Outside Fun

Until our yard is done with grass and a fence our outside time around home is limited to walks or hanging out on the deck. We have a gate (with a lock on it) on the deck because: 1. there are no stairs yet and 2. it is a long way down even if there were stairs. Grandma and Grandpa Reiter got the babies a water table in the spring as an early 2nd birthday gift and it's been great to have out there.


Maggie is every bit as into trucks, cars and tractors as the boys are.


Mitchell took a break from playing in the water to check out the tractor working in the yard a few houses down from us.


Casey looks pretty serious here, but he's the one who thinks it's hilarious to splash and get everyone wet.


A while back we went to my friend Jen's place to play around in the back yard. Our kids always have a lot of fun playing with Luke who is 4 months older and Jordyn who is a 5 year old little mother to our muchkins. The big hit of the morning was the Barbie Jeep. We did our best to get a group shot of all the kids but as you could imagine, it didn't work too well.



Casey had fun preparing salads for everyone.

Life has seemed pretty crazy around here lately with lots of things going on. I don't have time to get into it now - I'm off to work on the never ending pile of laundry and get packed to go to Muenster tomorrow. I'm hoping things will start to quiet down a little next week.

We Found Our Nanny

What a relief! She is a young girl who is doing her social work degree by distance education for the next 2 years so she is totally open on the days and times that we need her. She hasn't done any actual nannying before BUT for over a year now she has worked in various emergency foster homes. She described her experience in these homes and the one thing that immediately caught my attention was that the fact that she deals with numerous infants and children that are very irritable and have behavioural and cognitive problems. Numerous irritable children? I wanted to hire her on the spot after she said that! I made up a contract and we just got it all signed and finalized today. I feel really good about her and I know that I will be able to leave the house and not worry about whether she could deal with our 3 kids when they all decide to be monsters at the same time. That's what I needed to find in someone in order to be comfortable going back to work. So, October 4th I will once again be someone other than just mommy, back into the real world. My to do list before I go back to work gets longer everyday!

When I started looking into setting up a contract for our nanny I got in touch with a friend who I used to play hockey with. Heather has a nanny for her 2 boys. She gave me a copy of her contract and helped me out with a bunch of questions I had. On a totally unrelated note we got talking about her online business that she started. It's an online store that carries a variety of household and personal items, there's some really neat things on there. Another nice thing is that she stocks everything on the site and has a great delivery/shipping policy. If you're interested you can check it out at http://www.area306.com/store/

If you enter the coupon code "summer" you will save 10% at the checkout (before taxes and shipping).

The babies were being so cute the other day. They were walking around the house holding hands....everyone together and no one fought over who held who's hand! It was awesome! They are starting to do more things like this together and although they still fight like crazy at times I think they are starting to see each other more as buddies too. Here are a few pictures of them going for their walk together.




Daniel was away last weekend at baseball provincials but was home with us on Monday so we took a trip to the spray park. Mitchell and Maggie got sprayed unexpectedly right when we got there so it took them a little while to warm up to the spray again.

Casey was so excited to get his bucket filled with water. He loves the spray park the most.

Mitchell giving daddy knucks.

Maggie was pretty content to hang out on the side lines, eat all of the snacks and hide under the table.



We ended off our nice day at Fuddrucker's where they ate a lot of crayon and a little supper.

House Pictures

We are so happy with how things have turned out with our new house. It's a great neighborhood and although there is still a lot construction and mess around right now, the kids love all of the big trucks and tractors that come with that. We are a 5-10 minute walk along a path to a park and also to where the elementary school is planned to be built. We can also walk to the zoo, spray park and library in about 30 minutes. We are just a few houses away from Gail, Dave and their kids (my sis and brother-in-law). We also have a number of friends in the neighborhood or close by. We love the layout of our house. It's a modified bi-level which means we have 2 bedrooms on the main floor and then our master bedroom is up above the garage. Downstairs we have 2 bedrooms and a walk out basement. There is a lot more room for everyone to run and space to play. But with a new home does come a lot of work.

We had been waiting for well over a month to get the stucco and driveway done on our house but the record amounts of rain that we got really slowed things down. After the wrong stucco color was initially put onto the house and then a storm messed up the freshly poured concrete on our back patio, everything got done.

The kitchen and dining room.



The living room. I love having an open floor plan, that was the major thing that we wanted to change from our old house. The babies are content now to play anywhere in the house whereas in our old house they liked to be somewhere that they could see me...which was usually in the kitchen.


Down to the entrance area and up to our bedroom above the garage.

This is the play room/change room. It will eventually be Maggie's room when it's time.


