Happy Thanksgiving!

Another amazing year of ups and downs, but we are always thankful for the people in our lives who help keep the ups way higher than the downs.  The boys just continue to amaze us, and we feel truly thankful for them every day!  For me personally, I am ever so thankful for my husband.  He is the constant care giver for our family in more ways that just earning the moola!  Raleigh had an awful fall on Wednesday, and as I called to let him know we were on our way to the ER, he was so quick to say he would meet us there.  I cannot tell you how much I feel his support unconditionally.  Additionally, it was great to have even more supporters when I was able to leave Gus with our neighbor and friend, Miss A, so I could go with only one two and a half year old!  Truly thankful for her kindness!!!  My mom of course was also there in a blink of an eye, her selflessness this year is beyond amazing.  Seriously, this week alone she got my car washed, and scrubbed my awful cream colored sink that is my nemesis, and of course cooked a delicious turkey yet again this year.  Of course, my dad is always there too, making us ridiculously amazing food on a almost daily basis.  Some days I think I may starve without him!  We are thankful that we got to spend another birthday on Thanksgiving with the big guy, especially after a hard year dealing with so many heart issues.  We are thankful that Auntie Peta is joining us next week for the entire month.  The boys even get to spend Christmas with her!  What a treat.  Sadly, the grandies are not joining her this year, but we are thankful that we get to see them soon in the new year.  I am so thankful for the friends who have come into our lives just because we had twins!  How lucky to have joined a spectacular group of women and moms that my kids can enjoy time with their kiddos, but I really benefit from their friendships most.  I am thankful that my best friend in the whole world is still my best friend after 30 years and I even get to see her once and a while despite our different states of residence.  Simple things I am thankful for, include, nap time, wine, great books, time to read, music, time to listen to my music loudly, mom’s night out, and not having to work (well outside of the home that is). I could go on and on and on and on!

 

We were even more blessed this year with a change in plans the day after Thanksgiving to meet our friend Miss Stacey yet again for free entry into Disney. We even got to see Stacey’s mom, whom I have not seen in probably 18 years.  We hit Animal Kingdom, and although it was busy and we got rained on before the parade, we all still had fun. It was great to enjoy the park with Daddy and the boys.  We got to spend a lot more time in the dinosaur area of the park, and I have to say, it is really cool.  I still think Busch Gardens blows away all other zoos and animal parks in regards to animal proximity, but this has the coolness factor of Disney, so it was still great.  The animal sightings on the Kilimanjaro Safari experience was spectacular!  The weather was slightly cooler than our last trip, and it was overcast, so a ton of animals were just chilling in the savannah.  Amazing.

 

Back to Raleigh’s fall.  He fell up the stairs in our backyard. Miss A and I were on the porch, just opposite of where he fell, and heard him hit the cement and I was truly thankful he did not hit is head anywhere except his chin because I think he may have knocked himself out.  Unfortunately, he hit his chin just right so he left himself with a pretty big gash. I knew as soon as I saw it he would need stiches.  So off to the ER we headed where bravely endured the three stitches along his chin. Now he has matching scars to Poppy, me, and about 50% of the population who fell on their chins at about 2 years of age!  It was more painful on me…I think.  He did not cry to badly, and even slept like a champion that night and ever since.  He really hates getting his Band-Aid changed, but even that is getting to be less stress on him.  I cannot tell you how painful it was to help hold him down while they put in the stitches. It took two other nurses to hold him down, on top of him being completely swaddled in a bed sheet.  Whew!  He is  strong little bugger.  His pain tolerance is amazingly high; probably stemming from his time in the CVICU. 

Here is a picture from the day after the fall. Looking good.  It is just now getting to the point of being itchy, so we hope it is not too bad before he goes to get them removed on Wednesday this next week.

Here are a few pictures from Thanksgiving – love the shirts the boys did themselves for the occasion – and Disney.  If you are reading this, just know how thankful I am, it makes me super happy!  What makes me even happier is a comment or two every once and a while…Enjoy!

the next two picture are pretty indicative of how much the boys don’t want to take pictures right now!  They may smile, but mostly don’t want to look at the camera!  Oye, I thought I had them trained;-P

Here is a piece of sweetness. My favorite part of Thanksgiving happened during this picture taking.  Matthew and I had just kissed and Gus looked at me, then looked at Matthew and said “Daddy loves you too, Mommy.”  Then he reached over and planted one on Rals.  Ah, at least we are doing well at “training” them to be sweethearts!  What good men they will be some day!

