The Moore You Know

If you don’t want to hear a little #1 or #2, then you might want to skip this post.  To you, I’ll just say, potty training is going well.  To anyone interested in more details, here we go.  When approaching almost anything with Dax the only memories we have are doing it with twins.  So we really hunker down expecting a challenge.  But with almost everything so far it’s been sooooooo much easier.  This was no exception.  We started on Friday and by 11am Lance was saying that he was bored.  Where as from memory we were frantic all day, there was no down time trying to potty train two boys.

We armed ourselves with “potty candy,” salty treats, and lots of yummy drinks to keep the pee coming.  We started the morning off watching, “It’s Potty Time,” a very out of date movie that includes a song about being a “Super Dooper Pooper.”  It’s pretty hilarious (in the way that it’s not really suppose to be though.)  He had a couple accidents, trying to get the feel of when he needs to go and stuff but the hardest part was he was scared to go #2.  But hallelujah he did it again tonight, by his own free will and choice.  We said our goodbyes to the poo and sent it to the “poo party” in the sewer.  He was very proud of himself and was excited to flush the toilet.  I don’t know, but I think I have a Super Dooper Pooper!!!

She truly is one!  I took her into the doctor yesterday for her six month well visit (a month late) and she was 19 pounds 2 ounces, 26 3/4 inches long.  She’s 2 pounds heavier than my biggest boy at that age.  Lance says that she’s the youngest so we just feed her to keep her quiet.  I wouldn’t quite go that far, but she really is hungry a lot.  I figure, let her eat, this is about the only time in her life where people think that her budda belly and thunder thighs are cute.   Enjoy it while you can, am I right ladies?

I was waiting at the bus stop for the boys and all the rest of the kids came out and the boys weren’t coming out.  So I poked my head around the door and the bus driver turned around and the boys were sound asleep so she went back and woke them up and they slowly made their way down the stairs. 

This is when I realized boys are boys whether they are 33 or 5.  They have already started to compartmentalize.  What they do at school, they leave at school.  It was painful trying to get any information out of them, they just did not want to talk about it.  All they wanted to do was veg, eat (they were starving!) and of course play Lego Indiana Jones.  The little that I got out was that Chiler really enjoyed school and liked his teacher.  Xander…not so much.

For the last two years (that is not an exaggeration) I’ve been worried about one thing, finding a great teacher for Xander that is going to love him and want to work with him.  I went from being disappointed(Friday), to optimistic (Sunday), to devastated (yesterday.)  So we’ll see what happens today.  I hope that I go back to optimistic, I want him to love school and learning, we have at least 12 more years ahead of us.

I can’t believe it.  Truly I’ve been thinking about this day, trying to prepare for this day.  Man, I am not!  We walked the boys down to their bus stop and waited for a few minutes.  Then the bus came and before I could give the boys a hug, a kiss or even say goodbye they were on the bus, they were so excited.  I wanted to get on the bus and make sure they were sitting nicely in seats, but realized that I probably wasn’t suppose to.  Then for a few minutes I kept watching the clocks wondering if they were at school yet, if they made it to their classes.  Were they having fun?

For five years I’ve been their everything.  I kiss their hurts, if something is going wrong in their life, if something is great in their life, they search me out.  Now, I’m not there.  And it’s left me thinking, have I taught them enough?  Do they know their right from wrong?  Was there something more that I should of done?  I’ve been saying lots of prayers for them over the last few weeks, about picking the right teacher, that they will love school.  All my hope lies in those prayers now and my heart is full and eyes a bit wet. 

The boys got to pick new shirts for their first day of school.  So of course it was Ben 10 and Lego Star Wars.

These are my buds still at home.  Dax wore his back pack all morning and cried all the way home from the bus stop that he couldn’t go to school.

Yesterday was a very interesting day for me.  All four of my kids were sick, but in varing degrees.  Chiler and Dax almost immediately started having breathing problems.  Other than Chiler all the kids acted like they were fine, just with a few extra sniffles.  Chiler spent most of the day upstairs watching TV then taking a nap.  Xander spent most of the day downstairs, watching TV and playing with toys.  And Dax went back and forth…which ever TV had the show he wanted to watch.  : )  What I realized is that there was no fighting yesterday.  Chiler and Dax are very similar in some ways.  They want things to be their way, and they are physical.  Xander, on the other hand, is very easy going.  For the most part he’ll just go along with what others are doing or he’ll go do his own thing.  He doesn’t really get mad too often.  The other two get mad and upset with each other very quickly.  So when Chiler was taken out of equation, Dax and Chiler weren’t butting heads all day.  It makes me wonder where  Rory will fit in, in the Moore world.  Will she fill the stereotypical youngest child role and want her way all the time?

