Things I am Grateful For (by Mom)

What a wonderful Mother's Day --- as so many people commented....my blessings and kisses have doubled since last Mother's Day. Love it! Corey and the kids gave me a great day full of kisses, gifts, yummy food and no dishes! So I thought I would finally update the blog with pictures of the kids (I didn't get any pictures of Corey but I am obviously most grateful to him for helping me bring these children into the world and helping me keep my sanity somewhat intact while we work to keep them here!). So back to my point.....Things I am grateful for this Mother's Day:

A determined little girl who fights a whale shark on a Wii game for an hour despite her parents telling her maybe it's not supposed to be one of the fish you can catch....and watching the joy when she learns the value of not giving up (it weighed 20,000 pounds!....most of the fish range from 1 to 50)
A big sister who loves her little sisters and is ready to teach them everything she knows...
A big brother who loves his sisters and who I know will look out for them his whole life...
Watching the wonderful world of twinsSunny days spent outside
Happy kids
The wonder in their eyes as they watch their big brother and sister....and the fact that they are so content to sit and watch!
The smile that can only mean trouble is coming
Any smile for that matter
My kids trying to clean the floors for me...
My kids baking me a cake for Mother's Day (okay, Reagan baked, Harrison supervised....)
My kids enjoying the clean up part from baking me a cake for Mother's Day...
My kids -- all four of them -- who love me too
Happy Mother's Day!

Reagan's School Pictures

We tried to blur out everyone's faces just in case they didn't want to be seen on our blog :)

Spring is Here!

Spring is here and we are loving it!!! It's so nice to get out without having to load everyone into the car. After I got home from school today, we plopped everyone into the stroller and took a nice stroll today to the library, the bakery and then off to the park. We even let the girls try out the swings for the first time. They both loved them!Kennedy:
And Madison (we're not sure if she giggled because of the fun ride in the swing or because she finds her brother to be so stinkin' hilarious every time she looks at him!)

And, by the way, when we say that we plopped everyone in the stroller....we weren't kidding. The "double" stroller functions quite well as a quadruple one!

Happy Birthday Papa!

WE LOVE YOU!

Time Flies

Unbelievably, the twins are 6 months old today! What a whirlwind the past half year has been and amazingly, Mom and Dad are starting to realize the next 6 months could potentially be even crazier. But we know we are extremely blessed and lucky to have such happy, healthy girls. Kennedy is officially the new heavyweight. For the first time since they were born, she has overtaken Madison in the weight category. Today Kennedy weighed in a 16 pounds, 3 ounces and Madison followed closely behind at 15 pounds, 15 ounces. Both girls are 26 1/2 inches tall and were both declared healthy, strong, happy and wonderful at their check up today. Kennedy entertained the place with constant squealing and babbling the entire time she was there, where as Madison showed a bit more apprehension when she saw the nurse who gave her the shots last week! Madison quickly warmed up and (as usual) both girls were happy little angels.

Mom grabbed a few pictures of the girls to mark their half birthday. One of these days we'll get professional ones done, but we tend to wait for the 1st birthday for those. Enjoy. And Happy Half Birthday Madison and Kennedy!

Madison

Kennedy

Happy Easter

We started the Easter festivities with the community Easter Egg Hunt on Saturday. They moved it indoors since it was wet and chilly outside. As you can see, Harrison had a little difficulty understanding the purpose of his basket!
Once he had something to put inside, he was more than happy to stop using it as a hat. But he wanted absolutely nothing to do with the Easter Bunny....wouldn't even go see him to get a piece of candy....so I got to take a picture with him all by myself (aren't I so cool in my shades???).
Where oh where could those eggs be hidden???
Checking out our loot....
We went to bed that night after leaving out a little snack for the Easter Bunny -- we do it for Santa, so we figured it would be polite to do so for the Easter Bunny as well. Mom and Dad think Santa gets a better deal with the milk and cookies!

Easter morning we woke up early, hunted our baskets and our eggs and headed out for church.

Grandma bought us all matching outfits to wear and we looked absolutely adorable. Unfortunately, we don't have a ton of proof to that because we never managed to get a picture of all four of us together. This is the best we did to get a group shot of the girls (it's getting harder for me to hold both of them at the same time!). You'll see that Harrison's sweater vest matched our dresses in this picture from out at the shed (and do note the addition of the hat and sunglasses was all Harrison's idea!)
We learned quickly that waking Harrison up before he is ready to be up combined with him eating candy out of his basket for breakfast leads to a disaster for having a well-behaved child during Mass. We survived without any major meltdowns, though, and then headed out to Grandma and Grandpa's shed for the rest of the day to celebrate Easter with them, the Vogels and Great Grandma and Great Grandpa (speaking of, have we ever mentioned on the blog that Harrison figures if we call Daddy's Grandparents "great" grandma and "great" grandpa that in order to reference Grandma and Grandpa, he calls them "plain" Grandma and Grandpa....funny kid). Anyhow, it was a wonderful Easter and a fun filled day. The Easter Bunny even left us baskets at the shed and we got to hunt more eggs out there too.

I'm already asking what the next holiday is!

Aunt Amy and Abbey's Adventures

After counting down the days for months, it was finally time to go pick up Abbey and Amy from the airport! (Unfortunately, we picked them up, but not their bag -- the poor things waited two days for that to show up!) They found a cheaper flight into Bismarck, so we made the drive up there to pick them up and decided to let all the kiddos run around at the zoo to burn energy before piling back into the car for the ride home. It was a gorgeous day....but clearly the meltdown led to lots of mud everywhere....there's pictures on Abbey's blog of her because she managed to find most of it! We saw bears and wolves and taunted a few tigers, fed some animals at the petting zoo, grabbed some Happy Meals and headed on home....

Amy and Abbey slowly acclimated to the chaos that is our household these days. Mommy loved having Amy around to help with the babies and the babies loved the chance to help Amy prepare for her new baby! We didn't do quite as many planned activities, but luckily, Abbey loves our basement and we spent a lot of time playing down there and in the backyard. We lucked out and had some great spring weather while they were here. Here's a few pictures of us playing in the backyard and enjoying our snowcones....
The twins loved the fresh air too!!Grandma was nice enough to spend a day with the twins so that we could go down to the Y and take Abbey swimming. We played in the pool for a whopping 15 minutes....I think it took more time to get us dressed than we spent in the pool! Luckily we spent a little more time playing in the playground there afterwards, so it wasn't a waste of time to head down there. We also headed to the Capitol to feed geese and see my Daddy as the Appropriations committee worked a marathon day to work out the state's budget before the end of the legislative session!

Mom tried to get a picture of the three of us while we in the locker room....she had to include all of them because it shows how difficult a task that proved to be. We had fun, anyway! And the look on Abbey's face is priceless in one of them.....as is the one of Abbey and Harrison studying each other.
We had such a great visit with them and miss them terribly already. Guess it's time to make a new countdown calendar for our visit to DC to meet the new baby this fall!!!!