Surprise Sleepover!

We always have a family party every year for the kids' birthdays, but this year, Tessa was asking for a party with her friends. Since her birthday is in the summer, I didn't really have a way to get invitations to her friends from preschool because I didn't know their addresses (or even some of their names....oops). And every time I asked who she would want to invite, she would say Alex, Essie and Bry! So I decided to just invite her cousins over for a surprise sleepover with them, Nana and Brooke.

The night before her birthday, I had Brooke and Nana bring Alex, Essie and Bry over after I got off work. Tessa was so confused about why they were there, so I let Alex tell her that it was for a sleepover. It's the most excited she's ever gotten about a surprise! She's never had them over to stay the night.

 We started off the night by going to the splash park in Augusta. 

 They had so much fun running around and playing!

 Brooke and I went and got them some shaved ice from a little place we LOVE right down the road. They have the BEST shaved ice!

 After they were done playing, they decided to put all of their towels together to make one big 'bed' so they could dry off and "lay out." I felt like we were getting a glimpse into their teenage years. They sat over there talking and giggling for at least twenty minutes--it was so cute!

After the splash park, we grabbed a gourmet meal at McDonald's (at the request of the birthday girl). Then we headed home to play outside for a bit and they ate some "poopsicles." Aunt JJ got Tessa some emoji poop popsicle molds and they were a HUGE hit!

Tessa opened a few presents from Aunt Brooke (makeup, undies and a walmart gift card) because she wasn't able to make it to Tessa's family birthday party.

Then it was time to get in our jammies and do each other's make up! I think that was my favorite part of the whole night. These girls LOOOOOVED lipstick! I think Tessa put on about 5 layers by the time we were done.

The BEST makeup of the night award goes to Brooke. Essie and Tessa teamed up on her and did her makeup. Essie kept saying, "Brookie, with TWO womens working on you, you're gonna look fan-TAS-tic!" And she did look......special.......

Everyone finally settled down and conked out around 11pm.

The next morning was Tessa's birthday and she woke up to balloons all around (per our annual tradition) and wanted to head straight upstairs to open presents!

 

She got emoji pants, the game Guess Who, 3 pairs of sparkly shoes, emoji ice packs and keychain, Uno and a bunch of other little things. She was in emoji heaven! After presents, we hung out in bed and the girls played an intense game of Guess Who....

And then THIS cutie dropped by and Tessa's birthday was complete!

After all the cousins left with Nana, Tommy and Tessa and I got around and headed out for the day. I felt bad because I was super tired and didn't feel good at all, so I wasn't as enthusiastic as I normally would have been. But Tessa insisted she didn't notice and had a great birthday day anyways!

She wanted to eat lunch at Golden Corral and then go bowling, so that's just what we did! I didn't get any pictures at lunch, but bowling was so much fun for them!

Sometimes they fight constantly and sometimes they get along for 5 minutes...

 Tommy was being really sweet to her and helping her put the ramp in just the right position!

 

They ended the game with a whopping 83 points between them both!

After bowling, we went home and we all ended up napping for about two and a half hours....it was amazing and I felt SO much better after that nap. Once Nick got home from work, Tessa and I left to go do some shopping because she wanted it to be "just the girls." So we went to Dollar Tree and Wal-mart. I loved spending the one-on-one time with her and watching what all she picked out. At Dollar Tree, she kept pushing the cart by herself and she just looked so big!

She ended up buying some cute Shimmer and Shine PJs, a weird pig pillow thing and a few other small things. She had so much fun spending all her money!

Then we headed home to eat dinner with dad and Tommy. Nick had saved a few presents for Tessa that he picked out and she got to open them. It was riding gloves and pink goggles--she was thrilled! He really liked them too.....

Then we just hung out and watched TV together and snuggled! It was the best day celebrating the best daughter!

On her 5th birthday...

Tessa Grace--

I cannot believe that you are 5 years old! The years have FLOWN by.

You, my lady, are such a joy in life. I am so grateful every day that you are my daughter.

At 5 years old, you are 53 pounds and 3ft 8in. You are getting so big! You're not too far behind your brother. You wear a size 6 clothes (sometimes a 7, depending on the brand) and a toddler size 12 shoe! We're almost out of toddler sizes and that breaks my heart because clothes and shoes stop being as cute when they're kids sizes.

