The 4th of July is coming

I've been really bad since I got back from Sacramento about taking pictures and I have no idea why but I promise I will start doing better over the 4th of July. Speaking of the 4th I just can't help but to think about how lucky, myself and my family truly are for living in the United States of America. I love my country and am very proud to be an American! I used to feel bad about saying things like that for some reason. Like by me saying that, that put other countries down or maybe it wasn't "PC" but I don't think that at all any longer. I would love to travel someday and visit other places but I'm most certainly happy this is where I call home. Just a little random thing that happened to me last week. I went to Hill Air force Base with my Grandma last week and while we drove around the base I saw many Soldiers walking around on base in uniform and I couldn't help but feel very patriotic seeing them. A little choked up even. These people are giving up so much of themselves to fight for our freedom and I'm so grateful to all those who serve in the military and their families. (Andrew and Lisha Helpingstine and Kyle and Serena Martineau as just a couple of examples.) Anyway, I just wanted to share that little experience I had. Don't worry, I'll get some pictures on here as soon as possible.

Hello again...

So i have Dequervin's tendinitis in my left hand right now and it really bites. I'm not sure who this Dequervain person is but they can have their tendinitis back. I'm putting this on here because I may not be able to post anything for a while unless something really exciting happens. I got a shot from my Dr's office yesterday and I almost cried. (Almost.) He said it should start feeling better in 2-3 days. Well meanwhile, i can't pick up my kids. Well that's funny because I'm pretty sure 18 lbs and 20 lbs blobs aren't going to pick themselves up. Ugh....so Joaquin stayed home yesterday and I was hoping today I'd feel better but I most certainly was not. I think it's worse. (And I'm pretty sure typing isn't helping. Eh oh well.) So I called my wonderful, life saving Grandma up and asked if she'd come down to SLC and of course she said yes, she's my Grandma, it's what they're there for. ;)

So while Grandma was watching the boys I had my first Pack Meeting for Cub Scouts. That's my new calling at church and I'm totally going to love it. Let me rephrase, I totally love it. I can be goofy and weird and these boys don't care, in fact they'd probably like it if I was more weird. Their parents on the other hand might be rethinking if they want to bring their boys back to the pack meeting once a month. They probably think i have something wrong with me. (And I probably do.) Anywho, it was the boys Pinewood Derby and it was awesome!!! I loved it and I kind of wish I had made a car myself but between the twins, my thumb, going for walks, making dinner, cleaning the house, entertaining the boys, laundry, driving to get grandma, running for mayor.....just kidding about that last one, i just didn't have time. Anyway, I now know for next year that I'll be making one....maybe. So my new Cub Scouts are such good kids. I don't know them all very well yet but I can just tell. Scouts is going to be so fun and I'm excited to have my boys in it someday. If we can fit it in between football, baseball, hockey, hip hop dancing, singing, piano and whatever else. (Joaquin's going to kill me for the second to last one.)

So enough about that, now on to my last and final issue of the night. I want to make an Ode to MINI VANS! That's right people, I'm making a shout out to all my peeps with mini's. Let me first just start off by telling a slight story. Friday night Joaquin and I decided we wanted to rent a movie from our local red box. So I drive down, in my mini, and I see someone who I think is from high school. Wasn't really sure but pretty sure. So I look over and I see another friend I knew in high school. We'll call her Lisa for discretion reasons. I was actually really good friends with Lisa my Jr year. (She was a Sr at the time.) So we were catching up. She's pregnant, I told her I had twin boys and that was quite nice. Well as we were saying our good byes she says, "Nice mini van!" In one of those tones. You know the tone, one of those tones where you take all night to pick out an outfit and you put it on and the next day you go to work or school and you've realized it's a little small since you last put it on and someone says, Hey nice outfit, did you forget to look in the mirror? Now don't get me wrong, I love Lisa. She is such a sweetheart but don't be knockin' on my mini. There were so many times before we had the mini that i wouldn't leave my house because I had to cram two baby, myself, two blankets, a diaper bag and sometimes Joaquin in my Corolla. It was too big of a pain. So i called my wonderful Dad up in Cali and asked if he'd start looking for a van and he found one and I just so happen to love it. I really do. It's not brand new or anything but it's brand new to me and I think everyone should have a van. Now it's not just this good old friend that I ran into from high school who's knocked the mini. I have friends husbands who've said, I would rather work a ton of overtime and put in long hours at work so we could drive anything but a mini van. Are you kidding me? Well you go ahead and work those long hours so you can have some fancy, cute, up to date SUV but for me and my family, we'll take the mini. It's so good on gas and it's huge. Why would you want to spend more money on something else just because it might "look" a little cooler. LAme! If you choose that, that's fine but I'd much rather see my husband more often then have him work overtime just so we can have a nicer car. So to all my fellow peeps Rockin' the mini, more power to you.

