Ha ha!  Look – a link to 108 pictures for your viewing pleasure, complete with captions on most pictures.

Today, Tuesday, March 26th, was our free day. No school, no OT, no gymnastics and seeing that the weather was fairly nice, we headed to the zoo. Nicky has just not been our Nicky for a while. We are not sure if it is a lingering cold, or growing pains but he was a bit on the lethargic side this morning. And because of it, it was a struggle to get him to see any animals, let alone the new lion cubs. After lunch, we headed over to Zoomazium, an indoor playground inside the zoo. Joel and the boys had a great time stacking blocks and playing with felt cutouts of animals. Then, we talked them into going to the outdoor play area. A burst of energy was had by all. Before I knew it, Joel had two sets of twin boys chasing him around the enclosure. Yep, Joel had picked up identical twin boys, a month younger than our boys. Their mom didn’t seem to mind and two sets of twins really wore Joel out. I thought I would have to carry three boys back to our van after that 45 minute session of running about.

What was totally cool about today was the fact that because the weather was nice, we were able to not go straight home but instead, treat us all to ice cream cones at Mukilteo beach after the zoo. We found some nice shells and rocks too for Nicky’s collection when about 5 minutes into our throwing rocks into Puget Sound, Dexter stuck his shoe into the water enough to get his sock wet. For those of you who know Dexter, that was the end to our beach trip.

It is now 8:30pm, the boys are asleep and Joel and I want to be too. I love it when we can get outside and get into nature.

Oh, and one last comment about the day. It started with me having Dexter clean the boogers off the wall next to his bed. I figured if he had to scrub the 10 or so boogers stuck solid to the wall, maybe he wouldn’t put anymore there. I’ll let you know how that turns out.

Here are some pictures from today:

In retrospect, this blog post is a bit dated.  It’s now February and Joel has had surgery on his arm and I no longer work for Boeing.  However, the boys singing always puts a smile on my face and hopefully yours.  Enjoy this dated blog post.

in retro-retrospect, it’s now 6 days from Easter and Joel is just now helping me with this…

In families, there are jobs for specific people, or as my friend Monica states, that job is/is not in my column.  Due to Joel’s arms being just about useless through no fault of his own (genetics can be cruel), in my column falls writing blogs.  I bet there are many of you out there that just gave a groan.  I agree, Joel is incredibly funny when he writes but alas, his arms are in braces right now and another surgery has been scheduled, but I digress.  Blog writing: me – picture/video upload: Joel.  It just so happens, that I had to upload the current crop of pictures to our computer.  Holy Cow – there is so much we need to share with you all.  I am sorry we are so far behind and so much has happened.  Little did I realize that in staying home the past three months, I would get nothing done during my day.  I had this unrealistic picture that I would be productive.  But no, I actually have to play with the boys.  ;)  Play, chore, play, chore, play, chore – that is my day.  Blogging and exercise somehow haven’t found a time slot yet.  Working on that.  And yes, come early January, I will officially be a stay at home mom.  Bye bye Boeing – see you in a couple of years.

Anyway, to bring this monologue back to the title “Holiday Cheer”, in the wake of all the tragedy that has occurred on the east coast and that has left me in tears, I thought we could all use some good, old fashion, holiday cheer.

The other day, the boys picked up their cardboard guitars and started to sing.  Future American Idol contestants?  One never knows……  Enjoy their show and I hope it gives you as much joy as it does me.  I LOVE MY BOYS!

Ah children.  Don’t you love how they repeat everything you say?  That happened to Joel today, a couple of times.  First, when hustling the boys up the stairs for a bath after gymnastics, Dexter had clearly pushed Joel’s button and Joel responded with the count to a time out.  Dexter turned around and threw it right back in his face, using the same words.  Hmmmmmm -how does one respond?  Then, sometime this evening, Nicholas walks into the family room and says in a non religious way “Jesus Christ ….” to which I turned to Joel and raised my eyebrows.  I walked away to Joel explaining to Nicholas that we should not take the Lord’s name in vain, that he (Joel) had made a mistake and that Nicky should never say that at school or around me, I think.

Oh, don’t get me wrong.  I had my moments too.  Dexter and I got into a fight right before bed that ended with Dex in a timeout that he then self extended so that he missed all his stories.  That kid is incredibly stubborn.  I think the strain of repeated sickness and lack of firm routine with Joel still home is wearing on everyone.  I know that Joel really wants to be back at work but that his arms are not fully recovered yet.  We are losing track of time – the weekend feel seems to go on forever, and yet we are not accomplishing much.  It is kind of frustrating.

