Sick Ward

I had grand plans for my week off of school, in between spring and summer semesters.  I was going to blog every day, take my kids to do some fun things, get some much-needed stuff done around the house...

And then....

Hadley woke up last Saturday, in the early morning hours, throwing up.  She was pitiful and it was awful.  She couldn't even keep down the smallest sips of water.  I ended up having to take her to the doctor (after not peeing for over 12 hours or being able to keep any fluid down for the same period of time) and they gave her some zofran.  Luckily that helped and she was able to start taking some sips of water.  I had a cold that day, but spent the day cleaning and disinfecting my house.



David was scheduled to go out of the country on a business trip that Monday for a week.  Perfect timing, yes?  So he packed his bags and got well out of dodge!  Hadley took a few days to perk back up, but she finally started getting back to her old self, just in time for Griffin to go down.

Griffin woke up Tuesday morning just happy as a lark, but when I took him upstairs to get ready to take Hadley to school, he threw up all over me.  I cleaned him (and me!) up and realized he actually felt quite warm.  I took his temperature and it was 102.5!  He pretty much went downhill after that and ran a 102.5-103.7 fever for the next two days.  He only threw up the one time, but he clearly didn't feel good.  He was so whiny, clingy, and didn't want to eat.  I spent most nights just walking him around because it was the only way he was comfortable.



His fever finally broke, but he still didn't want to eat.  I saw something white in his mouth when I was brushing his teeth that night and upon closer examination I realized--he has thrush!  I looked a little more and realized he had sores all over his throat.  This poor kid had hand, foot, and mouth AND thrush on top of that.  I have no idea where he picked that up.  He's had some blisters pop up on his hands and feet, but not too many.  Most of them showed up in his throat.



So, we went back to the doctor to get something for the thrush, but the HFM just had to run its course.  And now, here we are a week later!  The best laid plans got pushed to the side, I got no blogging done last week, but quite honestly, if everyone was going to be ill, that was the best week for it.

I spent a lot of time thanking God that these sicknesses waited until my break from school to occur!  I can't even imagine how I would have done schoolwork after being up all night walking my babies around.


Am I the only one who wants to walk around like this all the time?  ANYTHING to prevent the stomach bug.  ANYTHING.

And we couldn't have done it without my grandmother and aunt, who came to the rescue.  They were so helpful and I can't thank them enough for how amazing they were!

Hopefully we are all on the mend now and I can get back to school and my blog posts!  I hope you all faired better than we did this last week! ;)

Life Lately

If you follow me on instagram, chances are you have probably already seen most of these pictures.  But it's been quite a while since my last "Life Lately" post, so I'm well overdue for one!

I can't believe April is almost over.  It's gonna be May (yeah, yeah, I see you N'Sync fans!) which is month 5 of the year, which is practically half the year!

Anyway, here's a little of our life lately:

 We flipped Hadley's car seat around.  We made it to almost 3 1/2 years before she turned.  And she will still say she missed having it the other way (because now she can't see the iPad!)

 I didn't move fast enough for this kid.  He wanted a snack so he got his hummus out of the fridge and his veggie sticks out of the pantry--and dumped them all over the floor.  Easier to dip that way, I guess!

 Like usual, we were rushing Easter morning to get everyone ready and out the door, so we snapped a quick cell-phone pick with my little loves.  

 Hadley has discovered make-up and got into my lipstick the other day.  She said, "I'm beautiful, am I!" 

 We went strawberry pickin' and ate our weight in strawberries!  So yummy.

 We've had many sleepovers in Mommy and Daddy's bed.  (Hadley swears she'll sleep in her bed "when I'm five."

 Our "play-date pet" Ted Turner has come by for some treats.

 Griffin has decided he prefers to eat his dinner on the floor.  #whateverworks

 They have actually started playing quietly together.  Also, I said, "clean up your mess!" and their mess is all shoved under that train table. Hahaha :) Jokes on you, Mom.

 We discovered with all of this rain that I am essentially "blonde Monica"!  

 We've gotten to play with our besties quite a few times!  Summer is going to be so fun.

 Re-take of our Easter outfits!  Since I shamelessly forgot to take a "sibling picture" on the actual Sunday of Easter.

 Hadley has the best great-grandparents.  She mentioned wanting to ride in the horse drawn carriage downtown.  They set it all up for her.  She dressed in her princess dress, princess shoes, and waved at all of her loyal subjects.

 Prince Charming got in on the waving action as well.

The coachman, Mr. Michael, played every bit his part and made her feel so special.  People on the street would wave at her and say, "You look beautiful, princess!" which was icing on the cake.  

There you have it!  A little bit of our life lately.  It always seems to be full, but I wouldn't trade a minute of it!

Spring Break 2017: Days 5-7

The rest of spring break, we spent around town.  We did at least one "fun" thing a day and just explored our little city.

We...

• Ate doughnuts for breakfast one morning

• Went downtown and discovered all the "Mice on Main" with Aunt Jess

• Grammy came to visit!

• Visited our small zoo

• Dyed Easter Eggs

• Mommy and Daddy went on a date night! (Woo hoo!)

• Went to an Easter Egg hunt (and had our own!)

