At last! The weather is making a turn for the better. Today is absolutely gorgeous, and we plan to take full advantage of it. The girls insisted on wearing shorts to school today. I made a deal with them that they had to wear long sleeve shirts in order to wear shorts. It was a deal. We venture up to MN for the Easter weekend and really hope to get similar weather up there. Fingers crossed.

Vi is vigorously vivacious to experience her first spring and Easter.

I want to feel sorry for Sadie, but she has legs and could certainly run and hide if she wanted to.

The girls are absolutely smitten with Violet, and Violet the same with the girls. They spent all this morning happily cuddling with each other on the couch. Couldn’t ask for a better moment.

Two unopened bags of plastic Easter eggs used to sit on my kitchen table. Now there is 1 unopened bag of plastic Easter eggs on the table and 1 opened bag of plastic Easter eggs. More importantly, the opened bag of plastic Easter eggs is now 1/3 empty. Can you guess who the culprit of my dilemma may be?

The two bags of plastic Easter eggs. 1 unopened. 1 opened and 2/3 full.

1 missing egg has been discovered.

Another missing egg has been located. And this morning 2 more eggs have been found.

The perpetrator has since moved on to other adventures. This time it’s the removal of a yellow feather from a Mardi Gras mask made by Mimi.

Mimi models her handmade Mardi Gras mask. Notice the lack of a yellow feather.

Annie’s just glad she doesn’t have anything that Sadie desires. Yet.

In order for Mimi to overcome her plight of missing feathers she instead demonstrates her new skill, that of reading. We are actually very surprised that she’s moved to this next step in her education because she’s never been interested in academics. At all. In the least bit. Without much persuasion and arguing and gnashing of teeth and pulling out one’s own hair and giving up and bouts of despair and searching for non-academic sources of success for a non-academic child.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPmzLsva8yg

After harassing Mike for the past year and a half I was finally able to convince him to paint our little, half bathroom downstairs. Without paint or decorations I always felt like I was using a gas station restroom when in there. Shiver. The project took all of about 1 hour to complete, so I don’t know why it took us this long to get to it. Do you think I’ll be able to persuade Mike that our other 2 bathrooms absolutely need to be painted?

When Mike and I first decided to upgrade to a “family” vehicle, I vehemently fought to purchase an SUV. Knowing that I would be the sole driver of that vehicle, I just couldn’t imagine giving into the “soccer mom” stereotype of driving a minivan. Fast forward to a few a months ago, and I couldn’t fathom driving anything but a minivan all mommed out to the max. Well, them days are over because we are now the proud owners of a brand, new Chevy Suburban. I was reluctant to purchase such a monster-sized vehicle, but Mike convinced me that it’s necessary for all our road trips with us, 3 kids, and a dog. Mike’s truck is capable of handling all those passengers, but it’s a tight squeeze with the 3 kids in a car seated row in the back. Plus, the dog needed to be in the bed of the truck outside which can get pretty frosty.

I’m feeling very spoiled with this new SUV of ours. If Chevy offers an add-on option, then it’s in our Suburban including leather, heated and cooled seats, remote starter, navigation, DVD player, usb port for iPod (love this), XM Radio (love this even more), rear camera, electric rear door, OnStar, bluetooth, and more. All this luxury was a little intimidating to me at first, but Mike wants me to be very comfortable when we are residents of SD. I got used to the idea pretty quickly, and to say I’m thrilled is an understatement. I seriously want to move into it and play with my dash board all day long.

My new bedroom.

I didn’t think the inside was that much bigger than the vanimal, but I feel like my girls are miles away back there.

In other news, Violet is not a fan of food. Getting her to eat even just 1/8th of a jar of baby food takes what seems like hours. Mike and I wondered the other day if her dorm in college will have the wet nurse option.

Hope you’re wearing your green today!

