3 years 11 months!

My babies are almost 4, yikes!!!!!! For some reason 3 still sounds so little to me but 4 sounds so old. How did I end up with identical triplets I'll never know, but it's PERFECT! I couldn't imagine it any other way, nope, never, they are perfect : )

CET 3 years and 11 months old

You can't tell by this picture but the boys were more than excited for their first ever krispy kreme donuts!

Making Friends

 The boys are quite the party these days. They play constantly and are always having fun together (much to my dismay during times when we need to be serious). I love that they are best friends (most of the time) but what I love the most is how welcoming they are of others that want to play with them. They don't really try to make friends (I guess why do they need to if they have each other, right?). But if anyone try's to make friends with them, they waste no time with shyness or semantics and quickly include them in what ever silly games they are playing : )

This little boy made friends with the boys.
They had a good time play fighting with sticks and chasing each other around : )

What's going on here Thomas?

Caleb was cold so I lent him my hoodie : ) Most of my great beach pictures were lost when my hard drive broke. I only took a couple with my phone : (

Phil works downtown and rides his bike rain or shine in 13min flat door to door, which allows us to be a one car family (actually it's pretty awesome, less maintenance/gas/insurance). And not to brag or anything but we live in a PERFECT location because we can walk to everything (restaurants, grocery stores, parks, the car mechanic, etc) if need be. As you may have heard our car broke down the other day which wouldn't have been a big deal normally, only this time we were right in the middle of a two week swim lesson session. The pool is just outside of walking range (for the boys that is or for me pulling them in a wagon) SOOO we took the bus to swim lessons for a whole week, not fun for me but the boys thought is was ah-mazing since it was their first time on a bus.

Waiting patiently for the bus!

They were loving it!

Caleb looking so tiny among the tall tree's!

Fountain time!

The boys nursery school had "family day" with face painting included.
We have one more day left here and then we are off to bigger and better things!

Oh Crap! moment #75 & 76

It looks like I'm not going to be catching up on my blogging anytime soon...

Oh Crap! moment #75

My mom had just arrived the day before we were set to leave for our California trip. Phil and I had to go do some things so we left the boys at home with my mom. The boys had been looking forward to seeing their mama Elda for quite some time that they were beyond excited that she was finally here. I guess you can say they went a little crazy with excitement! They were a bit out of control and among the things they did in those few hours was dump water all over the floor, pee in the kitchen, and that was the least of it. Well at some point my mom decided to play a movie in hopes that they'd calm down. It seemed to work so she went into the kitchen to fix herself something to eat when she heard Thomas crying "airplane movie, airplane movie!" When she checked in on them she found the tv screen broken and several potatos on the ground. She asked who broke the tv and both Eli and Thomas said it was Caleb. My mom asked Caleb if he broke the tv and all he did was grin mischeviously! 

    The tv appears fine when its off.

   You can see the potato point of impact when its on.

Oh Crap! moment #76

Since the occurence of moment #75 the boys screen time was way down both out of punishment and out of inconvenience. Only during times of desparation would we play some netflix on the computer for them. Less than a week ago we had set up the computer so that they could watch it and we could get some things done. At one point the boys started playing and getting excited and what do you know happened? Eli runs by the computer and runs into the cord so that the computer goes flying. So now the computer looks perfectly normal turned off but won't turn back on (at least not the way you'd want it to). 

We took the computer into a local repair shop and they told us the hard drive is pretty badly broken. $300 to retrieve the files and $260 to replace the hard drive! Every other month or so I back up my pictures so it looks like I've lost all my pictures from our California vacation, our camping trip, and all the great pictures from the beach that I hadn't yet posted about. Losing a month and a half of pictures doesn't sound that bad but I know it will eat at me for many years to come (it's my inner ocd). Another thing that really bugs me is that I've lost dozens of recipes that I had scanned into my computer (because who wants to deal with a bunch of unorganized papers), I literally spent hours doing this! Why I never backed this up, I will never know! Not to mention all the other random files of mild imprtance. Still I cannot justify $300 to recover those lost files because I'm still without a computer! What to do, replace the hard drive or get a new computer for not much more? I've lost sleep over this question, ahhhhhh!

The computer is just one of many things that have recently broken down. Its like we're in this loop of EVERYTHING breaking down on us that we are afraid to think that this is the end of all this madness and that nothing else will break. 

-First Caleb breaks our tv. $350

-Then our plumbing sprung a leak and we have to pull out the tub and vanity out to fix it so at that point we just decided to remodel the bathroom since our bathroom has always sucked. We will do most of the work ourselves but paying for the plumber and materials will be a pretty penny as you can imagine. $$$

-Next, our dryer breaks down, new dryer $550.

-After the dryer, our car breaks down $450.

-Finally to top it off, Eli breaks the computer! $260 min to fix, or $550 for a new one.

-What next???

At this point the boys are watching ZERO anything I dont care if the drive me crazy but we will not be replacing the tv for a very very long time! 

At least we have our health, ha!

So anyways, I can still blog on my ipad (thank goodness for my ipad!!! it is not going anywhere near my children). It is a bit cumbersome to do so and I can only post pics that I've taken from my crappy phone camera (and I'm almost out of space). So don't expect my posts to be too colorful or frequent for the time being.

  THE TROUBLESOME TRIO, DON'T LET THEM NEAR YOUR ELECTRONICS!

Camping 2014

I'm way behind on blogging! The weekend before last we headed up to Mt. Hood National Forest for our annual camping trip!

After some playtime by the river the boys got to roast marshmallows

Caleb eating way too many marshmallows

The boys got cozy with this tree

Took the boys fishing!
So grateful for Everet, he provided endless entertainment for the boys.
He was the ringleader all weekend : )

Caleb picked flowers for me : )

Eli

Caleb

Thomas is an early riser!

Our camping group this year was so much fun!

What Are Training Wheels?

Never heard of them!


Not even 4 years old yet!!

The boys pedal bikes were delivered last week and Phil quickly put them together for the boys. We decided to forgo the training wheels in hopes that the boys wouldn't need them. Sadly one of the bikes had a bent fork and we couldn't get the tire on it. We returned the bad bike and ordered another one. Caleb was first up and learned to ride it within a matter of minutes, on his third try and away he went. Eli tried next but was a little shaky, I think it discouraged him so he didn't want to keep trying. The next day he got it just as well as Caleb. Thomas tried it twice and didn't want to ride anymore. We didn't push him to keep trying since there were only two bikes and his brothers were hogging them. When the other bike came a week later Thomas got the hang of it ok. He's real shaky but with more practice he'll smooth out. Our biggest challenge is getting them to start up the bikes themselves, right now they need a push. We got them the smallest bikes available (12" wheels) and even with the seats all the way to the bottom they can barely reach with their tippy toes. Eli and Caleb have gotten their bikes going themselves a handful of times so hopefully practice makes perfect : )

What's the secret you ask? Balance Bikes!! The boys started riding them around when they were 19 mo old and have been riding them ever since. The great thing about these bikes is that kids learn the hard part first, balancing. These types of bikes are very popular in Portland and it's rare to find a kid that doesn't or hasn't owned one. Whenever we visited California we always got strange stares of admiration after seeing the boys zip around in them. Many would tell us "wow those are so cool." So many people have never even seen these before but I highly recommend them. They are such a great gross motor activity and you won't need to stress over teaching your kids to ride their pedal bikes in the future! It's a seamless transition : )

The boys "helping" dad assemble the bikes!

Eli

Oregon licence plates, so cute!

Tippy Toes

Mr T