*Don't judge the pumpkin.  #secondchildprobs

• Got ice cream at the town square ice cream station

*The dog in the background kills me. Just waiting on his opportunity to get G's cone!

• Watched a baby giraffe get born

*Yes, Hadley watched. She said, "well I bet that's smelly." Hahaha :)

• Went strawberry picking!

All in all, it was a great spring break week.  I love taking the time to explore and do things with my kids.  They are just so fun to be around.  These days...are about as sweet as those strawberries. ;)  (And that's pretty dang sweet!)

Spring Break 2017: Day 4

We really wore the kids out on Sunday, so they slept until about 8 am Monday morning.  (This is unheard of if you know us at all, haha!) Hotel breakfast ends at 9 on weekdays, so we booked it to breakfast pretty quickly.  This particular morning was much busier, probably because we weren't up at the crack of dawn and people had to get to work!  We ate, packed up our room, checked out, and headed to our last attraction.  (Hadley was so sad to leave the hotel...she wanted to know if next time we could stay "FOREVAAA")

Our last day in Atlanta saw us visiting Fernbank Museum.  I'll be honest, I was enamored with the area where Fernbank is located as much as I was in the museum itself!  You have drive on Ponce de Leon Avenue (adoringly referred to as "Ponce" to native Atlantans) which in and of itself is a looonnnng road, basically connecting all of Atlanta, haha.  We were in the Druid Hills district and y'all.  GORGEOUS.  Of course the roads were lined with million dollar homes, but they were older, classic, full of character.  I mean....this is the elementary school:

*For the safety of the kids and since this is a public blog, I'm not going to share the name of the school.  But I got this picture from this website.*

Can you even imagine going to elementary school here?  It looks like it's right out of a movie.  There was so much greenery, pretty parks, sidewalks that wound throughout, it was just a really beautiful area.

Fernbank is a National History Museum and when you pull up, there are dinosaur statues outside.  My kids were already excited when they saw those!  For the second time on our spring break trip, we opted to leave the stroller in the car, and I'm so glad we did.  Fernbank is 3 stories and while they have elevators, we chose to walk on the beautiful spiraling staircases to each different level.  The kid play area is on the 3rd floor, so that's where we headed first.  The kids seriously played in there for about an hour.  There are all kinds of activities built into a tree-house that let their imaginations just go wild.


*Daddy teaching Hadley about the rings on a tree.*


*Standing in the misting cave.*




*Building a wall.*

We literally had to drag them out to make sure we could see everything else the museum had to offer! The second floor was a lot more of the "museum-y" stuff, where we walked through the different "eras" --based in Georgia, mostly.  They had a lot of taxidermy animals in their wildlife habitat and Hadley pretty much skimmed over most of this.  David and I thought there was some pretty cool stuff in there (like a tree trunk made out of stone...what?!), but Hadley wasn't having it.  We finally got to the dinosaurs and she loved that part!


*Learning about the dinosaurs!*



David and I hadn't really been paying attention to the time and we realized it was about 11:45 so her meltdown was more than likely due to hunger, so we quickly headed to the cafeteria area.  We grabbed some food and the kids were a lot happier after getting some food fuel!  #badparentmoments

 



Once everyone was full and happy, we headed to the bottom floor of the museum, which was all about weather patterns.  Hadley and Griffin got to make their own tornados, Hadley played a fun game where she was a part of a tornado, and then she did a quiz on hurricane trivia.  It was all very interactive and they had activities that, even though she's young and doesn't quite understand the concepts, she still enjoyed and we got to introduce her to some science.


*Hadley making her tornado!*


*Griffin working on his tornado.*

One of the coolest parts, in my opinion, of Fernbank, is the nature walk.  They have miles of wooden walkways over their natural land habitats, full of climbing ropes, and platforms for the kids to play on.  There are a couple different viewing areas, and even a playground for the kids.  Both Hadley and Griffin had a great time running up and down the boardwalks.




*Walking on the rope bridge.*

We knew it was time to go when our generally sweet-hearted girl had a fit about sharing one of the two xylophone hammers.  So we made a family trip to the bathroom, walked through the gift shop, and got in the car to head home from our first family trip.  By the way, Hadley and Griffin both picked out wallets as their present to commemorate our trip and David and I picked out a christmas tree ornament to add to our travel ornament collection (started on our honeymoon).


*Some of the natural habitat at the museum.*

We did make a pit-stop at the Mayfield Dairy factory for a dip of ice cream on our way home.  We thought about going on the tour to see how ice cream is made, but ultimately decided to just eat the ice cream this time around.  In hindsight, I'm glad we stopped because we got caught in traffic halfway home. (Something about a tanker truck spilling flammable liquid all over 85 and totally shutting down all 4 lanes of traffic for like 12 hours....)  We ended up driving back roads the majority of the way home, so our typical 2 hour drive ended up taking 4 hours.  Needless to say, we were all ready to get out of the car when we got home! :)



It was such a great trip.  Some of my fondest memories growing up are the trips my family took and now I love to travel and explore new places.  I hope my kids learn to love traveling and family trips just as much!

You can read up on the other days of Spring Break 2017 here:

Day One
Day Two
Day Three