I decided to roast some brocolli in the oven last week.  It had been years since I’d made it this way so I figured I would try again since I pretty much hate vegetables and don’t really make them that often (bad, I know!).  I threw some olive oil and salt and pepper on them and put them in the oven for a bit.  After they were done I put some fresh lemon juice on them and then grated some fresh ginger on the top of them.  I could NOT believe how good it was.  And me, hating brocolli!  It was so yummy so I thought I’d buy a bit more at the store this week and make it again!

This time around I used my handy little hand shredder and shredded some fresh parmesan on the top and also put a bit more fresh lemon juice on it.  Also, don’t ask why I have fresh ginger and lots of lemons sitting around, I’ve been juicing lately with our new juicer so I’ve got a ton of new and different stuff sitting around….blog post to follow on that soon!

What surprised us the most was how much Matthew ate.  JM of course won’t touch it, but Matthew shoveled this baked brocolli in like candy.  Jordan and I actually only got a few bites because he wanted more and more.  How could I refuse him fresh broccoli?!

Yes, it smells up your house, but I was just surprised at how good it was and wanted to share with everyone!

We’ll definitely be eating more broccoli around here for sure!

Who knew…

celery could be so beautiful and crafty at the same time?!

We had so much fun with celery stamping and it made the most beautiful artwork!

I can scarcely even type the words….six months.  Goodness.  How did time fly by so quickly?  As usual, it’s just flying right on by since we started having kids.  I’m not sure if it will ever feel like it’s slowing down.  Some days I wish I could slow things down and savor whatever we’ve got going on, other days I’m not sure I can even handle what all we’ve got going on and all of their needs at once!  It seems like just last month he looked like this:

So, at 6 whole months old Noah is roughly 22 pounds.

To say that he is smiley would be an understatement!  I just love how happy and sweet he is.  Unless he’s hungry or tired…he’s just like this!  Noah likes to jump in his jumperoo and he’s getting really good at holding objects and he really tries to stretch to get a certain toy that he has in mind! Sleeping was a bit iffy there for a bit, but he’s been doing a pretty good job lately; only getting up once or twice and going down nicely!

He’s starting to want me to hold him a lot and he’s starting to prefer me a bit too!  I don’t mind!  I think he’s gradually beginning to understand when his brothers take something from him.  I’m sure it won’t be long until he starts to get really upset when that happens!  Right before Christmas he started sitting up by himself perfectly!  He’ll lie on the floor and sort of twist around, but no crawling and while he can roll, he just doesn’t like to very much.

He’s constantly sounding like a grumbly baby dinosaur!  Raaaahhh, Raaaaahh, Raaaaaaaah is what he sounds like and it’s always with a smile!

We’ve been comparing his hair to the other boys a lot lately.  It’s totally different from his brother’s hair!  We think it might be blond like JM’s, but it sticks up and is a little more coarse and it tends to grow straight forward toward his forehead.  None of our other boys have had hair this texture!  I love how they are all different and unique!

Lately, Noah has been able to be more a part of what all is going on around the house.  He’s been eating most baby foods for a few weeks now and he likes to sit at the big table with brothers!  He’s also working on using his sippy cup.  He seems to prefer the take ‘n toss cups!

He also had his second cold and his first double ear infection this past week.  He’s so much better and I’m glad he’s on the mend. My baby is growing by leaps and bounds.  Sadness and joy as well!

And just for fun….here’s all 3 boys at 6 months!  Precious!

I’ve recently become totally and absolutely obsessed with Pinterest!  I have loved finding random recipes, awesome crafts for the boys, ideas for the playroom that we’re working on, and ideas for decorating my den.  I’m a little obsessed!  Recently all 3 boys had this runny nose/cough respiratory ickyness so we’ve been in the house for close to 2 weeks in a row.  I kinda thought I’d lose my mind, but alas…I have Pinterest!

The boys loved this idea using pipe cleaners and a colander and they played with it off and on for a few days.  As with anything new and fun, I leave it out for a bit then put it up and bring out back out another day!  It makes the toy/craft seem brand new!

Matthew was the most excited about it.  JM played with it too, but I don’t have any pictures of him for some reason.

And by the way, doesn’t Matthew look so darn cute in his little man shirt?!

I found him later on with this on his head…eating an apple.  He cracks me up!

I ended up using a ton of my Pinterest/Snow Day activities that I had planned to use to save my sanity this winter! Here are a few things that we did while we were home for nearly 2 WEEKS in a row!!  Ahhh!  I’m so glad they’re on the mend now!

I got a mini muffin pan for Christmas, so I put it to good use with these little pizza poppers served with pizza sauce! Yum!

We built forts…

I made these AWESOME cinnamon roll pancakes. I knew my boys would love them so I knew I had to make them.  They are so wonderful.  The boys have been requesting them most mornings and I have to explain that these yummies are only an occasional treat; and treat they are!

