Happy Easter!

Our Easter Celebrations

 

Annual Awesome Neighborhood Easter Egg Hunt

 There is the amazing lady who does it all!

Mikey with his spoils

Luke just getting started

And Joey is just learning the ropes of Easter egg hunts

Luke sorting his winnings and helping his brother

Egg Dyeing

Oh how kids love egg dyeing. The hard part is the week after when we have to start eating their beautiful creations. It never goes over well.

 Easter Morning

The Easter Bunny came!

Yes, we put carrots out

So excited!

Mikey was very anxious to help Joey with the whole Easter thing. (Church was at 9:00, thus the half dressed Mikey. He was supposed to be getting dressed at this point.)

 

We The Easter Bunny put some special eggs in a separate room just for Joey's own little egg hunt. He loved it!

The Post-Church Photo Shoot

This is what happens when we try to get a nice picture of all of our kids smiling--they are never all smiling together

I think this one comes the closest

But one at a time, they have the best smiles around :)

 

Daddy and his little lady

I must have 10 pictures of Luke and Elise like this. Luke just kept kissing her and telling me to take another picture. He is so enamored with her. It's really cute :) 

Elise's first Easter :)

One final (failed) attempt to get all the boys smiling together

Hey, at least they're all looking at the camera!

Happy Easter!

Curious Joe, Part II (aka my full time job)

Well it seems as though I just wasn't finished with all of Joey's adventures. He is at it again. I swear, he never stops!

Let's start with rice. As I mentioned before Joey found a little bag of rice and dumped it all over the family room...that was nothing. On Monday, I came into the kitchen to find this:

You will notice a few other smaller buckets in the background of the first picture. Those are buckets of sugar. He managed to drag each bucket out of the cupboard (and that bucket of rice is not little!) The sugar sprinkled throughout the rice was nice. And even nicer was the rice IN the bucket of sugar. The rice was also not just all over the kitchen floor, but it had spread into every piece of adjoining carpet. So I swept. Then a few hours later I managed to vacuum, which flicked lots more rice back onto the hardwood floor. Tuesday morning I finally got it all swept again and vacuumed and cleaned up.

A little later that day, I walked by the kitchen. All was calm. ONE minute later Luke came running to find me, "Joey is making a mess!"  Sure enough, I ran out just in time to Joey flinging handfuls of rice as far as he could. So I stopped him and set him aside. I set the sugar on the table so I could clean the rice out of it later. I swept up the rice. I turned to put away the broom. I turned around and Joey was up on the table with his hands in the sugar and throwing it on the floor. "Ahhh!" I grabbed him and cleaned off his hands. I turned to move the bucket of sugar from the table to the tall counter. I turned back around in time to see him pulling over a full glass of milk on the table.... *sigh*  That cute kid! Such a handful! But he is so cute and innocent looking that I still just want to kiss his little face all over!

And a few other cute things he has done:

• A a little later that same rice-filled day, I was in the bedroom feeding Elise. I thought Joey had gone downstairs a while before where all the kids were playing. Luke came upstairs and I asked him what Joey was doing. He said, "Playing."  A minute later, there was a knock on the door. Luke answered it before I could run out. I overheard someone say, "is your mom here?" I ran to the door. Luke and Joey were there in the entryway and my neighbor was standing in the door. Then she told me that she had just found Joey wandering down the street. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!  I can't believe it!  Of course I felt HORRIBLE! But also wasn't surprised that Joey was the first of my kids to ever escape.
• The picture below is of Joey wrapping up a Wacko stuffed animal in one of Elise's blankets like a baby as he is quite enamored with babies now. So cute! What wasn't so cute was how he then stuffed that blanket, Wacko doll included into Elise's white and pink filled laundry basket when I wasn't looking. I then washed it all.... See that red nose and hat?  Elise's white blankets and clothes now have a nice pink swirled/spattered look.

 

• We had just brought home a giant bag of animal cookies. They were freshly opened on the counter that Joey couldn't reach...or couldn't reach until that day. He managed to reach the bag and moments later we had a kitchen floor covered in cookie.
• A half an hour after the animal cookie incident, we had just finished mixing up the Easter egg dye to dye eggs. We turned away to gather the eggs and turned back around in time to see him pull over the blue cup. So we had blue egg dye all down our white cabinets and wood floor (note to selves, Joey can now reach the kitchen counter top.)
• A few days ago, Lance's Easter candy was up on a ledge that Joey couldn't reach...until that day. A moment later I heard a very large crash and Lance's whole basket of candy was all over the floor. (I basically never put the vacuum away last week.)
• I've heard many a horror story about kids removing their own diapers and creating giant messes. Guess who just started taking his own diaper off... We've never had a child who did this regularly. But it's no surprise that Joey is our superstar to do it.

That's our boy!

Baby Elise comes home

We are having so much fun with our baby Elise. She's just so stinking cute! The boys all can't get enough of her. Luke and Mikey always want to hold her and Luke is even willing to do things just for the privilege of kissing her. (i.e. "I will eat all my food after I get to kiss baby sister." Seriously.) And whenever Joey hears her crying he stops what he's doing and runs to her saying, "baby! baby!" Well, it's more like "beebee, beebee!"  He is very concerned when she's sad and he tries to help by shoving the binki into her mouth.Yes, this is one taken care of little girl.

 Her first bath at home

 All cleaned up and awake!

 She's never awake for long

 There's nothing I love more than napping with my baby :)  (You may notice that she looks a little yellow above :(  She had pretty bad jaundice. We spent her whole first week under home photo therapy lights and running to the hospital every day to get her blood drawn to check the bilirubin levels. It was rough.)

