4th of July in Michigan

Our fourth of July celebrations lasted not just one day, but the entire week! And what a wonderful week it was. We braved a long 12 errr wait make that 15 hour, with stops...road trip with three kids to spend the week up in Michigan. It was hard to even remember the last time we've visited Michigan in the summer time. We played hard, enjoyed the beautiful weather and long days and loved spending time with family.

Here's just some of the highlights of the week!

Camping in the backyard with cousins!We set up a few tents in Grandma & Grandpa's backyard. Andrew was so excited for his campout with daddy!!

Water day! We spent an afternoon playing in the water! We blew up a ton of water balloons and planned to play a few different games, but the little kids (Andrew included) had so much fun throwing them that by the time we got the games organized there wasn't much left. But they all had a ball and the neighbor boys came and joined the fun! Then we turned the sprinklers on and let them run and scream to their hearts content.

We were able to meet our cute new nephew Jaxon, who was just a few weeks old.

Grandma & Grandpa have a fire pit out back where we cooked tinfoil dinners and made smores! Mmmmm nothing beats dinner & dessert being cooked over the fire! Andrew LOVED the 'woods out back' and spent hours walking the different paths. He has asked everyone since we've been home if they have 'woods out back' like Gma & Gpa Holden! 

We always love to make a trip or two to the Chippewa Nature Center

One morning the grandkids and Stephen set up a trap for a little chipmunk out in Grandma's backyard. Funny thing is only after a few tries, they caught it!

Picnics and parks! With the awesome not to hot, not to humid weather in Michigan, we hit up a few parks and had lots of picnics outside. One day we stumbled upon a free lunch for the kids! They loved it!

I'm sure grateful that my sister in-law Meghan goes along with some of my crazy ideas with just as much enthusiasm as me. We were trying to think of some fun activities for the kids and got the idea to tie dye shirts red, white and blue for the celebrations on the 4th. Well, it was kind of a last minute idea and after doing our research on pinterest, we thought we had it all figured out. It was kind of crazy and all the dye kept getting clogged in the bottles and became a huge mess. It ended up being more of an adult activity rather than one for the kids....

But here's proof that they did turn out to be red, white and blue!

Except everywhere we read, said that you needed to wash them in a quick wash with a little detergent....here's where it all went wrong. The blue turned purple and the red and white turned all shades of pink.... Oh well...it was still a lot of fun!!

One of the days, we all got babysitters for the kids and the grown-ups went on a little kayaking adventure down the Chippewa River! We've done it a few times with the Holden's.

It's a fun, easy-going river. No rapids, just a slow current that takes you down. It's pretty relaxing and it's beautiful scenery!  We usually stop and look for (and even catch) a few turtles along the way. Well, a few of us...me included decided to bring our phones inside the Kayaks for picture taking purposes. And, a few of us for some reason got dumped....me included.  As I stood up soaking wet, I saw my phone start to float away and my heart sunk. Stephen held the record for getting flipped the most times out of his kayak...3 or maybe 4 times. But he was smart and did not bring his phone. We still had a great time and all had some pretty good laughs. It was a wonderful day and so nice to get a little break from the kiddos, despite the loss of my iphone.

We are kid-free!!!

Trying to dump the water out of his kayak

Cute Meghan taking a picture of the gang stopped for a snack!

Soaked from head to toe!

Turtle catching adventures! This one was a big one!

Just a sidenote...my phone miraculously survived the wet adventure. We put it in a bag of rice and after about 4 days. We charged it up and it turned on!!! It has worked ever since...Thank goodness! The bag of rice trick works!!

Go big or Go home about sums up our firework show. Let's just say we had a small firework show almost every night we were there. Between Stephen, his two brothers and his brother-in law and the fact that there are no restrictions with the types of fireworks in Michigan, there were plenty of fireworks to last weeks and weeks. We put on quite a show for the neighborhood. It was fun. But really all Andrew needed was a few sparklers and some glow sticks and maybe some pop-it's and he was a happy camper!

Doing Sparklers with Daddy

 Watching fireworks with Aunt Meghan

Cousin Conner helping Andrew catch a parachute 

Throwing Pop-it's with Grandma!

We had a blast and of course had to get a few pictures of all of us in our RED, WHITE & BLUE!!

Grandma & Grandpa with all the grandkids! 

 Getting Andrew to sit still is almost next to impossible these days!

Olivia & Kathryn's First 4th of July

 Olivia

Kathryn

This is about the best we could get of our family! 

Happy Fourth of July!

Nine months Old

I guess it's about time for another update on these sweet girls since they turned 9 months last week!

The last three months have flown by. Sometimes I still look down and can't believe that I have two babies! And I really cannot believe it's been 9 months since they joined our family.

Olivia June

These girls are becoming so much fun! I think with every phase I say to myself..."This is the best baby phase ever" ...then they grow and learn new things and I say it again. I  truly love seeing their little personalities shine, and seeing them grow and explore new things.

