Nerdy Caleb

Sorry I haven't been doing my consistent twice a week posts but Phil's been taking a lot of time off and that usually means we're off having lots of fun and adventures so that doesn't leave me with much time to blog.

C, finally a dry spell! The boys were itching to get back on their bikes : )  

T

C

T looking debonair 

the boys chasing after strange dogs

"raise the roof, woo woo!" (Thomas is sooo 90's)

C

T looking so handsome

rare moment where the boys don't crawl all over the person that's trying to read to them 

nerdy Caleb, wearing a pair of dad's old glasses

won't they look cute when they start wearing glasses?

Lots of cute pictures are piling up, I have several 'oh crap!' moments to write about and need to write about our first real attempt at potty training. Much to come, so stay tuned!

Tiger Monkey Monster

More from our fun week. The boys are missing their uncle Chance and aunt Janet, they were lavished with love and attention!

TEC, in their super cute sweaters from aunt Janet and uncle Chance : ) Thomas is the tiger because it starts with the letter T, Eli is the monkey because he's so silly, and Caleb is the monster because Caleb is always monsters. It just fits.  

this is one of my favorite spots to photograph the boys. Such bright and fun colors but we need to figure out the lighting (maybe uncle Garret can help us out next time he's in the US : )  

Caleb looking so big to me!

Loving their shiny new Tonka dump trucks, thank you J&C!  

T making a cheeky face

Group shot, love the silly look on Eli's face (right)

Caleb's crazy hair

Our friends K & Oz watched the boys for us and Janet & Chance took us out to eat at our fav tapas restaurant : )  

It snowed a few days ago and it wasn't sticking at our house but when we got to the children's museum (a couple hundred feet up) it was! 

ECT, photo cred: a lot of these pics were taken by aunt Janet

CTE

a rare family pic

A few hours before we had to say good bye! We miss you : )

Donuts!

Sorry I haven't posted in a while but we've been having too much fun with family in town : )

We all took the boys to have their very first donuts! Anyone who is anyone visiting Portland stops in at Voodoo Doughnuts. With good reason because even the locals love their donuts! My first year living here I would stop there on my way home from work every week to indulge on their delicious unique varieties (not sure how I didn't develop type two diabetes). Yummy : )

The boys having no idea the deliciousness about to come their way! 

Captain crunch on a glazed or crushed oreo topped with peanut butter and chocolate anyone? Sounds crazy but so dang good! 

I got the boys my childhood favorite, cake donut with colorful sprinkles! 

Caleb

Eli

The boys with uncle Chance and aunt Janet

This is how they all ate their donuts, frosting first!

Phil

Thomas

These are my donuts to enjoy during naptime, mcminville cream and an orangatang. I thought I'd give the bacon maple a rest : )   

TEC, super full on donuts! Only two bites of dinner were consumed that evening (that's is why this isn't a regular occurrence, ha!)  

More on our fun week to come!...

Quirks

The boys watching an ambulance go by, they love their emergency response vehicles!

I want to mention some of the boys silly quirks...

We have about 6 or 7 of these little figurines. I always find them in random places; in the boys play fire station, in the trunk of their ride on cars, or where ever. The interesting thing is that they are always in groups of three! I think triplets are born knowing how to count to three : )   

This is a t-shirt I have and I wear a lot, not because I like it that much but mostly because the boys LOVE it. They point at each of the different cats and I imitate the expression it's trying to convey, angry, happy, excited, worried, etc. I can't get them to imitate the expressions themselves but if I ask what the third kitty from the left is doing Eli will tilt his head : )  

Lately my house looks like a grave yard for baby socks but especially the boys room. They never wake up from a nap with socks on! And as I mentioned it before it's not because socks bother their feet but because they like putting socks on their hands, silly boys! The last time I cleaned I recovered about 20 socks from all sorts of nooks and crannies in the boys room. 

These are some books where the boys only look at ONE page, can you guess why? I can't tell you how many times they come up to me with these books open to those pages so I can list off all the stuff on them.  

Train

They looked at this page so often they ended up wearing it out!