The bedrooms are a lot bigger in this house which is so nice. In our other house we had the 3 cribs in their room in a "U" shape and very little room in the middle of them all. This is their room now, with so much extra space. We still have all 3 together sharing a room, I think they would miss each other if we split them up.



This is our downstairs family room area. We try to keep most of the toys in one area, but I'm sure you can imagine how well that works.




We had to cage off the eliptical machine because the babies were using it as a jungle gym. And for the record, yes it does get used for more than a close hanger...I use it to exercise on and the babies use it for toy storage.


This is the view from our deck. We don't have direct access to the path that you can see but it only takes us 30 seconds to get there. We love being able to look out the back and see open green space and the kids like to watch all of the people and puppies walking on the path, not to mention all of the tractors around with the all of the new home construction.

The dirt area is ours and our neighbours' yards that haven't been finished yet.

We are waiting to get the final grade of our lot done and then we can get started on landscaping in August (fence, lawn, and sprinklers).

Videos

I've had some videos that I wanted to post here from the past month but for some reason I haven't been able to get them to play. So I finally uploaded them onto You Tube and then put the privacy setting to unlisted so no one else can find them.

These videos give you a bit of a glimpse into our kiddos being their goofy (and noisy) selves. This is what it sounds like in our house a good part of the day when they are awake. The odd time it's a little quieter, sometimes it's a lot louder.






This one isn't really them being loud, it's just Casey being really cute!


Our mealtime bootcamp has been going pretty well. What I've been doing is anytime they are in their chairs and throw any or all of their food or plate they come straight out their chair and just have to hang out while everyone else finishes their meal. At first they are okay with coming out but when they realize that they're missing out on all the good stuff that comes at the end of the meal like blueberries, grapes, etc., they are crying and whining to get back in their chairs. That's when I tell them again "No, we don't throw food, you're all done". I've been really praising whoever eats their meal with no throwing and when I take them out of their chairs we do 3 cheers (with the hip, hip, hoorays). It was so funny today...Maggie ate her meal good but then threw her sippy cup at the end so I took her out of her chair and just set her down (after telling her no throwing). When I took the boys out I made a big deal of how good they did and we did 3 cheers. Maggie watched us and then came up to me and said "Hoorays? Hoorays?" She was upset because I didn't give her 3 cheers and the hip, hip, hoorays. It was priceless!

So, overall I would say mealtimes have been substantially better since I started this last Friday and I think it should only get better. Casey hasn't thrown anything at all since then, he's just observed and learned through watching Maggie and Mitchell get ousted from their chairs. I feel better about mealtimes now too.

Bootcamp Begins Tomorrow

It's time to do something drastic or else mealtimes around here may send me to the looney bin. Picking up plates, forks, bibs, endless amounts of food and sippy cups got old a long time ago but I'm still doing it, mainly because we only have so many plates and forks and we don't have a dog to clean up the leftover food. If I put too much food on the trays everything gets thrown off. So what I do is feed the babies one course at a time: protein, starch, veggies, fruits and then milk at the end. But what happens throughout the duration of the entire meal is they throw what they don't eat or want of the food (each kind of food), plus at some point their plates and forks get thrown as well. They also often will rip off their bibs and throw them on the floor. When they throw something they don't get it back (food, plates or forks), but what I have been doing is then moving on to the next food because I want to offer them a well rounded meal and don't want them to be hungry.

Well after today I am saying, too bad so sad. If you throw anything, you're done. I got the idea to do this from another triplet mom on the Triplet Connection forum where she said that she did this with her kids. If anyone threw any food or plates/utensils they came out of their chair and didn't get to eat again until the next snack or meal. She said it took a few days of some crying and whining but after those first few days there was no more throwing. A little additional crying and whining in our days won't even be noticed so now is as good of a time as any to try this.

I know that I just need to relax and let go of things a little, if they are really hungry they will eat. I think my mentality around this came from the beginning when they were discharged from NICU and the nurses stressed to us how important it was to get them to take their bottles to catch up on their weights. Well, obviously that was a long time ago and no one here is fading away. So we'll see how boot camp goes tomorrow.

Last weekend we went to the lake again. We try to get at least one weekend out of the summer where everyone in my family can get together out there. It was a great weekend! I think the biggest hit with the babies was playing in the tubes and being pulled around.




I think Mitchell liked being pulled around the most. We heard lots of his famous giggles.



Mitchell gave Brennan a thank you hug for all of his hard work pulling everyone around. Thanks Brennan and Brett!

Casey and Maggie did take their turns doing some pulling.



Maggie also took a little time out to pose with daddy.

My niece Ava was another passenger in the tubes.

Here are a few other pictures of our little Roughrider fans.




They slept through almost all of the game, but our littest fan Calder turned the game around for us once he put on a jersey.