One of Three Back

We spend a wonderful weekend with the kids in New Jersey. It was wonderful playing with my babies again and having Phoebe sit all over my lap with her wet bony butt (it hurts after awhile!). Her butt was wet as there was a pool at our disposal, which was fantastic, as the East Coast of the US is going through a horrible heat wave. It should be over 100 degrees Farenheit today. Ugh! We spent lots of time in the pool, which the babies and Phoebe love. The boys are on their way to being fishy kids like their big sister. I wouldn't be surprised if Phoebe ended up on the swim team in high school. The hard part was we weren't at our house, which makes it difficult to figure out where to put the boys to play when there are tons of people around, which was only on the 4th itself. The other days, we could put up barriers on the deck and let them play there.

Liam is catching up to his big brother in the physical skills. He's pulling himself up to stand and can do everything Tommy can do, except he's not as good at sitting himself down as Tommy is, but he's been standing for a few weeks now. I'm so proud of Liam. In the past month, he's learned to hold his own sippy cup, push himself to sit and pull himself to stand. He can crawl on his hands and knees, but he still prefers to commando crawl as he can go faster that way still. I can't even see calling him Keebler anymore as he's losing his elf appearance and looking more like a little boy. I love it!

We'll be picking the boys and Niki up tomorrow night (Wednesday night), as Niki has a doctor appointment on Wednesday, so her and the boys stayed behind still in New Jersey. Phoebe came back with us last night and she started her theater summer camp this morning. She was so nervous! I find it funny how well I know her. She wouldn't eat anything for breakfast, so we packed her a lot of healthy snacks with her lunch in case she got hungry during a morning break and wanted to eat then. She can never eat when she's nervous about something. Thankfully, it doesn't happen very often, because she's already such a skinny girl. But we didn't push the food at breakfast and packed some extra snacks of blueberries and a cheese stick to go with her ham and cheese sandwich (hoagie-style with olive oil, oregano and lettuce) and a bag of pirate booty snacks. She was still really quiet when we went there and were meeting some people. I'm becoming a magnet for twins as I started talking to one of the teenage volunteers and who comes up but her identical twin sister! They were so funny finishing each other sentances and saying words at the same time, but then saying they can't share a room as their personalities are so different they never agree on anything.

Wow! This became a long update, but I've missed our children so much. I've kept busy with work and exercising (more on that later). I'll have some updated pics of the boys to post. I have one of them eating watermelon on the 4th of July. It'll be so nice to have everyone home on Wednesday night and sleeping in their own beds where they belong. I don't know if I could have them go away for this long again, but I know it was really good for them. Phoebe even got to go to a Boy Scout camp for a week (just day camp) and she passed the Swimmer's Test, learned to shoot a pellet gun and got a bullseye and had an overall great time. She also got her ears pierced a second time. Our neice that manages a Claire's did it for her. It looks fabulous! Little purple studs and her first ear piercing has little flip flop earrings in too that are new. It's really cute! I'll have to ask if I can take her pic.