Happy 5th Birthday Madison

 Madison wanted a pretty cake with water on it. Yep, that was her request. This is what she got.

 A pool party for the water baby. It was still somewhat cool so they froze a little but they had fun playing together.

Jordan loved demolishing the cake - he was in heaven!

The Little Things

 Drew loves to tend to the flowers. He loves to go out and remove the grasshoppers and the dead flowers. He'll even bring me in flowers occasionally!

 Jordan loved eating the cheese balls and Ms. Jeannie gave him! He'd never had them and he made a huge mess with them!

Guess who's been eating watermelon.... Jocelyn!

The Little Things

 Jordan stealing a cupcake. He found the toy box, emptied it and moved it into the kitchen so he could eat a cupcake!

 Drinking out of the sprinkler.

 Remember when I said that he liked to hide his sippy cup?

This is an old sippy cup - you can tell because of the curdling on the inside. Disgusting.

He put his 'toys' in here and then put the lid on. Since we don't use this very often no one ever checked it for a sippy cup.

John being John! Too bad we can't get free pizza.

T-ball

As you can see, Drew is very calculating in terms of hitting the ball. He doesn't like to just swing, he might miss after all. He makes sure that he's lined up and then he lets it fly. 

We asked Drew if he wanted to do soccer this year and he told us that he can't keep up with the other kids so it's not fun. (I might have almost cried. Poor kid.) But T-ball is something he can do without having to really 'keep up'. There isn't a whole lot of running involved and he still gets to participate in a sport - it was a win-win!

Dance 'Recital'

Ashley and Alexis made a dance recital of their own put together dances! It was unique, fun and creative. They were even sweet enough to allow us to record and take pictures as we wanted.

Drew's Adventures

Drew went gluten free for nearly a year to help him not get sick. He did great! He self regulated and he felt better. Both he and John quit puking randomly and had more energy.

At the end of the school year he started to feel not so great again. Then he came home from school and said that he was feeling really sick. He laid down and didn't move again for the rest of the day. During this time he told me that it was hurting to breathe. Because Drew had such issues as a baby/toddler I went and borrowed a pulse oximeter to measure is 02 sats. His 02 sats were in the low 90's but his rate was in the 170's, which concerned his mommy. Eventually he followed the same path that he always follows and he ended up puking. Once he puked, he felt just fine. O2 sats went back up, heart rate when down and he was just fine. I looked into ideas online - dangerous, I know - and found a couple things that somewhat fit what he seemed to have. One said that if it was a problem with his heart he could reset it by sticking his thumb in his mouth and blowing as hard as he could. I had him try it - it's not like it could've done anything worse than what he was already going through. It worked for a minute, his heart rate dropped back to a normal range but then it went right back up. So we went to the Dr again to see if they had any ideas. They wanted to do an EKG to see if they could see it when he was feeling normal - they couldn't. We had an appointment with a cardiologist made and had to wait another month to see what he was thinking of doing. 

Drew did great with this. He thought it was kind of fun, until they accidentally pinched him with one and made him bleed. He was fine once they took that off though. Luckily Drew had just overcome his obsession with not letting anyone see him with no shirt on. In primary they told them that boys should be modest too and that they didn't need to take their shirts off! Yes, yes, they said that. Honestly I wanted to beat one of them. It took over two years for us to convince him that it was okay if we saw his chest.

The cardiologist said that he thinks Drew has an extra node in his heart. So half his heart is going super fast while the other half is normal. Not always, but sometimes. Puking will reset the heart and bring everything back to normal. They wanted to hook him up to a monitor for a month but I nixed that idea. Usually when he has his episodes they last for a few hours, which gives us enough time to get to a Dr's office and get an EKG done. Drew hasn't had another episode since the cardiologist so it's just a waiting game to see what the tests say next time he has a problem.

Laundry before and after

My dryer died. Wouldn't start any more. For anything.

So I did what any reasonable person would do - I put them in the garage and got a new washer/dryer system! Because we literally have a hole in the hallway for the laundry there just isn't much room. Read: there is always laundry you have to walk over to get to the bedroom! I decided that if we ripped out the cupboards we could stack them, put shelving to the side and still have room to throw laundry! It worked! I'm much happier. And, laundry gets done in the half the time it was before - who can complain about that?