Snakes, meanwhile, Daddy was standing a good 20 feet away, not these boys, they just went up and petted them!

Those were a few of my favorite shots, but here is a cute slideshow of us and the “manimals”

Where We Are & What we’ve Been Doing

First, I have to say, my awesome, smart, great hubby fixed the picture disaster and now we have everything restored and now we are currently working on backing everything up!

 

The boys are continuing to amaze us every day.  It is not all roses, mind you, but in the bigger picture, they are truly amazing little boys.  How awesome is it that they have built in play mates and a brother to challenge them, play with, love on, and talk to whenever they want to?  They are really into being like Daddy right now.  Gus loves it when I put his Daddy’s hair fudge in his hair and every time, he looks in the mirror admiring himself and saying how much he looks just like Daddy. Augustus also is quite the mama’s boy right now, too. He just comes up to me and gives me big kisses and hugs so hard that he basically jumps on me any time he sees me after a brief detachment (i.e. after I go to the bathroom). He also say “I love my mommy” ALL the time. Life is good, right?  The boys are getting more affectionate with each other, telling each other they love them and giving hugs and kisses in  between the occasional hit, or toy swipe. 

 

Raleigh continues to astound us with his recall ability, in particular with direction, but it applies to everything.   Both boys were read new library books yesterday, and were able to retell Daddy and Nonnie what I had described to them.  This book was all about tractors and was not so much a story, but pictures with descriptions of what the tractors could do.  One tractor was hauling manure, so I described that, including what manure was, and why it was useful and both boys were able to retell about the manure tractor in their own ways.  Wow, development again at its best!  Daddy found a cool show for the boys on PBS that he set up to DVR daily.  It is called Word World.  If you have not seen it, the characters are letters that together make up the word and it still looks like what it is spelling out.  Here is a link so you can see what I mean. http://www.wordworld.com/ I think this shot is from an episode Daddy and Rals were watching so sweetly together.

The boys watched a particular episode with fire trucks in it and seriously, one time and the boys remember every thing about it.  They constantly spout off that “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”  That leads in to their seriously wicked imaginations.  They not only drag their mini-fire trucks around everywhere pretending to climb the ladder, save the day, and yell “fire rescue,” they also spot fires out when we are driving and talk about saving the day and how to spray fire hoses and use extinguishers. Wow!  GnR are so excited for Christmas!  They say “Merry Mis-mass” all the time when they see decorated Christmas trees, and yell out when they spot a “ho ho man,” aka, Santa Claus.  We have already gotten to see Santa Claus at Sea World as you saw in the last post, but soon enough we are going to ride to the North Pole with Nonnie, Auntie Peta and Daddy, too.  I cannot wait to see how excited they are that day.  Of course we need to celebrate Thanksgiving first, but they are not really understanding the concept yet.  Hopefully they will soon.  Of course, Grandpa Pickle’s birthday is the same day, so we’ll be celebrating that the same day…so they probably won’t really fully understand until next year. 

 

We visited a fire station yesterday as part of our multiples group.  The boys had fun, and were happy to volunteer to go first for every thing the firefighters let the do.  They were really good about waiting their turns, too. Yes, the first shot looks like I took a pee right before they snapped the picture, but good news, is that it was just from the fire hoses the kids got to play with!

 

Ever the busy social calendar, here the boys had fun at their friend Hannah’s birthday party – where they got in touch with their feminine side and rode her pink scooter! 

They also helped Daddy try to fix the sod yet again.

Here is a picture of the boys at the big boy table for dinner celebrating Pickles birthday a little early while his mom came to visit. Yup, the boys got to meet their first great-grandparent, Gigi Miriam who visited from Green Bay. 

We’ve enjoyed Busch Gardens some more, too.

Gus chatted with Nannie in the car.

The boys celebrated Veteran’s Day in great style.

 

We hope everyone has a safe and wonderful Thanksgiving this week!  I know we have a lot to be thankful for and I am working on remembering that when things are going completely nutso during those long days!  We cannot wait to see Auntie Peta next week, too!  Good luck on exams, Pete!  The boys will see you next Monday morning!

