Lately...

The past few weeks have held some ups and downs, some great moments and some I'd rather not repeat.  Here's a little bit of what's been going on lately.

The boys recently had their piano recital.  Both were not thrilled with having to get up in front of a crowd of people to play their memorized piece of music but they both did great and I was proud of them.

These kiddos are good friends and the big three did great at their recital.

I helped do the Valentine's party for Lawson's first grade class.  They had a Valentine's Dance which I didn't get to participate in because I had Jury Duty, but I did get to see some of the line dance, which Lawson loved getting to do.  He is by far our most uninhibited child.  (He begged me to wear a bow tie so I gladly went and picked one out for him.)

I brought my other two Valentine's with me.  Are they not adorable?

The kids enjoyed their ice cream party.

Ava Jane thought her lip sucker was awesome.  I thought it was pretty cute too!

Here are the valentine treats that we did this year, we went with simple instead of elaborate this year.

Because I have so much time on my hands and nothing better to do (insert sarcastic tone) I had to attend Jury Duty orientation last week and will begin calling in each Wednesday morning for the next twelve weeks to see if I get the "privilege" of sitting on the jury of a civil trial.  I used to always watch Matlock and I'm still a sucker for Blue Bloods, so if the trial was/is interesting, I'm certain I could do my civic duty.

I recently had a little car trouble that included me needing to rent two vans in one day. YIKES! Thankfully I have really good friends and a mother who came to my rescue.  One picked up my kids for me from the preschool and went and got more gas (just in case that happened to be the problem…. unfortunately it was NOT the issue!)  My other friend helped watch my big kids while I messed with the car and she also offered me a nice strong coke which helped too.  And then of course my precious Mother came to pick all five of us up and helped us get to Enterprise.   It was definitely not a repeater of a day!  This was one of my lovely vans that I got to rent.

Lawson finally has started losing teeth. I like his little toothless grin.

We got to have some cousin time last week with sweet Theodore.  These three enjoyed reading before nap time.  Theo ate almost all of his grilled cheese sandwich by dipping it in ketchup.  He was so pleased with himself!

One day this past week I helped another friend with her kiddos which went really well considering I had seven kids under the age of nine, with four that needed help finishing their homework.  I'd planned to go to our regular, Thursday afternoon playgroup when I realized that I had seven kids plus myself, which meant I was one seat short in my suburban (insert the emoji with mouth spread narrowly across the face in an "oh no" expression). So again, I called on another friend who was going to the park and she thankfully came by the house to pick up Lawson so that we could still enjoy the spring like weather we were experiencing.  Here are some pics of our time that day.

So there's a brief synopsis of what we've been doing.  There were several pictures of things that I'll spare you the image of from the past week which includes both Lawson and I heaving over the side of the bed with the terrible stomach bug, Ava Jane running a low fever and coughing so hard that her "yucky nose" (as she calls it) started running.  There were many other moments high and low, but these are the ones I'll leave you with.  Hope your Monday is off to a good start.