You have just started to enjoy shopping for clothes and finding your own "style." Most of the time it looks pretty good, but there have been a few outfits I've had to put my foot down on. You love it when dad takes you somewhere and lets you wear whatever you want. You usually come home and I am shocked that he let you out in public, but you always laugh and giggle about it.

You are a pretty good balance of tomboy and girly-girl. You love to be outside getting dirty, riding four wheelers, playing with the dogs, riding bikes......but you also love putting on makeup with mom, snuggling up to watch movies, twirling in dresses and finding cute shoes! You are signed up for ballet/tap class, but also want to play flag football. I'm hoping that it works out for you to be able to do both.

You love to read chapter books (except you call them "tractor books"). It's hilarious because you pick up a book, skim the pages and then when you're done, you get so excited because you just "read" an entire book. You get very annoyed with me when I point out that you aren't ACTUALLY reading and you glare at me until I retreat slowly.

You wear your emotions on your sleeve. You try SO hard not to let people tell what you're thinking/feeling, but I know in an instant when you go from happy to mad or sad or whatever. Your mad face is the cutest. You scrunch up your little nose and cross your arms. But you also have the best smile in the world.

When you are tired....you are DONE. You start falling asleep no matter where we are and you get very drowsy and a little bit grumpy. You don't ever really fight going to bed and you like your room to be pitch dark and freezing cold. Just like your daddy!

You start kindergarten this year! You're glad you're done with preschool, but your brother has made you a little nervous about kindergarten because he didn't LOVE it. So you SAY you don't want to go, but when we start talking about who your teacher might be and what you'll do all day, you act excited. I think you're going to thrive and love it!

 You love taking care of people. I'm convinced you're going to be a nurse or something along those lines, because you are all about helping people do things. If I have an "ouchie," you fix it. If someone gets hurt, you hug them. If something needs found, you find it. If I have a question about something, you try to answer it. You're always by my side wanting to help me do anything and everything. You truly do so much for me and so willingly!

Gracie, I could not be any prouder of you than I already am! You have always been the perfect addition to our family and I'm so, SO grateful for you. Happy birthday, sweet girl!

Tessa's 5th birthday party

For Tessa's 5th birthday party with our family, we ended up doing a ballerina theme. She kept begging for a poop emoji party. I'm usually willing to go along with a lot of my kid's crazy ideas, but I draw the line at decorating my house with emoji poop. So pink and gold ballerinas it was!

However, since she wasn't getting the poop emoji party of her dreams, she got a little demanding about her decoration requests--ha! She wanted lots of balloons and she wanted a cake with pink flowers all over it and 5 gold ballerinas on it. Can we say diva?! Buuuuut.....she IS the birthday girl, so I managed to make it happen! The frosting job wasn't the best (because I was running out of time and frosting), but she loved it!

 I ordered her a cute little shirt to match her pink and gold theme! I also made a tutu for her (that she refused to wear and that caused my husband hours of grief because he hates glitter).

 When we asked her what she wanted for dinner at her party, she immediately answered ribs and potato salad. I don't think Nick's had a prouder moment than that! He spent most of his day smoking ribs for his baby girl.

After we ate, she opened presents.....

She got so much fun stuff AND stuff she REALLY needed (which is my favorite kind of present). She got a leotard from Nana, ballet and tap shoes/Dr. Pepper/gum from Grandma and Papa, a ballet bag/leg warmers/$20 from the Kirkpatricks and socks/gum/shorts/emoji band aids from the Whitsons. She had been begging for ballet classes, so as a surprise present, Nick and I signed her up for them. After she opened all her ballet presents from everyone else, I was SO excited to tell her about the classes. I said, "Tess, if you have a leotard, ballet shoes and a ballet bag....where could you take all that stuff?" She said, "I don't know." I said, "Well......me and daddy got you ballet classes! So you can take all of that stuff to your new ballet class!" She just smiled a little and said, "Oh!" and then went back to opening presents! Ha!! Talk about a let down! I was expecting her to be giddy with excitement and she barely cracked a smile (however, after everyone was gone and the party was over, she DID give us big hugs and say she was so excited to start ballet). I'm just going to have to remind myself over the years that she doesn't really show a lot of emotion over surprises, but I know she quietly appreciates them in her own way.

After presents, we blew out candles and had some cake.

We took a few pictures with some of our party guests....

Then the kids played outside in the water and had a great time! It was pretty hot, but they didn't care! They had a blast running around and jumping in the pools and shooting water guns at each other.

Tommy loves his little cousin. They have to stick together because they're the only boys!