Photo Disaster

Well, we’ve been MIA in blogging mainly to do my BFF visiting with her eldest daughter and our travels around Orlando keeping us very busy, and then the sickies invaded the entire Hamilton household…even Nonnie managed to catch it.  Yuck!  The boys have been fine for about a week now, so we are hoping that first cold was the worst of it for Winter. 

Back to the disaster.  This week when I tried to put a cd together of my friend’s twinkies birthday party pictures, I noticed I could not get any pictures off of the server. Yes, it takes an entire server to store all my pictures. I thought nothing of it, went on with my busy week, but then I tried to do a little catching up last night and was still unable to get to the server.  Low and behold, after Matthew tried without success, he called HP and they said, well, the server is just a computer without a monitor, and it sounds like the hard drive crashed.  Huh?  What? Excuse me?  Of course we were devastated at the news, but Matthew has been able to take a few files off the server and put them on our computer, so I am hoping he can salvage most of them…although it is very time consuming and he was up past midnight last night trying to work on it.  Fingers crossed he or some other professional can work their magic to restore the files.  I will be looking into Mozy storage immediately, but if anyone else has any suggestions of where they store their data, I would love to hear it!!!

Disney was awesome. My BFF since I was two and I met up with another “old” friend who lived on our most awesome street as a kid.  We were able to bum our way into Epcot and the Magic Kingdom for free. I was so sad to hear that the boys, Matty and my mom could not meet us on the Sunday of the trip because of their awful coughs, but we still had fun.  It was ridiculously cold that weekend, so that was a little bit of a downer, especially with how ridiculously beautiful it  has been, but we managed to stay warm.  I know the boys would have loved, loved, all the princesses Annie got to see that day.  Here are a couple of cute pics…stolen from FB.  I am thankful I found time to upload a few pictures after our trip…really, really, really hoping I can get them all back from the server, sniff, sniff.

We’ve been at a lot of play dates this week to make up for lost time during our sickies.  My favorite one was the super hero play date.  My awesome friend Sara got an idea from another web site where you create a cape for the kids to decorate out of an old t-shirt.  I think the parents t’s worked great since they had a bit of length, but even an old, dirty, stained one of theirs that still fits around their noggins would work as well.  You just cut on one side of a seam if your shirt has one to help it not completely fray up, and then cut the sleeves off and around the neckline to maintain the cape, and voila, super hero cape extraordinaire!!! You can even use the sleeves to make a mask!

Yesterday we spent the most beautiful weather day at Sea World.  It is crazy to me to be wearing a tank top, shorts and flip flops in the middle of November.  The boys were really good for the most part…no real disasters of running off, talking back, or throwing any tantrums – it seems they save those for days we stick close to home – so it was even more enjoyable for all of us.  The dolphin area of Sea World, not even the amazing Horizons show, just the feeding area and underwater viewing area, are just too amazing. Not to mention that their artic area now hosts a Polar Express experience; which is super cool since that is the boys favorite movie. It was the first one they watched, and couple that with trains, and the idea of Christmas, and they are sold.  They got to talk to Santa.  Both were eager to let him know they wanted a big digger and a fire truck.  However, when we went to stand next to the big version of the actual Polar Express train, the boys were timid and scared – something I was not sure they boys possessed.  I think the next time we visit, of course we’ll be going again and again, they will be more sure of it.  This was the last thing we did before departing, so they were over-tired by that point in the day.  Nonetheless, what an extraordinary experience for these boys.  They have seen the Shamu show more times that I had ever before, and they are not even three yet.  They love it and I cannot wait to see them grow to appreciate it more and more.  The pictures of the dolphins are cool, the top ones are of a dolphin before feeding time.  He/she was using a leaf to play catch right next to the viewing area.  So playful and adorable!!!

One of my favorite shots ever!

Rals, super excited to touch the ice in the artic area where they visited Santa.

Raleigh whispers to Shamu Santa that he wants a digger…

Rals entranced at the Shamu show

In other news, we are so happy that our friends Heath & Jane welcomed another healthy, beautiful girl in Sydney. Happy birth day Siena! Well wishes to two of my friends who are not feeling their best, Miss A and Miss N.  I hate to see you girls in pain – get well soon!!!