One month has gone by. A lot of pictures and a lot of blogging. Beware.

Our precious "Thing 1 and Thing 2"

Auntie V with Lil E.

This little boy is Joaquin's Cousin, Rich's little boy and he was so adorable. I would have taken him home if they'd let me.

Joaquin's Aunt Dorthy with her newest Grandbaby. So cute.

Aunt Neda and Joaquin feeding the boys at the Mule Day Parade.

Joaquin, Toni and the hat. (Just kidding Toni, we love the hat.)

The Mule Day Parade.

Brocks eczema. :(

First swim lesson with Daddy.

They boys feeding the boys at Julies wedding.

The beautiful wedding. So beautiful.

The last two pictures are of my sister in law Steph with her boy friend and I'm sorry to say I can't remember his name right now and the other is Joaquin's Dad, Rich and little Kiley standing to the right. (Our niece.) This was at Julie's 40's style wedding. So cool.

Melina and Vallerie at the aquarium. It was awesome...kind of.

The stingrays at the aquarium. That really was awesome.

Us at Lagoon. "It's What Fun Is!"

Melina and Vallerie up at Gerry's ranch. It was seriously soooo beautiful up there. I might even move there if I knew it would stay that way all year round. ;)

I feel like I don't know where to start....so much has gone by in the last month. Well let me just start off by talking about my trip to Bishop CA and Sacramento CA. Bishop was really fun. We had such a good time there. We were able to visit with Joaquin's Mom and Sister along with a lot of his Aunts, Uncles and cousins. I really love Joaquin's family so so much. Bishop is such a special place to Joaquin and has now become so for me. It such a small town but the mountains are so huge and there are so many things to do out doors there that we just love it. We were able to be there for the annual Bishop Mule Day parade. It's the largest none motorized parade in the world. WOW, pretty fun. ;) Then after that we drove another 5 hours to Sacramento to visit my family and to go to Joaquin's beautiful cousin, Julies, wedding. We had such a good time. It was a lot of fun to see all of his Dad's side of the family too. I also adore the Ficker's. They are such wonderful, family oriented people. It's hard to be away from all these great people. Everyone was really happy we were able to come to the wedding, as were we. The wedding was beautiful as was their reception. So once all the fun stuff was out of the way then the sicknesses came. It started with our little Everett. He got sick. Now the boys haven't ever gotten a cold before so I wasn't really sure how to go about this. I was in Sacramento away from our doctor so I called and asked what I should do. They said take him in because he could have RSV or Bronchitis. (Yeah right.) Well let me just tell you what a waste of $50 bucks that was, a big waste. They said he had a viral syndrome which I found out was code for we don't know what's wrong with him so just let him get over it. Lame. Anyway, he was sick for a few days and then I started feeling sick. Joaquin left to go back home about a week before I did so I was there with out him. Then I started feeling even sicker and sicker. For about 6 days I felt like crap. Didn't really even leave my Mom's house. I couldn't breath, sleep or eat.....ah just kidding about the last one, I can always eat, are you kidding me....look at me. (Just a little joke.) Then Brock started acting funny. He was a different sick than Everett though, he was so out of it. On top of him being sick he broke out with pretty bad eczema right before we left and it only got worse while we were in Sacramento. Anyway, so I remember sitting in bed not being able to sleep and thinking I'm so going to blog about this and the title is going to be My horrible, terrible very bad no good vacation. Even though we weren't sick the whole time, at that moment I felt like it. (Oh and Joaquin was also sick. He had to call off almost the whole first week he got home from CA. He could have just stayed with us.) I really felt like it was such a blessing that I was in California while I got sick because I had my Mom and Dad and sister to all help me. Thank goodness. So after all of this craziness happened, I drove home with my Mom, the boys and two nieces. My nieces stayed with us for about 10 days. They just left today. I was really really sad to see them go. I've been so busy the last month and it's been so nice because I've had a lot of things to do but now I'm back to reality. Although I think Joaquin's happy I'm back in reality. I think he likes things a little less chaotic. Pretty good month all in all.

Ugh...

I'm just going to go off for a minute. The boys are now almost 6 months old and I still haven't lost any weight. I find myself facing this vicious cycle of wanting to lose weight but never doing anything about it. Then I start to think I'm not that bad until I try on 3 of my old dresses that I fit into a year ago and then i get so sad again because I can't zip them up. I'm sure a lot of women do this but how do I really get a grip on it? UHG....I don't know but I need to figure something out because I'm tired of avoiding mirrors and camera's.

OK, enough of that lame pity party I just had for myself. I need to say that I just watched the premier of the show GLEE and I'm pretty sure it's going to be my newest favorite show on TV. I think I have to wait until the fall for the season to start. Which is probably a good thing since I need to be doing less sitting and more getting out of my house and off of my couch. ;)

I'm desperate...