As promised, I snagged some pictures from our friends who were in the Dells with us. Most of the pictures were taken the last day, so that’s all I’ve got of the girls. You get the idea though: 3 days spent in bathing suits, going down lots of slides, and unable to stay dry. Violet was sick on the first evening, so we decided to keep her out of the water on day 2. She still wasn’t feeling 100% and didn’t show much interest in the water on day 3. Hopefully, she’ll be big enough and healthy enough to enjoy it next year. Julie has more details about our trip and namely about our dinner to a really swanky restaurant. We got a big kick about feeling like the hillbillies dragging our six kids to a fancy schmancy restaurant.

Annie and Mimi fought for Alyssa’s attention the whole time. Mimi also loves to stalk Alex, so I guess everyone was happy enough in the end (except for Alex the victim).

The wave pool was a favorite place to be and was visited 2 days in a row.

Vi’s little bit in the water. At least she still got to show off her cute suit.

It didn’t take long for the kids to discover and hop on the luggage cart and drive it all over the lobby.

The kids were most excited about their sleepovers each night.

This has nothing to do with the Dells, but I couldn’t resist posting it. Violet was doing this at church today, and it just melted my heart. I love how she uses just her wrist hinge to shake her object.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrPM5UQuf_g

Making it a yearly tradition we decided to head up to the Wisconsin Dells again. It wasn’t quite as a full house as last year since only one other family, the Johnsons, could attend with us. That certainly didn’t stop us from making a lot of waves. We daftly thought that by attending on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday that we would avoid the crowds that we had to deal with last year on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Such was not the case as it seemed doubly busy each day we were there, but fun was still had by everyone. The same park, the Wilderness Territory, had the best deal again this year, so that’s where we stayed. It really does have the most to offer in the way of indoor water fun and lodging, and there were no complaints from any of us. I don’t have any pictures of our water time yet because I was lazy and left it up to the Johnsons to bring their camera and take all the pictures. I do have one picture from the Dells to offer, and I think it was totally worth it just to see how Violet looks in a flapper and happy to be posing on a car and holding dynamite. Annie and Mimi were so thrilled, too, to get “fancy” dresses and necklaces and feather headbands. Daddy was just pleased that each of his girls got to hold deadly weapons. I’ll post more pictures from the Dells once I con the Johnsons into giving us the pictures on a disc (hint, hint, Julie).

In other news, Violet is pretty much able to sit up on her own now. I quickly snapped these pictures of her, and then she planted herself on her face not 10 seconds later. Guess I jumped the gun and should’ve also placed pillows in front of her as well. She is competent in that area most of the time though.

Where do I begin? I feel as if it’s been months, even years since I’ve posted here, but I’ll get back to it anyway. The past two weeks have been a sleepless haze for me. Ever since Mike went away for his trip to SD a few weeks ago, life has been full of illness and other unplanned events. Annie got sick again last weekend which ended up with her needing to go to the ER. Her asthma is usually the culprit which got so bad that none of her rescue treatments at home were doing the trick. We also discovered that she had pneumonia. Because of all this Annie had to miss most of last week of school. Annie was taking 4 different medicines at one point. Fortunately, two of the medications were only 5-day treatments and are now complete. However, Annie has now been prescribed a preventative inhaler which is to be taken twice a day for as long as her doctor feels she needs it. The good news about that though is that she should no longer require emergency asthma treatments. Hooray!

The drama didn’t stop there though. As soon as Annie was feeling back to normal and returning to school Violet decided it was her turn. She came down with a fever starting Thursday and continued on with it until Saturday afternoon. Thankfully, Tylenol did the trick with making her feel better and kept her from getting too fussy. Nonetheless, Vi did lose her appetite during those days and put us back to square one with her solid foods introduction and was waking up almost every hour at night. She still isn’t eating as heartily as she was before all this began, but I still sit patiently with her each meal trying to pry those little lips open. Vi is back to her normal sleeping schedule though.

Mike was in Utah for the bulk of all this, so it was a bit more difficult to deal with everyone being sick. He’s home now and shackled down. Life is finally getting back to normal. Thank goodness!

I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures of my dear children.

Violet in her pod.

Annie and Mimi hijacking my camera.