Updates

I think the boys had a growth spurt because they are all looking a little taller and the 18 mo pants I switched them to don't fit quite as big as they used to (see pic above). We are officially done with 12 mo clothes! It only took us 2 years and 2 months (insert sarcasm)! Even our 18 mo footie pajamas are fitting a little snug (those are always the first thing we grow out of).

Some new words: roll (glad to see they are attempting 'r' words, I imagine it will be a while before they can roll a Spanish 'r' haha! no pun intended), stuck, stop, and knock-knock. Ah! only English words! I've heard of a lot of kids refusing to speak the language their parents speak when in an English speaking country even though they can or they had been. For a while the boys understood way more Spanish than English but I think it's really starting to even out even though I still only speak to them in Spanish. The English influence is undeniable and everywhere. Not sure if we are heading down that track but if we do I'll definitely make sure they go to Spanish immersion Kindergarten.

We are definitely going into the developmental stage called 'normal negativism' because the boys say no a lot more now and will even say it when they mean yes, oh boy!

Nap Time Crisis

cute little series of pictures...Caleb is so cute on his dad's shoulders : )

T see's how much fun C is having so he joins his brother up top  

the boys love doing puzzles and they are really good at it!

The boys kept 'talking' to each other while they did puzzles this day, they would exchange verbalization's and point at stuff. Who knows what they were saying but they seemed to understand each other. I have yet to crack any triplet talk code. 

the sand pit got a whole lot funner now that it has a bunch of community toys : )  

Eli getting braver and climbed up the sand pit waterfall

E and the boys at a different park

We went for a walk and to drop off some of the boys' baby toys at a friends house (which we've been meaning to do for several months now, so is the life with triplets). We thought we'd try it without a stroller. It's a good 10 min walk for an adult, they did really good on the way there but on the way back no so good : (  

And here are a couple of cute videos of the boys, nothing too exciting though. One is of Caleb laughing his head off on a swing and the other of Eli hearing a train...


Nap time Crisis

So I'm in a bit of a quandary! The boys keep pushing up their nap time, they were going down for a nap just fine at 1pm just a couple of weeks ago. But then I started noticing that it would take them longer and longer to fall asleep and now that they can climb out of their cribs (except for Eli) it's getting trickier. My first thought was that with all the rain we've been having we have been staying home a lot more and that maybe they weren't getting enough exercise. I experimented and even on days that I was certain that they had gotten enough exercise they are still not falling asleep till 3/4pm (if in bed by 2pm then asleep by 3pm or 3pm by 4pm and so forth). If I let them they will sleep until 6/7pm which doesn't work for their previous 7:30pm bedtime! Even though I haven't been brave enough to try it, I have a suspicion that they could skip nap time altogether! So I need to figure out what to do, my options are as follows:

1) Put them down for nap time at 2 pm so they are asleep by 3 pm and don't let them sleep past 5 pm so I only push up bed time to 8 pm.

pros: I still get some time to clean and a little time for myself each day
cons: It's very hard to watch the boys for that long of a stretch before they start to drive you crazy, I would have to make sure we leave the house each day to avoid going crazy.

2) Skip nap all together and keep bed time at 7:30 or push it down to 7pm (not sure that will go over well).
pros: No more worrying about a nap schedule and we can move on to toddler beds.
cons: They will most surely drive me crazy unless I up their 30 min a day T.V. quota to 2 hrs.

3) Put them down at 2 pm and let them sleep as long as they want, which would be till 6 pm. And push up bed time to 9 pm.
pros: I would continue getting a nice long stretch to myself each day
cons: I get less time in the evenings for cooking and hanging out with husband. We'd have dinner along with the boys (unfortunately this is still a con, I do not like getting up 10 times during a meal).

Right off the bat I'm not liking option 2 since I'd like to avoid taking anti anxiety medication. But inevitably we'll have to switch to option 2 sometime in the future when the boys finally decide on a nap time mutiny, hopefully not till a more mature age so I don't have to turn to medication. My instinct tells me to milk nap time for all it's worth! So it's down to option 1 or 3, decisions decisions...

So now that I dragged my boys names through the mud let me clarify and say that they are VERY good boys but nothing changes the fact that they are two years old and that there are THREE of them!