 This is my favorite picture of her ever!  She looks so good in pink :) 

So in love with this girl!

Curious Joe

A few months ago our little Joey really seemed to suddenly kick the "curiosity" up a notch...or 10. Of course he was into things now and then before that, but now he leaves no stone unturned. (Perfect timing, wouldn't you say? Just as my growing belly made chasing him around a breeze and now my little bundle of pink joy that really only takes up a few moments of my day... ;)

Unfortunately I don't have pictures of all of his adventures. But I do have these few. 

One of the best ones has been his attempts at cleaning the fireplace. (Or at least that's my best guess at what he was doing.)  This incident captured below was actually his third and most successful attempt (and by successful, I mean he managed to get the most ash and fireplace crap out onto the hearth and carpet and, clearly, onto his person.)

This was very shortly before Elise was born so I was hugely pregnant and trying to rest every chance I got. I knew Joey was out in the family room and knew he was "quietly watching a show." I was about to get up and go get him, but then I feel asleep. The next thing I knew he was clomping into my room. He was still in his pjs with one of Mikey's snow boots on one foot and one of Luke's on the other, while holding a blackened basketball and the biggest, blackened-faced grin on his face. Well, you can see below. How can I stay mad at a face like that.

In case you're wondering, ash doesn't actually come off very easily. The kid had black nostrils for a while. There were also little black hand prints all over the house. He had obviously wandered around a little before coming to find me in my room.

One of Joey's other favorite activities is to empty the salt shaker. I try hard to not leave it on the table, but I'm only human. I forget. This was one of his more thorough attempts. I'm pretty sure the salt shaker was completely empty. Usually I catch him in the act and stop him. This time he was able to finish the job undetected. 

Some of his other "adventures" not captured on film include:

• emptying an entire bag of rice all over the family room carpet (it didn't photograph well) 
• covering his hands, face, and legs with LOTS of lotion and creating a full circle of lotion around himself in the carpet 
• climbing up on the TV stand and getting BEHIND the TV, sometimes knocking the power out on the TV and always getting stuck

That's our little Joe! :)

The Princess Has Arrived!

Our little lady, Elise Hart Bastian arrived on March 14, 2012. She weighed 8 lbs, 7 oz and was 20 inches long born at 5:02 pm. She has already turned the house upside down. And here are a million pictures followed by the whole story :)

 

Who knew the hospital would stick cute little bows on her head?!  (Probably someone who has had a girl before.)

 Our first moments together

 Can you see it? He's already wrapped around her little finger :)

 Her first bath

  Oh she's so cute!

  Joey was the first to visit with dad, but he wasn't really all that into baby sister. He just jumped on my bed and laid down on me with the biggest smile on his face. Poor baby who is no longer the baby! :( He's having a bit of a hard time.

 Then Lance took Joey home for a nap and brought the other two back after school. They were much more excited about baby sister.

 

   Getting ready to go home

 First ride in the car seat

 And Elise arrives at home

 Joey was much more excited to see her when she first arrived. Now he's kind of hit and miss with Elise. Sometimes he loves her and sometimes he's had enough of her.

 Mikey never gets enough of her :)

 

We sure love her!

And now a little birthing story. You can take this or leave this. It's for my own personal record.

It wasn't too exciting as I was induced, but it sure lasted way longer than we thought since each labor has gotten shorter and shorter. But this little lady sure took her time getting here!  We went in at about 7:45 am. The doctor broke my water at around 8:30 and I got the epidural at around 9:30 or 10:00. The epidural is my least favorite part of all of pregnancy and delivery (though still worth it once those contractions really kick in.) This epidural, however, really took horrible to the next level. At this point, though, all I knew was that it seemed to take a little bit longer than usual.

So my progress was slow. I sat at 4 cm for hours. Then made it to a 5 1/2...and then sat for another few hours. Finally at about 4:15, I made it to 7 cm. 10 minutes later I was a 9 1/2! The epidural was not really working from about my pelvic bone down which was really horribly painful at that point. Finally we got that working a little better and waited for the doctor. At about 5:00 I started pushing. I pushed 2 1/2 times during one contraction and out she came at 5:02! The best part? No stitches! Yay! She was beautiful and perfect and off we went to our new room.

Well as the night progressed I realized that I was getting the worst headache ever!  The last two nights I had slept absolutely horribly so I chalked it up to lack of sleep and a rough day. Well I woke up the next morning with the headache going strong. Like seriously the worst headache I have ever had. It was pulsing down my neck and shoulders and sitting up was absolutely torture. That was when the anesthesiologist came in and told me about the "complication" during the epidural. He punctured the spinal fluid which was now leaking and causing my brain to "sink" in my head. A complication not unheard of, but still my nightmare. It was my nightmare because the fastest fix was to do a blood patch which involved the same process as an actual epidural.

And in fact it was worse. So I had to get a second epidural that morning except the anesthesiologist had to get into my back and then wait there while the nurse dug around with an IV needle to get blood to give to the anesthesiologist to force into the little spot in my back. That resulted in the worst pressure in my back and a horrible back ache for the next few days while the headache slowly subsided. That was the worst morning in all of my pregnancies and births ever! *sigh*  But we made it through. Of course she was worth it :)

Bless you!

This one of Joey's cutest bits right now. He just started doing it one day. I never get tired of it! (And of course, whenever he sees the camera he has to stop and say, "cheese!" It makes it hard to get videos of the kid.)

 

No one can get enough of this kid. He's just so darn cute!