Tessa had a GREAT 5th birthday party--we had a wonderful time enjoying our family and celebrating our sweet girl!

End of the school year 2017

The end of this school year and the start of summer felt really packed with fun stuff!

 I went on a field trip with Tommy's kindergarten class to the zoo! It was a little hectic with so many kids to be in charge of, but they had a lot of fun. His buddy Jace was in his group, so he was thrilled about that.

There was one little incident that caused a few moments of panic for Tommy. We were walking through the bird exhibit (basically a gigantic cage filled with birds). Tommy reached out to pet a bird and it pecked him right by his eye! It was so sad--he was crying so hard but at the same time was trying not to let any of his friends see him cry, so he kept hiding. It left a bruise where the bird pecked him, so I know it had to hurt! Luckily, he got over it fairly quickly, but it put a bit of a damper on his zoo trip.


Tessa Grace had her last day at Noah's Ark. It was bittersweet. We loved our time there but she's ready to go to "big school" with her brother! This is a picture on her last day there...

They had their little "end of the year" awards program. They sang a few songs for everyone and then each kiddo got a couple of awards. Tessa got academic queen and snack time singer! It was pretty cute and I may or may not have teared up a bit.

This was Tommy's last day of school....

I can't believe how much he's grown and changed since the first day. It's so true that the older you get, the faster time flies. It blows my mind how quickly the days turn into weeks and weeks into months and months into years.

They're both so ready for summer break! They're looking forward to lots of bike rides, swimming, sleeping in and playing outside. It's their favorite place to be! BRING ON SUMMER!!

One little pink pill--our experience with Singulair

I'm only sharing this in case someone else has had a similar experience and could benefit from it. I am 100% aware that this is not the case for every single patient, but it was ours and I appreciated finding info from other parents when I needed it, so here it is....(And now that I'm proofreading before posting, that starting sentence sounds way more dramatic than it needs to. But I'm too tired to think of anything else, so it stays).

Tommy was diagnosed with asthma around age 2. He was started on Singulair to help with asthma and allergies. He is now 6 years old. We initially had no problems with Singulair and it really helped him a lot with his asthma and allergies.

However......there were some things that happened throughout the 4 years he was on it that we are just now piecing together with being associated with Singulair.

Tommy could be a very aggressive child. He's always been persistent and determined and that's just his personality, but there were some times he was flat out.....crazy, for lack of a better word. He would get mad, hit, yell and refuse to listen. And it could last for SOOOOOOO long. Like, hours long sometimes. Most of the time, he was an AWESOME kid. But whenever he would have fits like that, it was seriously like he wasn't in control of his body. It was weird--and I'm not trying to blame his bad behavior 100% on a medication. We are fully aware that some of it was just him learning boundaries and pushing them. But often times, we would talk to him when he was finally done with his fit and calmed down and he would cry and say he was so sorry and that he didn't know why he was acting that way or how to stop it. As he got older, the fits weren't as frequent, but they were still happening. He wasn't as physical, but he would still have outbursts.

He also had a horrible time falling asleep. We would put him to bed and an hour and a half later when we went to bed, he would still be awake. He woke up grumpy every morning, like he hadn't slept good. He woke up in the middle of the night several nights a week because he was scared. He had bad dreams a lot that would make him really upset. He was often anxious and worried about a lot of things that weren't rational. 

Then he started having some motor tics. He would snap his fingers over and over and over and just do some weird repetitive movements with his hands. He said he couldn't stop. He did that off and on for quite awhile and then it went away for about a year and a half. Then early this year, he developed a really bad eye tic. He would blink really hard and squeeze his eyes closed constantly. He did this probably 2-3 times a minute for what seemed like almost all day. It would get especially bad if he was looking at a book or focusing on the TV. Then he started with a vocal tic. He kept just making a low sound, kind of like he was clearing his throat. It was constant as well. We decided to keep an eye on it when it first started because his finger tics eventually went away. But it got to the point where it was bothering him and the teacher mentioned it as well. I started trying to think through what could be causing it. I eventually looked up Singulair and it's side effects and HOLY. MOSES. I found forum after forum of parents discussing what was happening to their kids after starting Singulair. I read the warnings on the labels (which I should have done in the first place, but didn't think about since he'd been on it so long and hadn't read since he was two years old). I found articles with the serious side effects listed. And what do you know....

