of her body to the upper half of her body...  To top it off I of course remembered to throw in that oh so important extra change of clothes when I first packed the diaper bag 2 weeks ago when it was still in the 80's.  So all I had was a onesie.  But I got her cleaned up in the 40 degree weather, no hot water in the bathrooms so that wouldn't have done me any good, and put into a onesie and wrapped back into the (mostly) clean blanket.  The second awesome diapering happening was just this past Saturday when we went to a birthday party.  Little Amelie decided to poop (thankfully all contained since we were in cloth diapers), and unprepared Mommy failed to put in an extra cover.  So I did what I could, I wrapped the cloth around her, hoped the onesie would keep it somewhat in place and hoped she didn't exceed the cloth diaper within the one hour we had left. 

We are loving life as a party of 5!