Happy Mother's Day!

Wow, I can't believe I've already had this blog over a year! I remember writing for Mother's Day last year, too! Today I just have this cute little poem that I found online. I reflects so many of my own thoughts and experiences as a mother that I feel like they could be my own words! I really loved it so I wanted to share it with any of you moms of young children or anyone else and I hope that you enjoy it!

Every Mother's Prayer

Dear Lord, it's such a hectic day,

With little time to stop and pray,

For life's been anything but calm,

Since you called on me to be a mom.

Running errands, matching socks,

Building dreams with building blocks.

Cooking, cleaning, and finding shoes,

And other stuff that children lose.

Fitting lids on bottled bugs,

Wiping tears and giving hugs.

A stack of last week's mail to read,

So where's the quiet time I need?

Yet when I steal a minute Lord,

Just at the sink or ironing board,

To ask the blessings of your grace,

I see them in my small one's face,
That you have blessed me all the while,

As I stop to kiss that precious smile.

(http://www.hugsandsmiles.com/everymomsprayer/index.html)

Here are some pictures I took today of my "precious smiles" that I daily kiss, with gratitude to their Maker for allowing me the amazing blessing and privilege of being their mother. No matter how hard a day may be, they're worth every second of it! I love these three little people more than I ever imagined I could love anyone. I feel so grateful to be celebrating Mother's Day today as a mother myself.

Happy Mother's Day to all of you mothers!

Our new car!

Well, I guess we're officially a Mormon family because we finally broke down purchased a minivan! We bought it a week ago at a government auction, which is the same place we bought our Taurus that we've been driving for the past 5 years and we've had a lot of luck there. It's nothing fancy, just a 2001 Dodge Caravan with no power anything so it makes me feel so old school rolling up and down the windows by hand and manually locking each door, but it runs great and the best thing is it only has 16,000 miles so it drives like it's practically new! We paid $4000 for it which is about all I can stand paying for cars anyway. I hate car payments so it was nice to just pay for it from what we'd been saving for a new car, knowing we'd need one once we had another baby and ran out of seats. Our double stroller doesn't really fit in it very well and I do really miss my nice big trunk, but other than that I'm surprised how much I'm liking it so far! I was really dreading getting one but it's not so bad! We went to the auction while Savannah was at school and we didn't tell her anything about it since we didn't know if we'd actually buy anything so it was a surprise for her when we got home and she was SO excited! She's been bugging us about wanting to buy a minivan this whole school year since my neighbor that I carpool with has one and she loves it.

I think the biggest reason Savannah really wanted one so badly is because she always wants to take extra people in the car with us but we never can since our Taurus barely had enough seats for the 5 of us. The first thing she she said was "Now we can take Julian with us everywhere we go!" (Julian is our 4 year old next door neighbor who's an only child so he's sort of like their adopted brother) So of course here are the kids, including Julian, just a few hours after buying it as we drove around to show it to my brother and mom.

This is a picture of the back seat of our Taurus after we got the car seats out of it. I had such a ghetto mom car! I'm determined to keep this new one much cleaner.

Some cheesy pictures of Joe at the auction site right after he bought it.

This is a big, exciting step for our family! I guess now we're one step closer to baby #4! We'll have to start working on that... =)

Ward Talent Show

This is kind of embarrassing but I thought it would be fun to post it anyway. We had a ward talent show tonight and Savannah really wanted to sing in it, but I told her it was mostly just for grown-ups. They were looking for people with interesting talents or that played unusual instruments and some of you may know that when I was little I played the accordion. So the song Savannah wanted to sing was "On Top of Spaghetti", which is one of the songs she performed last week with her little singing group, and I had the idea that that would be a fairly easy, fitting song for me to play on my accordion while she sang along. Then it would also be good because she could take some of the pressure and attention off of my playing so I wouldn't feel so nervous or embarrassed at my meager skills. I totally had to practice for weeks and I was SO nervous about performing it, but now that it's over I'm glad I did it. I think Savannah really liked doing it and it was fun doing it together. She's such a natural little performer and it amazes me how she doesn't get nervous at all and she just thinks it's fun. She sure doesn't get that from me!

