She's 90

Yesterday my grandma turned 90.  90 folks.  That's awesome.  I can only hope I will live to see 90 years....and that our children will too.  And she's still doing relatively well for being the ripe young age of 90!  This past year has been a rough one on her, but she's hanging in there:)  She also happens to share a birthday with Parker.  I seriously had no idea of this fact for almost three years (awesome granddaughter, I know;)).   And Parker is seriously one of the happiest kids I have ever known....I don't think this is a coincidence!  They both bring much joy to those around them.

Anyways, we celebrated this huge milestone with her last weekend with the family.  We all went to dinner at Newport Grill (amazing place....if you haven't been go....just maybe not with 7 kids, just barely 6 and under!!)  It was definitely a little crazy with all the kids there.  But overall, they all did a fabulous job for being at such a nice restaurant.  We only had to go outside and burn off some energy a few times:)  And they gave us the banquet room, so we were secluded from the rest of the place....that helped too.  It was a great evening, although a loud one, celebrating grandma! 

 Grandpa is almost 91, and still going strong!!  While he can rarely remember all the kids names and who belongs to who (psshhh.....I have a hard time with this, and four of them are mine!!)  he gets the biggest kick out of all the kids, and I think we make his day when he gets to see his great-grandchildren.

 Grandma got some fancy new tennis shoes for her birthday.  Because when you're 90 you deserve to have some fabulous bright shoes on your feet!  And Charles liked them too:)

 And the whole bunch!  I need to do some edited of this so it's brighter and you can actually see all of our faces....but proof that we were all there celebrating!

 After dinner we thought it would be fun to "try" to snag a picture of all the kids together.  This is most definitely not the best one I got, but it's the one I clicked.  Bodies count....they aren't all looking, or smiling, but they are all in the picture.  Success!!

 And I snagged this adorable one of  some of the cutest nephews around.  Seriously, these boys....

 And a couple of my favorites.   My kids hit the cousin jackpot....not just with these 3, but with their other three cousins too.  Eli adores ALL his cousins and gets so excited when he gets to spend any time with any of them.  We don't see them often (even though we all live close...this is something we should probably change!) but they all have a blast when they get together.  These two boys are something else.  Just 5 months apart, and silly as ever when they get together.  You should just hear the ridiculous knock knock jokes that come out of their mouths when they get together......

Happy Birthday Grandma!!

More Birthday Fun

We finished our birthday celebrating fun last weekend with a family party at Granny and Papa's house. When I asked Eli what kind of party he wanted this year, he told me a swimming party.  But, doing a swim party with all his friends and their siblings stressed me out too much because there would be so.many.kids. to keep an eye on.  So we opt for the pool party to be with the family.  Just a tiny bit less chaotic.  And a larger ratio of kids that can swim by themselves without having to worry about drowning as much:)

Granny and Papa had to leave early, so the boys got to open a few gifts right of the bat.  Parker was so funny to watch open gifts this year.  He genuinely got so excited about everything.  It was cute to watch.  Eli opened gifts in typical Eli fashion....tore through everything one right after the other.

After a few presents, and a few pictures for Papa (those to come later:)), we got to eat and then swim!  This is what the kids really wanted to do anyways.  And it was hot that day.  So the pool was perfect for them (I say them because I sat out and watched....made Brian do all the kid wrangling)  Eli and Kamdyn have become such good swimmers this summer.  It is so neat to watch them go all over the pool and to see their confidence grow!

After the swimming, they got to open more gifts and enjoy a cupcake!

And that rounded out our night.  So thankful for such an awesome family and so many fabulous friends in our lives to help us celebrate our boys!  

Stitches

Well, we made it 6 years (with three boys!) and no stitches.  So I'm considering that a really fabulous run and a success in parenting:)  But, we finally had a kid get stitches....and it's wasn't the oldest...go figure it was the baby.  Of course, this should not be surprising at all because the younger two boys are wild and never.slow.down.  100 miles an hour at all times.  And I'm honestly surprised it hasn't happened before now.  But, last week an incident happened with Sawyer.  I say an incident because we aren't really even sure what happened.  It's possible Sawyer fell over his own feet and hurt himself, but I think there is a strong possibility he was hit in the head with the metal basket we use to store balls.

 I had a friend over with her 2 year old boy while the big kids were in school.  The boys were playing nicely and next thing we know Sawyer is flat on the ground crying.  I figured he fell:)  But when I went to get him for comforting, I noticed he was bleeding.  He had a tiny cut on his head.  At first we didn't think it was bad, but once we cleaned up the bleeding, we (meaning me and my friend....who is a nurse...came in handy that day:)) noticed it was pretty deep and would probably need stitches.  She did a nice make-shift pressure bandage for him to keep it nice and clean.  And I just pondered over whether I should take him in or not.  The dr. office couldn't get me in to see any drs that day, and I really didn't want to go to the minor care clinic with all the kids.  I was hoping to wait until the next day (Sawyer had a check up scheduled).  But after talking to another nurse friend and being told stitches needed to be put in fairly soon after the injury, I decided to suck it up and load the kids up and take him.

And and hour and a half later, little man had three tiny stitches.  He did awesome!  It was pretty sad and pitiful to have to stand back and watch him scream while they worked on him:(  But once they unwrapped his arms and I could hold him, he was ok again.  So we both survived our first stitches experience.  Something tells me this will definitely not be the only time one of our kids needs stitches.  Maybe we will get lucky and make it another 6 years?!?