Several websites listed aggression, mood or behavior changes, anxiety, trouble sleeping, abnormal dreams, agitation.....the list goes on. A lot of parents talked about how their child started having horrible tics and how the tics stopped once they discontinue the medication. 

So Nick and I decided to talk to our primary care doctor immediately about it to see what he thought. We took Tommy in for an appointment and told the doctor our thoughts. He seemed skeptical and said he hadn't heard of that being the case with Singulair before. He said he really thought it was more of a vision problem because of the eye blinking (and I KNEW he was going to say that--I had even had Tommy scheduled for an eye exam the day before the doctor's appointment to rule that out so the doctor couldn't blame the tics on a vision problem, but the eye doctor got sick and cancelled our appointment). However, he said that if we were concerned it was Singulair, we could go ahead and discontinue it, but to still go see the eye doctor. I called a same-day eye clinic and got Tommy seen the next afternoon. And his vision was perfect.

We stopped Singulair the night of the doctor appointment.

In about 10 days, I personally felt like we had a whole new kid. His tics started tapering off after the first few days of being off Singulair and then altogether disappeared. His attitude improved exponentially. He started falling asleep within 10 minutes of laying down. He went from waking up almost nightly and coming to our room because he was scared to sleeping PEACEFULLY through the night EVERY night.  I used to DREAD mornings because he was so difficult to wake up and SO grumpy and irritable. Now our mornings are SO much better--I feel like he just sleeps so much better and that makes him much more rested and pleasant in the mornings. It's been about 2 months now and he's still doing great! I think sometimes when I share, people are skeptical that it was really Singulair causing so many issues, but there are too many things that got better after stopping it for it to be coincidental. Honestly, I was skeptical in the beginning if it would work or not to take him off it because our doctor seemed to have no issues with Singulair. However, I felt validated when we took Tommy to an urgent care clinic over one weekend because of an ear infection. They were verifying his current medications and I told them he wasn't on Singulair anymore. The nurse asked why and when I told her all that had gone on, she said the same thing had happened with her daughter. Then the nurse practitioner came in and asked again why he stopped it. When I told HER all the info, she said something along the lines of, "Yeah, I'm not surprised. Singulair isn't something I ever prescribe because of the warnings it comes with." And while I was glad that a nurse and a nurse practitioner confirmed that Singulair can cause the issues Tommy was having, I felt frustrated that I hadn't heard it from any of the doctors we had been to since starting Singulair.

So that's why I'm sharing...because maybe somebody's kid is having these problems and they just need to hear from someone else that's had the same issues. While none of his issues were serious or life-threatening and I'm thankful for that, I get sad when I think about the fact that he probably felt out of control and didn't understand what was going on with his behavior and tics. I also feel bad thinking about the fact that his younger years probably could have been a lot better. We spent a LOT of time disciplining, struggling with behavior and meltdowns. And it was likely all because of one little pink pill...

Mother's Day 2017

For Mother's Day, Tommy's class had a little program and snack time for the moms/parents. They sang a few cute songs and then served us some tea!

He never wants to just take a normal picture--he always wants silly faces!

 Him and his best buddies!

 Tessa's preschool also had a Mother's Day Tea. The kids all served us some fruit salad and water and then we get to listen to the cute little papers that they filled out all about their moms!

After we ate, they sang a few songs and then gave us a gift they had made.

 It was really precious and was my last "event" with Noah's Ark preschool, so it was a little bittersweet! It feels like my kids' time there has just flown by!

On Mother's Day weekend, we went out to the Cains for a little riding and to watch the guys blow a few things up. Tannerite is their new favorite toy! Me and Brooke and Tess managed to all squeeze onto one 4 wheeler and had fun baking in the sun while the guys were shooting.

We got a little muddy and this ornery boy flooded his 4 wheeler, so dad has some work to do to fix it. I just love this picture of him though......I think it's my favorite one ever!

On actual Mother's Day, we went to church and then ate lunch with my mom and grandma at KFC (their favorite place). 

 4 generations! So glad my Granny is still with us!

Once we got home, the kids each gave me a present they had picked out for me. 

Tessa got me these fabulous earrings I'm wearing.....

Tommy picked out a ring for me that he thought was just so pretty!.....

 I made myself wear the earrings and ring almost every day the week after Mother's Day so they'd know how much I loved the thought they put behind the gifts. They are certainly not pieces I'd pick out for myself, but I love seeing what they think I'd like!

 I'm a pretty blessed momma!