Happy Birthday, Jared!!

Today is Jared's birthday! We are SO incredibly blessed to have such an amazing husband, Daddy, and best friend in our lives. We love you and hope you have a great birthday!!!

Beach Babes

My Mom and Dad celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary this year and decided that a family trip to the beach would be a great way to celebrate their milestone. Spending time with family is such a blessing, and I have lived in a different state than my parents and brother since college so this was a great trip to just enjoy one another's company and laugh at old times and new.

We headed out early Saturday morning and had many moments of one happy baby and one not so happy baby in the car, and I spent a LOT of time in between the boys giving them "snacks" of a few ounces of milk. They are definitely growing boys!


We finally made it to the beach and I was eager to get the boys in their swimsuits and take them on their first beach walk.They loved looking at all of the new surroundings and listening to the waves and this became our daily morning start...


It wasn't long before they were asleep...


We had SO much fun playing on the beach and making memories this week that if I were to talk about each one this post would go on for waaaayyy too long, so here are some of my favorite pictures of the hundreds that I took this week. Enjoy!

Happy Half Birthday!!

Today is our sweet little guys half birthday and their Poppy's real birthday. We celebrated our last morning at the beach with a morning bottle looking out into the ocean and saying goodbye to a fun filled week with so many wonderful memories. I can't wait for these two beach babes to have many more trips to the beach in the years to come!

The Fab Four

I love our playdates with Jennifer and her sweet boys! It is always fun to hang out with another mom and friend that has kiddos the same age, but it's especially awesome when it is twins! We definitely caused a scene on our walk this morning with these four cuties but it was a blast. Can't wait until the fab four hang out again!

Goodbye Pump, Hello World!

I was bound and determined that I was going to pump enough milk or nurse to feed the boys when I found out that I was pregnant, and my determination only became stronger when they were preemies since I knew that breastmilk was the best thing for them. Well, nursing two fragile babies in separate incubators in the NICU proved to be both challenging and taxing on my body, so I decided to exclusively pump and give the boys only bottles of milk that I pumped. It went great and I was shocked that I was able to produce so much milk for those sweet boys, and I set a goal to give them my milk for at least 3 months. Three months came, and I decided that I could do it for a little bit longer. I had experienced mastitis, lost hours of sleep, missed out on events bc I had to be home every 3 hours, and sacrificed all that I could to make it happen, but I wanted to keep going. In case you haven't caught on...I like a challenge ;o)

The boys are now rolling over back to front and front to back and it is getting pretty funny to watch (especially Carter). It has also made me realize how CRAZY it is going to be once these sweet boys are mobile! So I decided to wean myself and slowly introduce supplementation of formula with the boys and they have done AWESOME! They are still getting a bottle of breastmilk each morning and will continue to get that through milk that I've frozen, but they are almost completely on formula now and are thriving.

I know they say that breastmilk is the best thing a mom can give her baby if she is able, and I can't say how awesome it was to have Jared in my corner on that as I sat behind the pump for 3.5-4 hours a day....yes, 3.5 to 4 hours every day which is over 24 hours a week! That is a lot of time for a Mom of two that doesn't have a lot of time in the first place but it was something that I wanted to do and to sacrifice for the boys. I think it would be completely different if I was able to strictly nurse, but the four hours on top of the time it takes to feed them (45minutes every 3 hours) has put a lot of stress and strain on me and I'm REALLY looking forward to having that extra 4 hours to spend with these sweet babies and interact with them and to be able to help them as they roll around and not be attached to a pump.

Soooo....GOODBYE PUMP and HELLO WORLD!

Ducks

The weather is beginning to cool down a bit and it is FINALLY nice enough to take these sweet boys for a walk! Yesterday we took the boys on a walk to the lake in my parents neighborhood and Coleman was able to see the ducks and watch them swim. Carter would have seen them too but he was "resting his eyes" while we were there :o)

Hopefully the weather continues this way and we can take many more walks this week!

Lake Trip

Sorry for the delay in blog posts lately! Coleman accidentally spit up on my laptop when I was holding him one day and finishing an email at the same time (multi-tasking mama!), so needless to say some of the keys on my laptop are now toast and I have to sit down at a desktop when I get a sec to type. A new keyboard is on its way though, so hopefully this is temporary!

This weekend we went to Lake Martin to visit with Jared's parents and brother and sister. We had a blast and so did the boys while they played with all of the new fun toys at their Lovey and Big Poppa's house. Jared and I also both got two full nights of sleep...not sure that Lovey and Big Poppa knew what they were signing up for when they volunteered to watch the boys for the night, but I am definitely well rested and reengergized! The boys also went on their first boat ride of many to come since there was no one else on the water. They did great and fell asleep from the sound of the motor.

Here are some fun pictures from our weekend...

The dogs experiencing the paddleboard...


Coleman in the exersaucer/bouncer...

Carter in the exersaucer/bouncer...

Our first boat ride...

Meal time...


Hanging out with Uncle Daniel...