Happy Belated Birthday Alex!

So since Alex was sick for her birthday and the entire weekend after we had to postpone any form of a party until Tuesday afternoon. Andy was still off from work so we took advantage of it and went to the playground and had a blast! I'm a little post happy with the pictures and i haven't figured out yet how to label them. I can't believe Alex goes down the biggest slide all by herself! I get up there and feel a little woozy from the height of it! The kids and Andy love to scare me I've decided! They like to see my reaction?!?! It's madness! Some of the pictures I'm posting are while Alex was still sick. She put her present from Auntie Lisa (the earrings, necklace etc...) on on one of the days she was sick and she loved it but then she got feeling miserable again so then Daddy tried to make her feel better by wearing it! Oh so cute! As you can see Eric loves her presents too! He was the one to watch her Barbie movie this morning! If he wasn't such a boy I would be worried! He just likes to be silly! It's a good thing we finally celebrated her birthday yesterday because Eric woke up bright and early this morning throwing up. And when i say bright and early I mean the sun is barely coming up and the birds are out chirping. I am usually awake at this time most mornings due to a baby pushing on my bladder. And I love listening to the birds but this morning I wanted to take them all out. Maybe its from a long weekend and very early mornings full of vomit and misery?? I was just so tired and between Eric throwing up and the stupid birds all chirping like they don't have a care in the world I was really grumpy. And being the good wife that I am I sent Andy to the couch...Mostly it was selfish on my part...I didn't want to clean up anything from him if he saw what Eric did. Plus I guess he had to work this morning so he got to sleep. I really hoped we got rid of this stuff but the doctor did tell us its very contagious and would go through our household so I guess I was warned. Hopefully Eric is feeling better very soon and that me and Andy don't get it. YUCK! Apparently we aren't the only ones with it though. Two of my sisters have it as we speak. I haven't seen Mandy in who knows how long so we didn't get if from or give it to her and Lisa lives in Idaho so... its EVERYWHERE. So DON'T LEAVE YOUR HOUSES IF YOU DON'T WANT IT!!

Anyway...I'm glad we got to finally have a small celebration for Alex. I can't believe she is TWO already. She is so beautiful and sweet and we love her to pieces!! Happy Belated Birthday Sweetie!!

Vacation

We decided since Andy is done with school to take a little vacation with Danny and Andrea. Andy took last Thursday and Friday off, had the weekend and Monday (Memorial Day) off and then also took Tuesday. So we had a nice long time to be together and do some fun things. Alex's birthday was last Thursday (first day of vacation) so we decided we'd go to Duluth and go to the zoo and stay at a water park hotel. Sounds like fun, right? She had had a fever since Sunday night and we figured by vacation time it would be gone. And it would go away...but then it kept coming back. She was fine all day Thursday and lets just say we had a good time together at the zoo. The Duluth zoo is "oh so exciting"...you know...with all the animals that WEREN'T there!! All the cages said they were there but we must have been blind because a lot of the cages looked pretty empty to us!! But it was fun spending time together and the weather was nice so we enjoyed that part of it! Then we were off to dinner and check in at the hotel. Right away we got ready and went to the water park. What a BLAST! Eric LOVED the big water slide...I don't even know how many times him and uncle Danny went down it. Just a couple of months ago at Danny's wedding it was so hard to get him to go in the pool...now we couldn't get him to leave! He loved everything about it and had so much fun! Alex didn't have as much fun. She started burning up again and would just moan and whine as we tried floating down the lazy river with her. She did that the whole time and so we ended up not celebrating her 2nd Birthday with cake and whatnot. She never threw up or anything...just a fever. We ended up taking her to the doctor Saturday morning...we figured a week of fever is just weird...not to mention Sat. early morning she started throwing up. The pediatrician that saw her said she possibly had two things...the fever could have been Fifth Disease?? She said they'd been hit pretty hard with that lately. And she did have the "slapped face" symptom of it earlier in the week. Then the second thing was "summer flu" which was the vomiting and diarrhea. I can deal with fever...but this last stuff was not fun. She did that the rest of the weekend and was FINALLY feeling better Monday. We adults took full advantage of it since it kind of tied us down all weekend. We had my sister and her boyfriend come up and watch the kids. (SO grateful to them!!) We went and had root beer floats at A&W, walked around Home Depot, went to the AWESOME movie What Happens in Vegas, then went to dinner at Forest Lake. We ate $83.00 worth of pork, steaks, shrimp and crab legs! (Thanks to Andy doing favors for the Bank and them in return giving him gift certificates to somewhere we don't dare bring the kids to so they added up quite nicely!) YUM!! We had so much fun!

