The Swine....

Who would have guessed an innocent trip to the doctor's office Thursay to reswab for strep after 8 days on antibiotics would result in the FLU!? I had a bad feeling about it considering Gavin spiked a temp a preschool while on antibiotics and he had the accompanying cough. Poor baby..his temp never got o over 102 and thankfully with early detection and aggressive breathing treatments at home cought it and got rid of it quickly! It's been like a mini med clinic at the Howard house. Everybody on tamiflu, G&G with breathing treatments every 4 hours, alternating tylenol and motrin every 3 hours, mucinex every 4 hours and Gavin was STILL positive for strep too! WHEW!! Going to work Friday was a relief compared to the nursing care at home. Greg did a bang out job (as usual!) taking great care of the kids and keeping them medicated and getting them over the hump. Saturday at noon Gavin broke his temp and has been fever free since. YIPPIE!!!
Today I took them out to the park for everyones sanity.

Our Tree

We have retired (temporarily) our grown up tree and welcomed the "kid tree" this year. They wanted 'pretty colored light' and stuffed animal ornaments. So that is what we have. As far as ornaments are concerned I am happy to not have anything breakable on the tree...I have 2 preschool aged boys for cryin' out loud! G&G also have put some of their Christmas finger puppets and antler's on the tree too. It's quite original! They will take the stuffed animals off the tree and redecorate almost every night and then come get me saying "Mommy, look look, take a picture!" They are so proud of their tree and even though I miss my white lights and matching decorations, I love to watch them have fun!

Build a No-man!

Grayson articulates like a 5 year old...it is amazing. He has always spoken so clear..however, I discovered this season that he calls a snowman a no-man, which is unusual because he says his "s's" great. It's super cute especially when he is singing frosty the no-man! So because I like to do all things super fun with G&G I took them to build a bear and instead of making a bear they made a "no-man!" Frosty is really cute...scarf, corn pipe and broom. G&G also got the song button in his arm. When Frosty's hat lifts is makes the magic sounds when he comes to life. I love being a kid again with my kids. Holidays are such a blast.

A Great Wolf Beating...

Me and my ideas....some are good..okay most (grin!) but some are just plan ole' premature. Hence, my most recent idea to take a family "staycation" and go spend a couple days at the Great Wolf Lodge. I can't blame old Murphy (ya know, Murphy's Law?) because I did get a couple of precursor warnings to retreat and pull back the troops. But my inherent optimism took over and hushed those warnings. Grayson started with a low grade temp the night before but no other symptoms. So since I have already been "that parent" who rushes to the pedi for everything I decided to wait and see if his symptoms progressed or remained low grade. Next morning he was the same...yippie..so off to family pictures then Great Wolf we went. It was on the way to family pictures when my first precursor came....the cough. Then after pictures the next precursor....the sniffles. By this point I think I was heading more towards denial and we went to lunch. Gray seemed okay and ate. So off we were to spend some fun time on the water slides. STOP here. This is the last time FUN will appear in this blog. Really. Gray continued to get worse..coughing and hoarse. Gavin got feisty (okay, feistier!) We played in the water park for maybe 2 hours at best then inside and bath time. The evening was okay with the snowland activities and the boys enjoyed Rowdy the Reindeer. Bedtime came and for some reason my boys resorted back to infancy and decided not to sleep but rather cry and fuss. Keeping in mind no nap and busy day I kinda cut both of them some slack (a really little piece). Around 5AM I was so tired and the boys had taken intermittent naps throughout the night then more fussing...I called out to the Lord...PLEASE....and Greg started laughing. So we packed up after breakfast and played a bit then headed home for Grayson's doctor appt which resulted in none other than good ole' strep throat. Lovely.......at least we spent some time with family.

Family Pictures

Yippie...we finally took them. It was so hard to get 6 people...2 of which are toddlers...to smile at the same time. We finally had to agree on the best one. Gray and Gavin did great-as usual. They love having their picture taken. G&G will run around the house doing something cute or smiling and posing by something saying "Mommy take my picture"!

Our first Gingerbread House

What a mess.....I mean frosting everywhere and little candies all over the floor. And on the box it looked so easy! ha! We still had fun. I had to really supress my type A-ness and less them just randomly place gumdrops and candies everywhere on the house in NO order. I did personalize the house with our names. G&G love their house and talk about how the gingerbread baby lives inside (book by Jan Bret-The Gingerbread Baby)

A day at the Park before Winter's arrival...

We took the boys to the park to enjoy the cool winter breeze before the raining and storms came. G&G had super fun running in the fields and feeding the ducks. I packed up all the old boxes of crackers and cereal for "duck food." ShooShoo went with me and the boys to enjoy the morning. We had a great time.