Here's the video if you want to see it. By the way, my cheesy little dancing side to side was totally Joe's idea--he made me do it! =)

Happy Easter!

Today has been a beautiful, wonderful Easter! I'm pretty tired now after all the festivities, cleaning up all the candy wrappers and plastic grass, and getting my kids to bed when they were on such a sugar high, but it was still a great day. Yesterday we went to an Easter carnival at Wheeler Farm because Savannah's singing group was performing there and we ended up having a lot of fun there! My brother Ryan and his wife Savanah brought their three kids, too, so all the cousins always have a fun time together. Afterwards we went back to Ryan's house and let the kids dye Easter eggs and then today after church we hunted them in my mom's backyard. We had a family dinner at her house and church was really nice and all in all it was just a wonderful Easter celebration. Here are some pictures:

The kids before church

After church with their Easter baskets

Savannah and Katie swinging at Nonni's house

Alex having a great time with the Easter Egg hunt

Family Photo

Our visit from Spot

I did so well about writing last month and here it is the LAST day of March and I'm barely squeezing in an entry for the month. It's funny I've kept thinking I just had to get on here and change my background from the snow theme to something more springy to match the weather but now all the snow has kept coming back right here at the end. How frustrating! Maybe changing my background will bring better luck in that area. =)

Okay, so I wanted to write about this and never did but I'm doing it now. It was last month when I took Alex for his 1yr well child visit that the pediatrician told me he had 2 ear infections! He'd never had an ear infection before, at least that I knew of, and it made me feel bad that he was probably in pain and was just being tough and didn't let me know while he was suffering through it! The doctor prescribed Amoxicillin and Alex took it for 8 days straight without any problems. Then on the morning of what would've been his 9th day of taking it, he woke up looking like this:

I know I'm horrible but I didn't even notice at first. I changed his diaper and everything and must have still been half asleep because it wasn't until Joe picked him up that he said something about him having bumps all over him and we realized he had a mild rash all over his body. We called his pediatrician and they said to stop taking the Amoxicillin and recommended that I take him in to be seen. He'd also eaten cauliflower the night before for the first time and Joe is allergic to it so I thought maybe it was a food allergy since he'd been taken the medicine for 8 days with no symptoms at all. The doctor couldn't tell me what the reaction was from but said it was definitely hives and said I could give him Benadryl and a pain reliever. The ear infections were gone, thank goodness, so he didn't need anymore antibiotic.

That night when I was getting him ready for bed the hives seemed to have gotten worse and he looked like this:

The next morning was Saturday and this is what he looked like when he woke up. You could tell he just wasn't feeling good:

This was taken 2 hours later in his car seat. At this point we came up with the nickname "Spot" because he sure didn't even look like our little Alex anymore:

Again, two hours later. You can notice the hives on his face are growing and getting closer together so it started just looking like a really bad sunburn all over his skin:


And this is him in the bathtub that 2nd night, only 36 hrs after first noticing any sign of hives:

After getting him out of the bathtub I got him dressed and gave him medicine and he started feeling a little better. He and the girls were playing 'store' in the kitchen and eating animal crackers and I was glad to see him feeling better and playing! This picture made me laugh:

The next morning, on Sunday, he woke up with a pretty high fever at about 8am and was really fussy and not sleeping well so I took him to an InstaCare. Come to find out he had gotten tonsillitis and had ear infections in both ears again! They said the tonsillitis is a viral infection so it was unrelated, just unlucky timing, and the ear infections were a result of that. Poor kid! They didn't prescribe him another antibiotic because they wanted to wait until the hives were all cleared up but they gave me some numbing drops to put in his ears so at least they wouldn't hurt. None of us went to church because tonsillitis is contagious and that afternoon Alex was playing with his sisters a lot and seemed to be feeling a ton better.

By that night in the bathtub you could tell a big improvement with the hives. They at least were starting to not be so red and it looked like they were soaking back into his skin. He was obviously feeling so much better!