Sadly, Tuesday morning Danny and Andrea said goodbye and went home. I think the kids thought they moved in and were gonna live with us forever! We all had so much fun together. I really enjoyed our girls night Friday night which consisted of just me and Andrea going to the movie Maid of Honor. No kids to fight with and someone close to my own age to visit with!! So we didn't love the movie so much but we had fun being out of the house and away from the craziness of kids and fevers and whatnot! Saturday night the boys had their boys night and went to see the new Indiana Jones movie. They didn't love their movie either (Eric slept through most of it!) but when they got home we had fun grilling and enjoyed a wonderful meal of shishkabobs (Sp?) and corn on the cob! So even though Alex was sick most of the time we still had so much fun together!!

This post is long so I'll post later about the party we finally had for Alex's birthday! I'll also try to get some pictures posted. I was too busy at the water park to get any pictures taken of the fun everyone had there but I have some Zoo pictures I'll try to post.

Work in progress...

As you can probably tell we are very new to this blog stuff. Hopefully it'll get easier to figure out and we'll get more creative and have our blog looking better! We don't have many recent pictures of our family as we keep forgetting to buy batteries for the camera. We'll get some new pictures posted soon but for now i'm going to try to post the most recent ones we have! The kids are constantly changing and there is so much we'd love to share with everyone!

Eric loves being outside at every chance he gets. He loves riding his bike!! He gets going really fast down this small slope in the sidewalk and then takes his feet off the pedals!! SO brave!! His new interest in bugs is a little disturbing...he definately doesnt get it from his Mommy. He now holds a variety of bugs in his hand and begs to get the spiders when mommy is freaking out at the discovery of them in the house. I guess it would be nice for me so i dont have to do it but his aim isnt very good yet and they usually get away which leaves me feeling all creepy and crawly. I can't believe how big he is getting!!

Alex also loves being outside and loves going buh-bye. It doesnt matter to where...apparently anywhere is better than here at home! We'll be driving home and turn onto the street we live on and she starts yelling and crying and begging to go "buh-bye". Its crazy how she knows when we are almost home. And its really sad that she doesnt want to be here! Maybe its from being cooped up all winter??? She is really starting to love wearing dresses and you can tell she feels very pretty in them. How, you might wonder? Maybe its the twirling or the swaying her hips from side to side to make her dress sway back and forth? Or maybe its the big eyes staring up at us begging us to tell her how pretty she looks?!?! In her defense though, she really does look beautiful in them! The only problem with a 2 year old in a dress is that she hasnt quite gotten the "acting like a lady" while wearing them. We discovered this last sunday as Brother Cook was saying 'Bye' to her and she lifted her entire dress over her head. She wasnt wearing any tights or anything other than her diaper. Guess its not so bad while she's only 2 but still... :)

Anyway...Guess i'll quit bragging about my family and try to get pics. posted before I head off to bed!

This HANDSOME Man...

...is ALL DONE WITH SCHOOL!! Andy has gotten all A's this semester which means he will be graduating with HIGHEST HONORS!! He is amazing and I am so lucky to say HE is MY husband!! He has worked very hard for this and I am so proud of him!! It feels like our life is really taking off now! We have all this time to actually be together and the last two days have been amazing! I am so grateful for Andy and am really really grateful that we are now past the school stuff and moving on to TOGETHERNESS!! :)