Okay, so this is a shot in the dark but I'm desperate. Does anyone have any idea a good place to look for inexpensive tickets for show in San Fransisco? We're going to try to get tickets to Wicked while we're in California but I'm so bad at searching for things online and I just wondered if anyone knew of good websites. (Besides Ticketmaster. I'm not a big fan of them because they're kind of expensive.) Let me know as soon as possible if you have any ideas. We leave this Wednesday night. Thanks for any help you might have.

Lagoon: Fun in the Sun

Yesterday the four of us went to Lagoon. We bought season passes this year thinking it would be fun to go in and out of Lagoon as we please rather than feel like we have to stay an entire day to get our full money's worth. We really had so much fun as a little family. We didn't go on any rides but we walked all around the park. They have this part called Pioneer Village and it was so fun. I don't remember ever walking through that section before but it was a blast. It's set up like an old village with antique china shops, an old store that provided the pioneers with food and grains, a blacksmiths shop. All kinds of things. We had fun and we'll be going back all summer long. Our good friends bought passes too so we're going to go all together and take turns riding on rides. I'm so happy the weather has FINALLY changed. We are all about being in the sun.

My three hunks!

Don't you just love the hats. They probably look like little girls with them on but I don't care. I wasn't going to have their two bald heads get sunburned. That would be bad. All in all, we had such a good time. A surprisingly good time. Even Joaquin enjoyed himself. (I say that because he really wanted to go up to Idaho this weekend but we are heading out of town the end of this week so I said lets wait until after we get back so he said okay but that I had to plan our "saturday" activity. So off to Lagoon we went.)

So like I just mentioned we're heading out of town. We are heading to beautiful sunny California at the end of this week to see our families and to go to Joaquin's cousin's wedding. We are really looking forward to this trip. We are going to see a lot of people who haven't met the boys yet so it should be a lot of fun having everyone meet the boys. We're very excited and I'm sure I'll have some pictures from that trip to update everyone on.

Such Big Boys

Brock and Everett in their big boy clothes. They look so grown up to me in these pictures. Brock really is so much bigger than Everett. I don't really realize it until I take pictures of them. Poor little Everett. He may be smaller but he'll always be able to say, I'm 40 minutes older than you! These little guys keep me so busy but I wouldn't trade it for the world.

My Dad came to Utah this past week to bring our new Mazda van. I'll have to get some pictures of the new van. We're still deciding if we want to actually keep it or not. I'm pretty sure we'll keep it. It's so nice having a van. I know it's pretty nerdy but who cares, We're parents now. We have no shame. Anyway, it makes going places so much easier. So anyway, back to explaining these pictures. My Dad is a really big help and I was trying to cook some dinner but the boys were grumpy and I had already given them their milk so I thought I would try to give them some of their new favorite sweet potato's but it was too hard trying to cook and feed. So my Dad said he would help out with that. This is him helping and the last two pictures are of the boys after my Dad helped. Gotta love Dads. I know the boys sure do love their Grandpa. It made me laugh because when I try to feed the boys, I try to get as little food on them as possible so I don't have to clean up a big mess but my Dad didn't care at all. I realized then, I'm going to have to clean up a mess whether it's big or small so might as well just let them make a mess. ;)

Kinda cool

Ok, so you know that commercial with the little 4 1/2 year old girl that can upload a picture on her computer, brighten it and then email it to her family? It's a windows vista commercial...ok maybe you don't know but it shows how easy it can be for even a little 4 year old girl to do this so I've been trying to figure it out and I finally did. It's nothing extraordinary but it's kinda fun. The picture up above is of the back of my big old head in Zion's a couple years back and I was just playing around with that little program and the picture below is the result. Kinda fun. Anyway, just thought I would share.

Another post for today...

The reason I did another post today is because I was looking on my friend, Becky's blog and she had pictures of her little boy with his Dad's hat's on so it reminded me of little Everett's pictures. So funny. So because I was going to put pictures of Everett I couldn't leave Brock out so that's the reason for all these random pictures. They are fun though.

Dad's Future Hunting Buddies

Brock the chub Everett the kicker

Check out their cool boots

Just hangin' out

Daddy and his boys

I can't believe how the time has flown by....(sort of.) I mostly can't believe that my boys are as big as they are. They are little tanks. Everett is still a little smaller than Brock but we think it's because he burns more calories by KICKING all of the time. I swear the kid will be a swimmer, runner or kick boxer. Brock is just kind of a little blob right now. He's pretty happy with just being. They are now 5 months old and weighing almost 18 lbs. We just started introducing solids and they both love them. I've started them on rice cereal but they didn't eat that very well then I mix apple sauce and they love that. Next I'm going to let them try sweet potato's. We'll see how that goes. I might have to take some pictures.