While Xander is easy going during play time, he is very physically demanding.  He feels loved when he’s hugged and kissed.  So to fill his bucket full of love every day it takes a lot of personal hug time.  Dax is very similar, he needs a certain amount of attention, and they just come up and let me know when that is.  Chiler, on the other hand, is to the age that hugs and kisses are for babies.  He just doesn’t want them (or so he says.)  But yesterday, I spent a lot of one on one time with Chiler trying to get his lungs cleared up and he just relished in it.  All the way into night time he wanted to cuddle with me and keep his mom time going.  Being the mom of four young kids, keeps me stretch pretty thin a lot of times, trying to give the kids individual attention.  But what I learned from yesterday is while Chiler may say he doesn’t want that type of attention sometimes he needs it.

Family Dynamics are interesting and ever changing, I can’t wait to see what Monday brings…

Lance and I started trying to have kids just a few months after we were married, so the summer of 2000.  If you ever thought people looked at you funny, think of the doctors looking at me saying I wanted to start infertility treatments at the age of 19.  I pushed and actively tried to get pregnant from that time until the boys were conceived (winter of 2003.)  But back when we were in Flagstaff, I got this really cute baby dress.  After trying for a year or so, I thought about giving it away.  I couldn’t though, from that point on giving away that dress meant that I had given up.  I couldn’t.  So I kept it, five different houses, moving across the country, it came along with me.  Then I was blessed with two boys.  They definitely weren’t going to be wearing that dress, but I kept it in hopes that some day I’d have a girl.  I almost gave it away again, after Dax was born.  But I just couldn’t part with it, I knew I had one more chance, maybe that was my girl.  And here nine years after getting that dress I have the best little girl and she is wearing the hope I carried with me for so long.

My morning started super early because Alicia, Tara and I were part of an in studio audience for a radio show, Mix 107.3.  It’s a radio show that Lance and I have listened to since we moved here, we both really like it.  And every Friday they invite around ten people to come in.  So this week my friends and I thought we’d try and get tickets to go, and we did!!!  It was so much fun.  You never know what to expect when you meet people like that.  They all seem very nice on air, but how are they really?  They were awesome!  I couldn’t believe how often they talked to us and explained things to us when they were off air.  We walked away with lots of give aways and Alicia and I were picked to participate in the game at the conclusion of the show and we both won tickets to Luray Cavarns.  It was a fantastic morning.  Thanks to all our husbands, for manning the kids!

The three of us.  Please ignore the hair, we had to leave our house at 3:45.  And the studio was cold that’s why we have sweatshirts on.

Alicia and I made shirts with a saying that Jack Diamond says all the time.  We think that gave us a heads up when it came to picking people for the game.

If you want a good laugh, here is a video with Dax’s head stuck in the seat of the Jumparoo.  The really funny thing is that Chiler helps him out and he just sticks his head right back in.  Are we bad parents that we just grabbed the camara instead of helping him out?

On Saturday morning we had a great call from Garett asking if they could come down that evening to come visit us.  Other than the fact we were worried because we had no A/C we were excited to have them come visit.  I was having family withdrawal since my trip to Utah so it was nice to have them come down.  Other than a couple health incidents (we had a make shift ER room/kitchen on Sunday) we had a nice relaxing weekend and just enjoyed each other’s company.  The boys really enjoyed hanging out with their cousins.  We had our satellite company out on Monday to replace our DVR and one of the technicians asked if they were all siblings.  I told him no, but cousins and he said, “Wow, they all really look alike.” When all the boys were playing downstairs it looks like we were running a day care.   Really, if you add any number to my kids it looks like a day care because they all look so close in age.  It was a great last minute visit, thanks Jackson’s for making the trip.

While the A/C guys and cable guys were here we just kept moving the kids around the house trying to keep them out of the way.  Here are da boys hanging out on our  bed watching Backyardigans.

My boys came in after playing in the sprinklers outside and I quickly got in the shower.  Well, Spencer and Preston thought they’d join in the fun as well.

When I was pregnant with Rory I had some lower back problems.  Some times were worse than others as she would lay herself right on a nerve.  So when it came to picking up the boys and stuff, I just couldn’t do it all the time.  Well Chiler picked up on that quickly.  When it was time to clean up toys, “oh my back.”  When it was time to go upstairs and go to bed, “oh my back.”  When it was time to eat something he didn’t want to eat, “oh my back.”  You get the point, whenever he didn’t want to do something, his back hurt, so obviously he couldn’t d them. 

Yesterday, I was telling Dax he needed to go downstairs because I was putting Rory down for a nap.  He began to get off the bed and said, “oh my back.”  What Chiler does, Dax follows.