We made homemade flubber…

They really weren’t all that excited about it for some reason.

I thought it was fun and it turned out pretty neat!

Next, out of sheer boredom we moved on to moving ice from one bowl to the next. I threw in some yellow food coloring just for fun.  We did this one last winter too.  I’m always surprised at how long they will do this activity!

Fun and good for motor skills!

And last but not least, we made a raceway for our cars!  I got a huge bag of these blocks at my favorite thrift store for $2!!!!  They have loved stacking them and making forts and raceways with them!

I guess I can’t complain too badly about being stuck in the house.  My kids always bounce back and they are very healthy.  I have a lot to be thankful for.  Oh yeah, and God must have heard my prayers because we haven’t had any big ice/snow storms YET!!  yay!  You’ll remember this from last year:

I definitely can’t complain!

“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”

Psalm 139:14

Today was Sanctity of Life Sunday and we had the honor of dedicating Noah at church today.  We do a small ceremony promising before our congregation and pastor that we will raise Noah in a Christian home, with Christian parents who love him, each other, and also (most importantly) the Lord.  I still think it’s so crazy that this is our THIRD baby to have baby dedication for in our church.  We are so blessed and I’m so humbled sometimes that the Lord has blessed us with three precious boys.  What a joy and surprise they have been to us.

As the service began, they flashed some of my favorite verses up on the screen: Psalm 139:14.  ALL children are fearfully and wonderfully made and seeing those verses just made me realize what a true miracle life is.  I sat there with tears brimming, thinking about how each time I went to the doctor to confirm a pregnancy test, they would do an ultrasond and there would be a tiny, small, beating 4-chambered heart right there on the screen.  Each time I hadn’t even known I was pregnant at all.  What a wonderful God we serve to make us in “the secret place” (Ps 139:15)

We are so thankful for God blessing us with our sweet Noah!  He wore my brothers’ tiny blue sweater and the same outfit Matthew wore for his Baby Dedication.

It was a wonderful, happy, and blessed day for our family!

 It was fun to have 3 other couples from our Sunday School class dedicating today as well!

 We didn’t get a chance to go to Sunday School because Noah was having a total meltdown in the nursery.  He hadn’t taken a nap yet and I was going to have to feed him again, so we just went ahead and left. We drove around a bit and let him sleep and then met up with my dad and brother, Ray, at a local yummy chicken place.  It was very good, but it reminded us why we just can’t go out to eat (at least easily) with our brood right now…….

 Matthew ate about 84,000 saltines…

John Michael ate a good lunch…..

and Noah pretty much melted down the whole time.  Here he is right before the huge meltdown.  He was grabbing my cup of iced tea and trying to eat it.  I walked out with him right after this!  Bless his heart, he’d had a long day!

Between cutting up the boys’ food, refilling their plates, trying to keep Matthew from spilling his cup, trying to feed Noah baby food and at some point try and stuff food in our mouths as quickly as possible, it’s just not an enjoyable experience with them right now.  I know in a few years it will get better and easier, but for now it’s a nightmare.  Their behavior was really good but it’s just really hectic!

Christmas was hard this year.  I’m not going to lie.  Between the not sleeping (Noah was still getting up a lot), the craziness, and all the little details that had to get done; I was overwhelmed.  Mainly, though, it was the no-sleeping part that really did me in.  I learned a few things and we vowed to do a few things differently next year.  It was my first Chistmas with 3 very small children, so you live and learn!  I was sad because we never got our Christmas cookies made or iced them and I didn’t get around to packaging up some goodies for our neighbors that we never see or have never met. Next year I need to start wrapping way ahead of time and I also need to do some baking ahead of time.  I’m hoping I can remember this next year and try and not be so exhausted.

The point of Christmas isn’t to be so exhausted you can hardly see straight.  We need to make sure we concentrate on the boys and truly teaching them WHY it’s so important that we celebrate Christmas.  JESUS, JESUS, JESUS.  Yes, we do gifts and a few gifts in a pile from Santa, but I was so happy when John Michael could clearly tell us this year all about the Christmas story.  My dad took him to our downtown square to see the nativity scene and he told SO many people passing by, “It’s babay Jesus!!”.  He also named all the other characters in the nativity.  It really was touching for my dad to see and it made me happy that he truly got “it” this year!  What made us the most proud though, was John Michael saying he wanted to keep up our big Happy Birthday banner (that we’d had up for my birthday) for Jesus.  Of course, we did!

So, with those lessons fresh in my mind, here is our Christmas!

Everyone running in!

Little Noah got a fun little teether from Santa!

We were so glad the boys finally learned how to open gifts.  Last year, they would hardly open any gifts for some reason.  Not so this year!

