A few months ago Michael fixed up our laptop and now I have a way to blog faster and more eficently again! So here is to more blog posts and less spelling errors and quicker uploads! I have been blogging on my phone for the last few years and it takes weeks just to upload one post with 20 pictures attached, and lets not talk about autocorrect! Ugh! I probably look like I didn't finish 4th grade grammar! Who knows! Maybe I shouldn't blame autocorrect! Just a little side note... This post has taken me 3 weeks to write so maybe I shouldn't blame my phone entirely!
I love blogging! I love watching my kiddos grow and I love being able to quickly look up milestones to compare them... until I realized I never documented it on my blog. I feel a little overwhelmed with catching up on the last 3 months so I may just start from now and hopefully go back later and catch up.
Life with three littles is so hard! I look at all these mommies around me and think their life is so perfect and they have this mom thing down but then Michael reminds me of all the fun things we do and they probably think the same thing about me. Its nice how the internet paints this perfect picture of all of us (said sarcasticly). No one sees our flaws and our struggles. Life with three has really kicked my butt, then at night I look back and feel so blessed and then we wake up all the craziness starts all over again. Our best days are the days we get out of the house and go to the beach, park, pool, shopping, and in 6 days, DISNEYLAND!! I am so grateful to get out of the house, although it is a struggle to get out of the house it is so worth it when I carry each sleeping baby up the stairs after a great outing. So this is a little recap on some of the great outings we have done this summer without going into great detail of the day... because I honestly don't remember most of the details anyways.
The beach is so much easier now that I can put Ella down and she plays happily in the sand. She is such a SoCal beach babe! I love it!! She also knows what my phone means now and does a cheesy smile when I pull it out.
At the beginning of the summer our really good friends from Idaho came down for their annual Disneyland trip. Our passes were already blacked out for the summer so we couldn't go play at Disneyland with them but we had a great day at the beach with them!
After cutting Walt's hair at the beginning of the summer everyone told me how cute his buzz was even though I had taken the time to layer it so when it came time for his next hair cut I went as short as it goes! I regretted it later that day when we went swimming and I had to put sunscreen on his head too but it was so funny cutting it and it was really fun to rub his head for a few weeks!
I don't know if you know this but I LOVE living in Orange County or Orange City as Olivia calls it or "Her World". I especially love our city, we are tucked up in the hills so we are about a 15 minute drive to the freeway so we are far enough away from all the hustle and bustle of city life. We have the greatest community with tons of things to do so we don't need to leave our "little" town. This picture is at the beach club. It is a pool with sand around the edges so the kids go back and forth swimming and playing in the sand. It looks out over the RSM lake and the lake has a path around it that we walk quite often in the mornings, after we grab a donut of course! It is heaven and the view is amazing! I walk out of our Walmart and I feel like I am in a tropical paradise! I absolutely love where we live!
One morning my Aunt texted me and said she was going to the beach in 30 minutes and asked if we wanted to join, of course we did! I got us packed and ready and out the door in THIRTY MINUTES!! Olivia and Walt had a blast playing with Colt and Lola, my cousins kids. They call them cousins too and always talk about them.
One Saturday we decided that we wanted to go to the San Diego Zoo. We had a lot of fun and we are glad we got the season passes so hopefully soon we can go to the Safari Park. It was hot and now that I think about it, it was the 4th of July weekend so it was really crowded. I think it would be fun to go soon now that school is back in and go during the week when there aren't many people. I also realized how amazing the tiny Idaho Falls Zoo was. It isn't as big as the SD Zoo but it sure did have a lot of the same animals.
After the zoo we stopped by the San Diego Temple. It was beautiful! We ended the Zoo in bad moods but when we got to the temple the kids were so happy! It definitely is a very special place!
We took a spur of the moment trip to Idaho and it was so much fun! My mom was back and forth on if she could go so on Thursday night at 10 she said lets go tomorrow so I packed my stuff and I took the kids on my own! It was the hardest trip ever without Michael for many reasons but mostly because I missed him so much! It was really hard to be in "our" place without him. Everything we did on our trip made me miss him and wished he was with us. It made me realize that home is DEFINITELY wherever Michael is! And Idaho still holds a very special place in my heart. I will write a post just for Idaho since we saw so many people and did so much.