Kathryn Mary

It seemed like it took forever for these two girls to roll over. Olivia was first at 6 months old and once she started she just kept going. We nicknamed her rolly-polly-Ollie. She was all over the place and was crawling by 7 months.
Kathryn was sitting up by herself well before she rolled over at 7 months old. But don't worry, it only took two weeks of rolling over before Kathryn figured out that if she's gonna keep up with Olivia she's gotta start crawling too. I felt like the crawling phase came way sooner than I expected.

These girls are all over the place!

Mealtime with these two is always an adventure! We are now doing three meals a day with these girls and they are slowly getting use to their sippy cups. Olivia LOVES the sippy cup and is getting pretty good at it. Kathryn is much more interested in the food. They both are really pretty good eaters and devour most everything I put in front of them. It's been fun to have them try new table foods. They love a handful of things, avocado, bananas, peaches, green beans, peas, black beans, watermelon are just a few. I like this phase in that they will eat and eat until they are full, no pickiness yet.... that's for when they are toddlers. But we've started into the self-feeding phase and that brings a whole new messiness, times two.

 We finally have room for high chairs at the new house! I love how little they look in them...plus notice the stack of baby food containers. 

Okay so a few of those were half full, but still these girls go through A LOT of baby food. I try to now make most of it myself. So grateful they'll eat the homemade stuff too, Andrew never would. 

These girls are crawling all over the place...both are still doing the army crawling thing, but don't let that fool you. They can get where they want to go pretty fast. Especially Olivia, she is never in the same spot for more then a minute. She is all over the house. Usually I can find her chasing down and following Andrew or she will come and find me and be right underneath my feet. She's the one who's always getting into everything and showing me exactly where I haven't baby proofed yet. Like the other day when she got into our fireplace and was eating the tiny rocks in there. YES....I was so scared. It only took her a minute to figure that one out, while I was changing Kathryn's diaper upstairs. I came down to find her head stuck between the fireplace screen and she had black up to her elbows on both arms and all around her squirrel-like mouth bulging with little rocks.

"Look Mommy I'm sharing my snacks" 

The hardest part about baby proofing is teaching Andrew what they can and cannot have....he's starting to learn...I think, but it's been tough.

Vacuuming has become a fun chore...Olivia chases me down and Kathryn follows me around and tries to grab the cord and eat it the entire time.  

Most of the time, Kathryn is happy and content to just sit and play with whatever toys are around her. Long after the other two kiddos have left the room. If she gets board, she'll crawl over and find more.

The last few weeks these girls have started pulling themselves up to everything they can see. Mostly they can get up to their knees, but we've had to drop their beds because we've caught Kathryn standing up few times on the monitor. I'm certainly not ready for this...

or this...

or this...

We've tried to baby proof as much as we can, but it's been pretty difficult as we're still getting a few things put away, organized and things hung up on walls from the move. I guess I gotta work faster. Since we've put our gate up at the top of the stair, Andrew has now named it the "Zoo Gate" It's the only way we can go in and out of our "cage". Because apparently...we live in a "Zoo"

"Mommy can you please unlock the gate and

 let me into the zoo? I want 

to play with the grills! " 

~Andrew

We've entered the teethinpg phase! Always a favorite...although you'd never know it with Kathryn. She has one sharp little tooth on the bottom. But she's hardly shown any signs of teething. Just like her sweet personality she has been calm and content with teething. She'll sometimes cry a bit at night and loves to chew on everything, but that's pretty much it. I'm hoping Olivia's first tooth breaks through pretty soon, she's been super cranky and clingy this week with awful diaper rash and a runny nose that won't go away after almost 2 weeks. I'm hoping this is all teething. I was kind of dreading this baby phase with twins. But with as easy as Kathryn's been, teething with twins has so far been better then I was imagining. Let's keep our fingers crossed it stays that way.

These little girls both love to talk. It's adorable and their little baby talk melts my heart. They will talk to just about anyone who will listen and talk back. I love all the dadada, mamama, bababa and all the voice inflections they do. Sometimes they will carry on a conversation between themselves and it's pretty darn cute! And I think they are starting to understand a few words too, like Daddy, Andrew, kisses, no, night-night, and ba-ba (bottle).

The last three months we've done some new firsts.  

Swimming. Our new house has a community pool just down the street so we've tried to spend a lot of time there this summer. It takes them a while to warm up a bit to the water, but by the end they are splashing and playing!

Ready to go!

We went swimming for Stephen's birthday! So fun!

Grass. We had to take advantage of the beautiful weather in Michigan when we were visiting for the 4th of July and the nice soft grass. We have thick, pokey, not fun to walk in barefoot Southern grass at our house. Kathryn was all about the grass. After a little investigation, she went full force off the blanket. Olivia was pretty cautious too. She wasn't such a fan of the green blades and stayed right on the blanket.

