bring back any memories?

Jamie's parents always talk about how hyper/crazy Jamie would get after a breathing treatment (when he was younger, of course!)  Well, I have now experienced it first hand with Hudson.  Jamie says the medicine in it makes your heart race - and well, I guess that makes you want to run around the house, doing flips, jumping off everything. 

Keep in mind - this is in the midst of his sickness.  So he is basically laying on the couch for the past week, not eating, coughing and feeling pretty miserable.  Then he'd do a breathing treatment and he's doing this:

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RSV

I apologize for the lack of blogging lately. This picture gives a little glimpse of what life has been like the past few weeks in our house.  After 3 more weeks of sickness, than a week of me (kind of ) catching up on work, I am finally back.  We had some yucky stuff going through our house a few weeks ago.  It started with Hudson.  He had a fever for 3-4 days, it rarely went away, even with tylenol.  He was miserable. He couldn't sleep so we were up most of the night watching movies (Thanks to Gigi and Papa for bringing us their stash.  I was getting pretty tired of watching the couple movies we own.)
Then the cough started.  It was on a Friday so we figured better safe than sorry, so I went ahead and took him in to the doctor.  I was a little shocked - and a little freaked out - when she diagnosed it as RSV. (A respiratory virus that can lead to bronchitis or pneumonia.) That was our worst fear last year after Tate came home.  You might recall he had $2000 shots every month for several months to give him antibodies specifically to fight RSV.  And Tate had just started coughing that morning too.  But thankfully it was this year and not last and Tate was bigger (although RSV can still be very dangerous.) 

Since it's a virus antibiotics won't help. It just has to run it's course and we had to make sure they stayed well hydrated. The boys had to do breathing treatments several times a day to help with the tightness in their chests and the nasty coughing.  The first few times was quite a fight for both of them, but we quickly figured out what worked:

For Hudson it was playing the ipod.

  For Tate it was just letting him do it all by himself!

It was a struggle the first couple times.  Usually he would sit for a few minutes if I turned on the Praise Baby DVD we have and he'd watch that.  But rarely would we make it through the whole breathing treatment (about 10 minutes).  Till one day he took it from me and was playing with it.  I took his mask off and just let him play with it - and he was perfectly content!

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 So Hudson basically lived on the couch in the basement for a week and a half, watching movies.  Tate was a little harder to console.  But we made it.  Then Jamie and I both caught colds from them and we had another week of it.  Jamie had it much worse than I did though.  He still can't taste anything since he has been so congested!  Don't have to worry about what I fix for dinner!

How'd he do that?

Not sure how he managed to do this to himself but one day I was letting Tate cry it out for awhile and when I finally gave up and went in to get him this is what he had done:

Of course, he wasn't real happy that I was taking pictures instead of picking him up! 

Visit to the NICU

I wanted to do something special to commemorate Tate's first birthday and about a week before his birthday, I was reading books to Hudson before bed and he picked out the book "No Bigger Than My Teddy Bear".  It's a book I bought for him right after Tate was born that tells the story of a little boy whose brother was "born too soon" and has to stay in the "nursery" at the hospital because he's no bigger than a teddy bear.  He loved reading it while Tate was in the NICU and still occasionally likes to pull it out and read it again.  It will also be a good book to read to Tate once he's older to help explain what he went through when he was born. 

So I was reading it to Hudson and it hit me that this was something we could use to help other families in similar situations as ours...It took me much longer to get it all put together (miscommunication with the author when I placed the order) so I didn't actually get the books till after Christmas.  So instead of taking Tate up to the NICU to visit for his first birthday we went the first of January...close to the 1 year anniversary of him being released from the hospital. 

The whole family went - Hudson even got to go inside the NICU for the first time...But just inside the front doors, not into the actual nursery where the babies are.  We saw one of the neonatologists who took care of Tate and several of the nurses.  They all remembered us, and our names, and even stuff about Tate and his stay.  I can't believe they can remember all that with all the other babies that have gone through there since we left. 

I wrapped the books up and stuck a little note in with them explaining why we were donating them and an  update on Tate and how he was doing.

And inside each of these books we put this inscription:

And I snapped a quick picture of Tate and Daddy in front of the NICU doors before we left.

The NICU sent us a thank you card the next week for the books.  Hopefully they will hand them out to other families with older siblings like Hudson to help them understand what is happening.  It's such a crazy time in their lives and I know the other siblings can be overlooked in light of everything else that is going on.

A Royal Party

Princess Callista and Prince Carver both have birthdays in January so Annie and Chase had a combined birthday party for them.  It was obvious it would have to be a princess theme for Princess Callista (she turned 3), but how to work that into something for a 1 year old boy... "The Princess and the Frog" ! 

Royal Attire was required (when else would I ever get a chance to wear my wedding dress again!?)

Mommy and her Prince Charming(s)

(Hudson was VERY embarassed about wearing a PINK bow tie.  But I finally convinced him it was for Callista so he got over it.  All the cake and candy helped...)

My contribution to the party....frog blowers!

The beautiful (dancing) princess cake Annie made, along with cute frog cupcakes. Callista was very concerned as to what her slippers looked like and when Annie cut into the cake she was disappointed to find she wasn't wearing any!

The birthday girl blowing out her birthday candles. (After she recovered from the fright of us singing the "scary" birthday song to her.  For some reason, she's been scared of the Happy Birthday song since her first birthday...hasn't grown out of it yet!)

Carver had no problem digging into his cake...

He must have learned it from watching his big sister!

Hudson had his first ever candy necklace.  He thought it was the greatest thing ever.  I'm not sure if he did anything else till he had ate ALL the candy first.

And the kids played a cute game of "pin the kiss on the frog".

Callista took it literally!

Happy birthday Callista and Carver!

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My Christmas Present

Without further ado, I'll show you a little bit of what Jamie and I have been working on lately...

We've always had this empty space between the fridge and pantry that drove me nuts.  Just wasted space.  I usually stuck brooms and mops back there, but that was getting annoying because 2 little boys got them out all the time to play with them....

When I saw this idea on pinterest I knew I had to have it.  I emailed it to Jamie and he thought it was a great idea too!  So we no longer have empty unused space in that little gap....

We have a rolling pantry!  I love it.  It holds almost everything I had in my existing pantry before.

Which left me with lots of space to reorganize my pantry.

Which of course, led to another project.  Once I got it all emptied out I couldn't put it back together without a fresh coat of paint.

But I can't just reorganize one part of my kitchen and call it good.  Reorganizing the pantry led to all this too:

I'm loving me reorganized kitchen....but of course, it doesn't stop there....and for those who complained about all the suspense from my last post...I'll give you a little sneak peak:

look what Tate can do!!

Imagine my surprise yesterday when I'm getting stuff out of the closest and turn around and find Tate standing up in the middle of the room!  He does it best when he has something in his hands - preferably the ipod.  He stood at least 20 times yesterday and is doing it again today so I think he's definitely got it figured out!  (Sorry for the poor pictures and video - there isn't any electricity in our fort!)

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