The best part of the trip was seeing all my friends! I really miss my friends! I have been struggling a lot lately with not being happy and Michael pointed out to me that a big reason is that I don't have friends like my Idaho Girls here in California. In Idaho I was always having play dates every day or Bunco nights and I don't have that here so that made saying good bye to my friends just as hard as it was the first time.
We have been to the pool a ton this summer! Once I found our groove getting to the pool we have been going a lot. I loved it! That little pool behind Olivia in the picture is about a foot and a half deep and PERFECT for the kids. We start at that pool and end in the big pool. When Michael is with us I'll let Olivia take her puddle jumper off but when I have 3 kids in the pool with me I don't trust her... yet.
One night I took the kids night swimming and we had a blast! I put Ellanore to bed and Michael stayed with her and studied for his class that he is taking... more on that later. I tried to get a cool picture of the kiddos jumping in together but they wouldn't cooperate so it just looks like Walt is drowning and Olivia is tripping.
We go to the park a lot. Olivia asks to go every day and I should just take them but a part of me really doesn't like the park... or maybe its just the nasty sand. I have let go of that hate and we have gone a lot more this summer. Our park is covered so it is super nice. There are parks on every corner in our city, we should try all of them but it is so convenient to just come to the one up our street and the kids love it so Im not going to worry about it.
As we have gone to the pool more we have started to see the same people and Olivia made friends with a little girl who let her borrow her goggles. It changed Olivia's life! We went and got some goggles that day and went swimming the next day and Olivia was a fish! She only came up for breaths and swam around the pool for 3 hours!
We have gone on a lot of walks lately. We need to get out to have a healthy relationship so some days walks around our lake are what keep us alive. Three kids at home all day every day is a lot of work.
A week ago we went on a beach adventure and tried a new beach. This beach has an elevator to get to the sand. It was late when we got there but it was so nice to sit on the beach in the dark and listen to the waves and let the kids play in the sand for a few minutes while we talked.
Every morning the kids ask Michael if he is going to go to work and make sunglasses, he doesn't really make the sunglasses but they think he does. They are aware of what he does for work and now sunglasses play a big part of our out the door routine. Walt always has to have his. Michael has parts to make sunglasses at our house so he put Oakley icons on the sides of Walt and Olivia's target sunglasses.
I love how walt is looking up at his daddy in this picture!
This kid is just the cutest!! He is growing up way too fast!!
Right next to the donut shop is 5 buck pizza so for dinner we grabbed a pizza and went on a walk, I got something else of course! I love our family time!
This girl needs her own post! Im sad I didn't do a monthly update for her. She is a busy girl! she climbs the slide she never stops moving and is ALWAYS trying to get what ever Walter has. She only laughs for Olivia and is a total mommy's girl! You can ask to hold her but don't be offended when she whips around and try to get back to me. When we walk out of the apartment her whole body wiggles with excitement. I am so in love with this baby girl!
Look at that face!!!! She has attitude!!! Her personality is really starting to show now and it is so fun!! She is sassy and sweet and funny!! I could eat her up!
This last week has been so hard! On Monday Olivia got sick, any time she gets sick it is ALWAYS croup. She had an awful cough, fever, congestion, and was super cranky because she wasn't sleeping. On Tuesday Walter and Ellanore got sick with the same thing and they got the congestion part worse than Olivia. Walter and Olivia don't sleep through the night still so with their colds they were up even more than usual just tossing and turning... in MY bed! Ellanore struggled with sleeping this week too which was hard because she just starting to sleep through the night again now that her teeth have come in. I got sick on Wednesday and I had a really bad case of the aches along with the head cold. On Thursday Michael worked from home and was super helpful. We all started to feel a little better by Saturday and Michael started to feel sick. It is hard when we are all sick at the same time. We don't get much sleep when we aren't sick because the kids are always waking up at night and coming into our room but this week was brutal. I slept on the couch a few times and Michael slept on the couch once. Its hard to recover when you aren't getting rest.
Michael is taking classes for a certification in supply chain so he is gone on Monday and Wednesday nights from 5-10 and it has been hard. So on Monday before he came home for lunch he asked if I needed anything from the store to get me through the night and I asked for 4 packages of Oreo Thins as a sort of joke... but hoping he really would deliver and he totally did!! He is the best!! Thank you Michael, Oreos, Milk, and Zarbees for helping me through a tough week! We did it!!
Anyways, this was a really long ramble of random things from this summer. I hope to do a more detailed blog post on a few events like Idaho and the kids but if it doesn't happen its because I am trying to catch up with my life.