But enough venting.  Two other interesting events.  The boys are greatly improved in their gymnastics class.  It is amazing to see.  At one point in time, Coach Annie had the boys all attempting head stands and had put a round plastic bulls-eye on the floor mat for them to put their heads on.  She said to Dexter, who had gotten tired of not being able to do the exercise, to put his head on the bulls-eye.  In typical Dexter fashion, he picked up the plastic circle and put it on his head.  That was that for that exercise.  :)   We also went on our first light saber walk.  Both Nicky and Dexter were bouncy after dinner.  Seeing them start wildly swinging their light sabers around in the house, I suggested we all go for a walk after dinner.  So, we trudged around our neighborhood, with light sabers in hand, defeating the Sith who attacked up, cutting up Joel’s legs and yelling at Nicky to stop and let Dexter lead for once.  Nicholas never wants to let Dexter go first, unless it’s deemed an unpleasant experience, in which case he volunteers Dexter to go first.

So, that was our day.  Nothing too exciting anymore.  Just cute and not so cute moments from time to time……

Times flies when you are busy.  It doesn’t help that Joel keeps getting sick on the weekends.  First he had surgery.  Then he caught the flu.  Now he has a cold with laryngitis and sounds super squeaky.   And the boys want me to do everything.  Not a minute goes by without them saying “play with me, Mommy.  NO, play with me, Mommy.”  I’m tired and overworked.  The day off I had for my birthday, which was absolutely fantastic (my Mom took the boys for their first overnight and gave Joel and I a night at the Silver Cloud Inn in Mukilteo (Thanks Mom!)) was then undone due to an interview with a prospective birth mom that led to disappointment.  Hard to look in the mirror and not feel a decline in self worth when you consistently fail to be chosen.  We are good parents.  Why won’t someone else let us parent their child?  Enough whining.  The boys had so much fun sleeping in sleeping bags at Grandma’s that Grandpa had to growl in order for them to finally stay in the den and fall asleep at 9:30pm.  ;)

The past two nights I been slogging through kindergarten admission forms.  Twins are fantastic.  I love that the boys are twins except when I have to fill out paperwork for them.  That just absolutely sucks, especially when the online forms make me print them out in order to fill them in.  Needless to say, Joel is cranky because he is always sick (except for my birthday – I wouldn’t allow that), the boys are a bit cranky because I have too many chores and can’t play with them all day, and I’m a bit cranky because I can’t find the time to clean the house and it desperately needs it.  Thus, I’ve been lobbing hard for a paid vacation.  Don’t stay-at-home moms qualify for vacations?????

Oh, and because we said over and over again for the boys to use their words when they are mad or frustrated, Dexter today told me how much he hated me and wanted to hit and kick me.  I gave him a look and told him to think about what he was saying.  He then stopped.  Later tonight he was on my lap, showing me love so the night ended well, but it does hurt.  Nicky’s new trick is to run when he gets a time-out.  He thinks it a game of chase until he gets caught.  As much as I don’t want to laugh as I’m trying to catch him, I inevitably get a smile on my face that I quickly hide once the chase is over.  I do love my boys and I’m so happy that I lucked out and got them.

Ah, the Star Wars movies. Joel and I have dreamed of the moment when the boys would watch the movies instead of having us retell the story verbatim over and over again.  Do you know how hard it is to tell six separate stories in detail because Dexter is a detail kind of a guy?  Do you know how hard it is to listen to the Star Wars movie sound track and have to link music to story?  ”Mommy, what is happening now?  And now?  And now?…..”  After trying to watch the original Star Wars movie a couple of months or so ago and having the boys bolt at the first sign of Vader, we gave up and thought it would never happen and then bam – we’ve now seen movies 1, 2, 4, 5 & 6.  We’re skipping 3 because we didn’t want to expose the boys to brutal deaths of nearly every character from the first 2 films, and to spare them an further exposure to Hayden Christensen’s acting.  Now they know what the Force is all about. Little did we know that they would start using it against us.