JM was geninely excited about getting a Dinosaur Train book!

And Jack looked less than impressed with Christmas!

We took a little break and had a yummy breakfast of fresh squeezed OJ, pigs in a blanket,  and overnight french toast casserole.  I had to go put Noah down for a nap, but Jordan said the boys inhaled the casserole.  It was good!

Noah went down for a morning nap and we opened a few more gifts then watched Christmas movies and just relaxed in PJs the rest of the day.  It truly is the way to do it!  I love being home and in our pajamas (and not out driving around to different places all day with small children in tow!). Toward the end of the day we were truly exhasted.  When I was putting Noah down for his nap I realized I had to go get started on dinner.  I almost cried because I was so tired I thought I would fall over!

So, for dinner we had ham the way my mom makes it, twiced baked potatoes, green beans, and rolls.  I know that some moms can do it ALL, but after this year I decided I could not.  I’m all about traditions and baking, but it was just too much.  I spent a lot of the day in the kitchen cooking, baking, and loading and unloading the dishwasher.  It wasn’t worth it in the end.  I’d rather have that time back to sit and play with my boys.  We decided that next year we would order dinner from Cracker Barrell or something and just spend the extra time together as a family.  Clean up will be easier and I bet there will be less stress!

Maybe as my boys get a litle older it will be easier to do the big baking and cooking.  I hope I’ll have time to fit it all in as they get older, bigger, and need us a little less!

Whoo hoo!!  I finally have 2 things: 1) Time to blog and 2) a computer/picture/blog issue resolved so I can blog!  I’m so excited!

We got a new computer for Christmas and I am so happy to have it mainly because the boys love it.  There are so many websites that they can use the touch screen for and we have been having a blast trying out new sites and letting them use their motor skills to play the activities on the touch screen!

Anyway, I’m just going to pick up where I left off, because this blog is mainly for my memory keeping, so I definitely want to record our Christmas through pictures and words!

Last year we decided to make a new Christmas Eve tradition of going to Krispy Kreme to get snowman donuts!  Who doesn’t like that tradition?!  Last year we also went to a movie, but it’s so hard with little ones and there wasn’t anything we were thrilled with, so we didn’t go this year.  Maybe next year!

So, we started out our morning at Krispy Kreme!  We ran into our sweet friends there so our boys were thrilled to see their friends there.

Even though Noah couldn’t eat any donuts this year, he was thrilled to be there!  He is exactly 6 months old here.  Time is flying by too quickly.

It’s fun to watch donuts being made!

The boys love to get snowman donuts on Christmas Eve!  It’s an awesome Christmtas treat!

Here they are last year after eating their snowman donuts.  I can’t believe how tiny Matthew looks.

We ran into our friends at Krispy Kreme.  JM and Matthew were excited to see their friends there when we walked in!

After breakfast we didn’t do too much. We stopped off at Walmart and then headed home for lunch and naptime.  After nap we gathered with a few friends for some yummy food and good times.  None of us had family in for the holidays, so it was nice to get together and celebrate Christmas!

Look how cute Nicole and Noah look!

Jackson loves the babies! He’s so sweet with them.

After our get together, we came home and got our very tired boys into bed!  We had to get ready for Santa to come pay us a visit!

Santa came and enjoyed his milk and cookies that we left for him!

He also came bearing gifts for the boys for their Santa pile.  They were pretty good this year!

I’m probably going to divide up our Christmas posts into a few different posts.  We did a lot of fun things leading up to Christmas.  I tried to make it a sweet, fun, and also teachable time for our boys. 

One fun thing we did was make a gingerbread house for the first time.  We’ve never done one and I think they loved it!  They really had a good time with it!  They tried to eat everything, but it turned out really cute!

Finished product, sorry the picture is sideways! I think it’s pretty darn cute!

Matthew and Noah had some bonding time over the iPod.

Matthew is just a little bit obsessed with a bowling game we found for the iPod!  He loves it and walks around the house most days saying “bo-weeing” “Mama phone?…play bo-weeing!”

I have loved our manger scene.  I found it just like this early one morning!

I’m so glad they like it so much!  I’m especially glad we get to talk about Baby Jesus and why He was so important and special!  JM told me just today as he was playing it…”Mom, Baby Jesus is soooo special”!

John Michael’s preschool had their Christmas play!  I was so excited/nervous, I thought I was going to throw up.  I have no idea why!  I guess I was just realizing for the first time that he’s not such a little guy anymore and I’ve got to let him go out into a big, scary world!  Yikes!

The play was precious and he practiced his songs with us the night before.  He did a great job! 

Can you spot him in the pictures?!

I think this was my favorite one of him!

Gaga was up for a visit, so we all got to see him in his first play!