What an adventurous couple of days those were! It took about 3 days after this for any sign of the hives to be gone, but it was just those first 3 days that were the worst. By the way, I was told this was definitely a drug related reaction, and wasn't caused by food. Yippee, Alex, you get to have cauliflower again!

Party Time

Yesterday we had a fun filled party day, celebrating Savannah's 5th birthday and Alex's 1st. This was the first year Savannah got to invite friends to her party so she invited many of the kids in her primary class plus her cousins, making a total of 8 kids that came. Including my 3, that meant 11 kids in my little house and it was a bit of an adventure! It was fun, though. Savannah wanted to have a butterfly party so we had all the matching butterfly party supplies from the dollar store and I made her a butterfly fairy birthday cake. For games we played pin the antenna on the butterfly (using pipe cleaners for antenna), then Joe read them "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" and afterwards we had them divide into two teams, gave each team a roll of toilet paper, and they had a race to completely wrap up one person on their team like a cocoon. I think they had fun. Mostly they just had fun playing with each other in Savannah and Katie's bedroom and climbing on the bunkbeds and stuff. Savannah also didn't realize that all the kids were going to bring her presents so that was a very exciting surprise for her and she had so much fun opening all of those presents with everyone watching. That girl really loves being in the spotlight and she got really fun presents so she just loved it!

For Alex we just decided it would be easier to throw his birthday in with Savannah's even though everything was all girly because my family would already be coming over and it was more convenient than making them all come on a different night just to watch a little 1 year old eat some cake and open a present or two. I mean, really, 1 year old birthdays just aren't that exciting or eventful. I made Alex a Thomas the Tank Engine cake that had a 1 on the side and he seemed to enjoy sitting in his high chair eating it all by himself and making a huge mess. Here are some pictures from our fun day.

Here are the kids with their cakes. Savannah is with her cousin Dylan showing how they're both 5 now. Making two cakes turned out to be a little more time consuming than I'd imagined so the cakes got pretty sloppy. Definitely not my best work, but I was past the point of caring. If you can't tell, I did Alex's last so his was really rushed. Sorry buddy. I guess a 1 year old doesn't care that much.

Grandma and Grandpa Bilanzich gave Alex a little outfit and some shoes. He was pretty excited about those shoes! He wanted to carry them around with him everywhere!

Savannah's favorite present. She's not really into High School Musical that much but she LOVED this!

Alex may not have been too happy about that hat, but by then he was pretty worn out from all of the commotion, too. We all had a fun, but exhausting day. We went to bed early last night! No exciting, romantic Valentine's Day for Joe and me, but we had a great day.

Alex is one!

I can't believe today is Alex's 1st birthday! It seems like especially the past 5 or 6 months have gone really fast. That first little while when they're little babies is so hard and seems to take forever at times but then it starts really speeding up. He's so much fun now, though, and our family would be so different without him.

I just barely switched him last week from his rear-facing carseat to a big kid, forward facing seat and he was so cute how happy he was. He loves being able to look out the window and look over at his sisters and I think he feels so big and cool like them. Usually there are lots of times he screams when I try to put him in the car but now he almost always seems happy and even excited to go somewhere. He looks over at his sisters with big old smiles and kicks his legs excitedly. I think he's still relishing in the fact that he CAN kick his legs and move them freely while he's in the car! I'm actually surprised I held out so long with switching him over. With both the girls it seems like I couldn't handle seeing their scrunched up legs pushing against the backseat of the car at around 10 months--maybe he's shorter than they were. Or maybe I waited because I didn't want to give up being able to sit next to him in the backseat and nurse him while we were driving (I really try to cover up for the sake of passing motorists, I promise!). We just go on so many road trips and stuff and it makes it SO much easier to keep peace in the car when I'm right there to shut him up when I have to and not to stop for feedings all the time. Now we have a whole seat full of kids and I know it's not going to be much longer before we have to give in and trade our sedan for a minivan or something bigger. I'm not looking forward to that. I like how close the kids are in our Taurus plus I love our huge trunk...I'm going to miss that.

This is what my backseat is looking like these days:

Alex fell right to sleep in his new carseat on the first night!