It started with random light saber battles that strangely enough, always occurred right before bedtime.   Now, even though they are on the good side of the Force, they have developed their Jedi ways to use against Joel and I.  Good thing Joel takes his Force immunity pills each morning – very important if you want to finish a meal without choking, either on the food or by the hand of a Sith.  I tend to forget.  Oops.  Today, Nicholas looked at me, smiled, raised his hand and started to pinch his fingers together. (For those of you who are a bit rusty on what that means, that is what Darth Vader used to do to strangle people.) Seeing that I am Darth Katieus, I regularly try to strangle them with the dark side of the force. Their force use is better than mine and I’m the one that collapses to the floor, out of breath.  Although, sometimes Dexter will to or our Force battle will collide and knock us both to the ground.  This using of the Force actually works really well when I’m mad, like last night before bed. Instead of yelling at Dexter to go to bed, I used my dark Force stranglehold on him. He grinned from ear to ear, jumped up, raised his arm, and tried to Force strangle me. It made me laugh and the bedtime routine resumed peacefully.  It is an excellent tension reliever.

At lunch today, in unison, Dex and Nicky turned to us, raised their arms and pinched their fingers in the direction of Joel and I.  Joel’s use of the force is much stronger than mine and he was unaffected.  He was a little overconfident, though, after Dexter’s attempts to use the Force to strangle him were unsuccessful.  Dex was whispering, and Joel leaned over to hear better, and Dex skipped the “Force” part of strangling and just went for the jugular.  I, however, collapsed with choked laughter because of their grinning smiles and the fact that they threatened to tape me to the wall and have Joel look after them so they could “break all the rules.”   After the past three days of looking after all of them, I really didn’t mind that thought.  Joel has found out that waving his hand in front of Dexter’s face and saying “you want to finish your peas” really doesn’t work.

Also, in order to watch all the battle scenes, the boys needed to have their guns with them – oops, I mean, “blasters.”  At the first sign of trouble, aka bad guy, they would fire away.  It didn’t matter if they were just in their underwear, (we had to strip down after home haircuts today), they would sit cuddled up in the chair, ready to fire.  As the battle of Endor was heating up, Dex grabbed his bowl of Jelly Bellies (our typical haircut sit-still incentive), ate one, grabbed another and pushed it into Nic’s mouth.  ”It’s bravery pills, Nic!  They’ll help you be brave!”

One of my favorite memories of this time with them was during a rather poignant scene when C-3PO was carrying a dead Jawa to a fire pit.  We try to skip the worst scenes, and Joel had just fast-forwarded past the part where Luke discovers his aunt and uncle’s bodies, but he hit play a little too early.  We were trying to skip around the fact that all the Jawas were dead when Nicky asked what was happening.  Dexter, deadpan and matter of fact, “those are just dead Jawas, Nicky.”

Joel tried to scare them tonight, telling them about the terrible monsters on Endor, and how scared he was when he was younger, but the boys weren’t buying it.  ”Those are just Ewoks, Dad.  Nobody’s scared of Ewoks.”  Then Joel failed again when, while watching the AT-ST Walkers walk through the forest, he said to me, “How cool would it have been to see this on the big screen when it was first released?”  I replied, “I did.”  Apparently he’s forgotten how afraid he’s supposed to be of me, and it isn’t safe for him to make me feel old, especially with my Birthday only 4 days away…

For now the movies are done, but already the boys are asking about movie 7.  At least we can honestly tell them we don’t know the story, and we’ll all just have to wait together – because you know how well that works with almost 5 year olds, right?

I just saw Katie’s post, and figured that if I didn’t put something up soon people would start preparing to send her condolences flowers as she prepared for the funeral.  Whatever it was, it peaked about when Katie put up her post.  I couldn’t move for about the next 18 hours, but fortunately there was no emergent need to run for the bathroom either.  Yesterday I was able to get up an around, though I felt a bit like Dexter whenever he’s asked to help clean up – just too tired to move, with no energy.  Today is much better.  Still not great, but at least I can eat, and turn my head without having to wait for the world to catch up.

Hopefully I can give Katie some time off later so she can put up a better update, and share some of our more entertaining recent adventures later.  For now, though, I’m at the limit of how much I’m allowed to use the computer while my arms are still recovering, so this is about it.  Now I’ve got to go make sure I have things ready for Katie’s birthday on Thursday.  She’s had more than she bargained for on her hands these last few weeks, with the two little buggers and an invalid husband, so hopefully we can show her how much we appreciate her for at least one day.  That’s assuming no one else catches what I had, whatever it was…

It’s 3:34am. I have rubber gloves on as I sit and type. Joel has been up puking all night long – at 11:30pm, 1:45am, and 3:15am. I’ve been up all night too. I can’t sleep. I keep waiting for it to strike me. Please oh please let this not get the boys and I……..