Grocery Shopping. I threw in the towel and took all three kiddos to the grocery store. All. By. Myself. Let's just say I was in dire need of a few groceries after we moved. I only needed 4-5 things. Thank heavens our Kroger down the street had a double shopping cart with a toddler car. The girls did awesome and Andrew LOVES driving the little car and it kept him happy. I just got stopped every time I turned the corner by someone who wanted to ask questions about the girls or talk to the kids. It took over 30 minutes in the store for those few items. Oh well, we survived and I've even done it one other time since then...for a total of two times shopping by myself with all three kids. This is a big deal at our house. It's a hard way to shop and there's a reason I go early Saturday mornings. But I guess it is "do-able" now the girls can sit in the shopping cart.

First Pony tail. Well for Olivia at least! She's sported her first pony a few weeks ago and surprisingly it stayed in longer then I expected!

It's fun to see how these two interact with each other. They love to find each other in their cribs and talk, laugh and squeal at each other. It's pretty cute to watch on the monitor.  They are starting to do it in their high hairs too. They look for each other when one is gone and smile the biggest grin when they have been found.

 I find that we have our fair share of wrestling matches going on these days. Nothing will stop these girls from getting what they want. They will crawl right over the other one without a second thought.

 Even Daddy

They are starting to pull hair (as well as the flowers or bows out each others hair) and take toys away from each other...and now they cry about it. Before they didn't seem to care or notice. And so it begins...

They were actually playing really cute,  until I pulled the camera out to snap a picture. 

Caught Olivia red handed....that hair is way to tempting I guess! 

Life IS getting easier...bit by bit.

Now that they are sitting up by themselves, I'm able to give them a bath at the same time. Once in a while Andrew will jump in with them...but it's pretty crowded. They love bath time and splashing and playing in the water. But since they are starting to pull themselves up...doing two babies has become difficult again. Bathtime really riles Olivia up and she is always so hyper when I get her out. I thought baths are suppose to be relaxing. Certainly not for her!

Bottle time is becoming easier too. If Olivia has the right dosage of medicine for her reflux, she's pretty calm. You put her in the boppy and she can take her entire bottle by herself. Once in a while I can convince her to hold her own bottle, but she's pretty stubborn. So most of the time we prop it up in the boppy. I'll sit next to her and nurse Kathryn. She's pretty stubborn too in her own way. She took bottles great up until I decided I needed to be done nursing a few months ago. I decided I needed to just bottle feed both girls to save my sanity and time of feeding. But now it takes so much effort to just get a few ounces down her from a bottle. Any tips on weaning would be greatly appreciated. We try do 1-2 bottles a day, but my "preemie mom" mind kicks in and I get worried she's not eating enough. It's been almost two months of trying and I'm still not sure if we'll ever make it. Maybe we'll just go straight to a sippy cup.

You'd never guess that their older brother was deathly afraid of these girls the first three or four months and then he's slowly, very slowly warmed up to them. Now that they are interactive and all over the place he LOVES being a big brother. The other day he asked if he can have another sister. After holding back the laughter, I told him he already has two sisters why does he need three?  His reply..."because three is better then two" ...haha..of course! Silly me!!

He cries when it's their naptime, because he doesn't want to stop playing with them. He asks almost on a daily basis if he can have a sleepover in their bedroom. He loves to make Kathryn laugh by acting silly and playing peek a boo with blankets. He constantly asks if Olivia can come and play with him. They adore their older brother and he adores them!

Here they are 34 weeks and 6 days old! That is how long I was pregnant with these cuties! I had to get a quick picture! As you can see, it's getting tricky to try to hold them both at the same time. They are getting so big and so wiggly!

Since we've moved and I've had to find a new pediatrician, we're a bit behind on their height and weights...so I'll have to post those later after our appointment. But as I sit in bed and finish up this post, I can't but help be a little reflective with our experience with Andrew as a baby. In some ways, it was a blessing that Andrew was our first. As a new mother, I didn't realize what "normal" was.  I'm so amazed at how easily and quickly these girls pick up on things and how quickly they learn and grow by themselves. As hard as they were, those 10 weeks in the hospital on bedrest, was worth every. hard. day. Each time Kathryn & Olivia do something new or hit another milestone, I think of those long days in my hospital bed. Something as simple as grabbing their toes or sitting...(yes, just the simple task of sitting on their bottom with their feet out in front is something Andrew's never been able to do),  or picking up rice puffs took months and months and TONS of therapy and well...Andrew's still working on that darn pincer grasp.  I'm such a different parent (and person) because of our experience with him. I look at every little thing with such wonder and awe. My heart fills with gratitude for things most people wouldn't take a second thought at.  It's hard to put into words how I feel and the surreal experience it is to have another set of twins where things worked out for the better. I wouldn't expect anyone to understand or relate, but I want to be real and have this be more than a "things we did" blog. This is my journal, so there you go! However with all that being said, I wouldn't change a thing. So grateful for this perspective in my life. I am continually learning so much from each one of my kiddos on both sides of the veil.

 Love this little family of mine!