The boys got to go see Santa.  Poor Baby Noah was sacked out asleep in the car with Bop, so we didn’t wake him up to see Santa.  JM got very brave and decided he was ready to sit on Santa’s lap like the other boys and girls.  He did a great job and politely asked for his remote control monster truck.  I was really proud of him for deciding to go see him and talk with him! As you can tell, Matthew would just barely sit on a rocking horse in front of Santa!  He is so silly!  He also did pretty well for being terrified of Santa!

The Southern Mama in me just HATED that they weren’t in matching Christmas outfits, but it was a spur of the moment thing and I guess it truly doesn’t matter anyway!

Tons more Christmas pictures and posts to come if I ever get the time and energy to actually sit down and blog.  Parts of November and into December have been pretty rough on me sleepwise.  I hate complaining about it, but it’s just a really hard time of year anyway and it was just truly exhausting for me getting very little sleep and have 3 little ones 3 and under.  I enjoyed parts of it, but generally I’ve been bone-tired exhausted for about a month now.  I’m very much looking forward to 2012 and hopefully catching up on some much-needed sleep!  Maybe we’ll vacation during Christmas next year!  It’s definitely a thought!

Sometimes….

I still can’t believe we have 3 boys!  Life is a zoo around here lately!

A few weeks ago I thought it would be fun to host a Christmas Open House at our house.  I thought it would be neat to just have hot chocolate, goodies, cake, and punch and have our friends drop by throughout the night.  Keeping it low-key was important for this stressed Mama!  It turned out really great!  We had a great time and I really enjoyed having our home filled with Christmas cheer, happy, smiling faces of our friends, and good food!

So, we invite you to take a peek at our house all dressed up for Christmas!  None of our family members ever really get to see it all decked out for the holidays!  Here goes…

We had more decorations outside this year than we have had any other year.  I really have loved our little set of a buck and a doe.  They’re sweet together! We have our little sled with presents on it and Jordan worked really hard on getting some lights on our little bushes.  I appreciate all the work he did to connect everything into one central location so that all I have to do is click a button on a remote!  Awesome!

We had little luminaries out to welcome our guests to our house!

My favorite part of our outdoor decorations is our sweet manger flag.  Matthew looked at it and said “baby Desus!” 

We’ve been working on Christmas art as part of our Advent celebration (more on that in another blog post).  The boys painted Christmas trees and then we stuck them in paper towel rolls and displayed them in our front entryway.  I also put up Christmas cards from years past and a funny picture of Matthew with Santa from last year.

I decided to make a quick, super easy coffee table centerpiece that afternoon.  I put some cranberries on this cute server and put 2 leftover “fake” candles in the center.  Hey, with kids, it’s the only candles we’re having anytime soon!

Jordan made a beautiful picture of our Christmas tree that I love to hate.  I pretty much hate this tree, but most years I try and tell myself it’s not what Christmas is about.  It’s really a lesson in patience for me and also giving to others what a new, pricey tree would cost (new trees can be PRICEY!!). It truly IS better to give than to receive.  Maybe we’ll get another new, beautiful tree for next year.  Maybe we won’t.  Who knows.  Either way, our boys really don’t care as long as we plug that tree in everyday and feel the warm glow that comes from Christmas cheer!

Our mantle with nutcrackers, berries, lights, flickering candles, and all of our stockings hung with care.  Except for Noah’s.  Lillian Vernon still hasn’t shipped it to us.  Jordan’s mom brought him a random one to use, so his doesn’t match all of the others.

Everytime I have ordered a new stocking for a new baby I get so happy and feel so giddy.  It is so surreal to hang a 3rd stocking up on our mantle!

Here’s a clustering of the boys’ 3 trees.  Originally, I was going to put them in their rooms, but this just worked out better, and safer as well! We all know how Matthew can destroy a tree in no time at all!

Just a fun way to display leftover Christmas balls.

Here’s everything right before everyone arrived!  We had all kinds of chocolate dipped goodies, little cheesecake bites, haystacks, lil’ smokies in the crockpot, green pepepr jelly with crackers, and a yummy pound cake (Jordan’s mom made it, I can’t claim it!) with peppermint glaze on top!

I had some hot chocolate with candy canes ready to go as well as water, sweet tea, and a WONDERFUL punch.  It was slushy, tart and just right! 

I was only able to put out part of my Christmas village because I just couldn’t find room for the rest of it.  I made this little ball wreath and it’s a little “special” for sure.  I need to leave that one to the professionals!

And for fun (and also to be easy) I made a table centerpiece out of fresh fruits.  I just threw in some cranberries, cinnamon sticks, oranges, and greenery along with the pineapple.  It literally took 2 minutes to do it!

I may have to have another Holiday Open House next year.  It was so much fun and I think everyone enjoyed themselves!  Merry Christmas!