So now that the boys are older, I've been able to become more normal. Things seem a lot easier than when they were new born's. I was just talking to Joaquin about how hard the first couple of months were. I just remember not sleeping because of the every 3 hour feedings and every 3 hour pumping's. I'm so glad we are past that stage. I think when we have more babies, we'll do it a little differently. Like plan on not having a baby in the winter. I think that was a big part of why it was all so depressing at times. I was stuck inside for almost 4 months straight. Ugh... Now we go on walks and trips to the store or over to their Aunt Nickies house (Who they love!!!). They love it. Our next big adventure will be heading back to California. We are going at the end of this month. We can't wait. First we're heading to Bishop CA to visit Joaquin's Mom. She is so excited to see the boys again. The last time she saw them was when they were only a few weeks old. Veronica, his sister and her husband will be going to Bishop as well. Then we'll head to Sacramento for another 3-4 days to spend some time with my family. I'm hoping we get to go camping while we're there but I think Joaquin is scared to take the boys camping. He thinks it'll be too much work. I say, who cares. We haven't been camping in soooo long. Plus we'll have so much help. So we'll see what actually happens. It should be fun no matter what.

The Boys Are 4 Months Old Today!

Just wanted to give a little update on how the boys are growing. We went to the Dr's office today for their 4 month, wellness check up and she said they are doing really well. She said that they are right on track for full term babies actually. Here are the results;

Everett Julian:

Weight: 14lbs 8oz
Length: 24 inches
Head: 16 1/4 inches

Brock Carson:

Weight: 16lbs 1 oz
Length: 25 1/2 inches
Head: 16 3/4 inches

So Brock is still bigger but not by much. The thing that I thought was weird is she said Everett is in the 30 percentile and Brock is in like the 80th. That's nuts to me because it doesn't seem like there is a huge difference between them. She actually asked us what we were feeding them and I told her they have been mostly on breast milk up until the last 2 weeks. She asked what formula they were on and I told her it is NeoSure which is formula for preemies and she said there is no need for them to have the extra calories so to take them off of it when we run out. She said with in the next month or so we can start them on rice cereal and once they are used to that we can start them on veggies. I'm SOOO excited. They should be good eaters, I mean, look at their parents! (Seriously!) We'll see how that goes. We'll have to buy a couple of high chairs to start that. Can't wait. Also can't wait for our weather to get better so we can start spending time outside. While we were in California, they loved being out but they weren't used to the wonderful breeze. It seemed like every time there was a gust of wind they would breath deeply like they were trying to catch their breath. It was funny. Hopefully they'll get used to that as soon as it warms up. I hope!!!

Tummy Time with Brock and Everett

Sweet chubby Brock

Everett is so hard to get to smile with the camera in front of his face. I'll get him to smile and then I put the camera in front of his face and this is the result. I think that's the funniest picture ever.

This is the closest to a smile I could really get from him.

The boys having tummy time. Brock is so smiley. He's laughing more and more everyday. Everett smiles a lot more but it's hard to capture.

Don't they look cute? Dumb question, I know. ;)

More pic's of people who came to meet the boys...

Everett, Me and Sindy

This is Joaquin's Uncle Gary. He came all the way over to my parents just to meet the Twins. I thought that was SOOO sweet of him. He's such a great guy. We really enjoyed visiting with him. He was great with the boys too.

My Mom giving Everett a bath. She's probably going to kill me because I put this picture on here but I think it's funny. She's such a good grandma. She helped me so much again. (While she wasn't at work.)

Everett and grandpa....(geez maybe Everett is a little spoiled. I think it's because he cries more....poor Brock.) I love this picture of my Dad.

This is Auntie Kris and Uncle Jeremy. Sure do miss the fam.....!

It was really nice being in California because I didn't really do much or go anywhere other than stay at my Mom and Dads but everyone came to visit us. I didn't have to really go anywhere but I always felt like there was something to do because I constantly had people coming over to visit. I told Joaquin I want to move back to Sacramento and he said no way. Oh well. That just means eventually everyone will have to start moving out this way. I don't know if that will really happen or not but I can dream can't I?

Some of the many visitors that came.

This is my dear friend, Deyra. She and I worked at Kaiser for a few years. I trained her on how to use the phones. She was so quiet at first and then we just became such good friends. I loved seeing her and so did the boys. Can't wait to see her again when we go back in May.

This is Auntie V and Uncle Jon. Veronica met the boys back in January when she came out to help me for a week but this was Jon's first visit. He just loved them. He favored Brock a little bit because he said Everett was getting all of the attention for his Auntie V. So funny.

Melina with her baby cousin. Totally faking sleeping. Love that Melina.

This is Auntie Gina and lil' Bethany. Oh my gosh, Bethany is sooooo cute and she's so big and she just loved helping with the boys.

This is my niece Val feeding baby Brock. She's super good with babies. Would love to have her around. ;)