Out off the end of the deck.

Behind the house.

The side of the house.

The front of the house.

I still need to plant my vegetable garden and I hope to get a good start on it this weekend. After 3-years I’m finally getting some stuff done around here. Yay!!

I’m finally done digging under the apple tree and getting all the weeds pulled up.

I got a whole bunch of hostas planted under the tree as well. Yay!

I used what hostas I had left to start planting a row along the side of our house. As you can see, I need more plants but never fear, Dad has plenty more at his house.

I love having a small piece of my mom in my landscaping beauty.

These are hostas and daylilies from my mom’s flower garden. Dad dug them up for me and brought them to my house.

More hostas along the back of the house. We’ll see how well these grow. The soil is very clay-like.

I’m cleaning out underneath the apple tree to plant more hostas.

I spent an hour or so cleaning out some of the underbrush from the brush/trees in the back of the yard. I’m all scratched up on my arms and legs. But it looks so much better back there.

I managed to do some of the planting while having 4 kiddos ranging from 3.5 years to 17 months running around and causing a ruckus.

Dave has gotten most of the yard raked and ‘cleaned’ up. I’m ready to do some landscaping, planting and gardening. We bought some landscaping stones last fall to put in along the sidewalk and we put most of those stones in last week and hope to finish it up this week. It looks wonderful, certainly makes the front of the house much nicer looking. Below is a picture of it in the partial stages. I hope to get a picture up in its finished stage soon.

The garden location will be moving this year to a different location. We are moving it to the back, center of the yard. It will get more direct sunlight, which will hopefully help it to grow better this year. We also need to dig down into the ground to lay some netting under the soil to help prevent critters from eating the roots of my plants and killing them. Another garden biggie this year is going to be putting up a fence around it to keep out other critters. Not a whole lot survived in my garden last year due to critters. Hopefully this year will be more bountiful.

In other good news…we’ve made some major headway with Eli’s potty training success. He has very few accidents and is doing a good job of telling us when he has to go potty (and sometimes even poop). He has been getting A LOT of M&M’s. Each time Eli gets on the potty, Noah points to the M&M’s and says, “M”. Noah gets an M&M each time Eli gets 1 (sits on the potty), 2 (goes potty) or 3 (goes poop). Lots of M&M’s in our house right now. Speaking of…we need to buy more.

In some more other good news…Noah is almost completely OFF his need for his pacifier. Sometimes during the night we’ll give it to him to help him fall back asleep. Otherwise he doesn’t need it for falling asleep at nap time and bedtime any more. Whoohoo!!

These are two big praises to my prayer requests. :-)

Quick updates on all of us…

Dave is busy playing softball each week, buying/selling music gear (he currently owns 5, yes 5 bass guitars), doing some work on the house, playing his bass(es) and lovin’ on his family. He’s a very busy man but seems to enjoy it. We’ve been dreaming up ideas for our house and landscape ideas for the yard. Lots of ideas, just saving our pennies to get it done.

Eli is talking a mile-a-minute. His vocabulary has grown by leaps and bounds. We love listening to him talk and talk and talk!! He loves to play with his cars and trains, scare Noah (he giggles the whole time) and be ‘helpful’ around the house. He is becoming very independent and wants to do lots of things by himself. We have been encouraging the potty training ordeal, but he is uninterested. Maybe in a few more months. Here is a picture of my growing boy, I can’t believe he is already 2.5 years old. Eli is scheduled to have his 3rd open-heart surgery on Tuesday, July 12th.

Noah is busy growing and becoming a porker!! He is now a master at rolling around on the floor. He’s getting better at learning to sit up. He loves to play with his toys. Noah has discovered his voice and babbles a mile-a-minute just like his brother. They can be found having ‘conversations’ together, lots of giggling! Noah is learning to crawl, he’s not quite there but he can army crawl and scooch around on the floor. Lynn, our daycare provider, said he is a man with a mission at her house (he chases the dog). :) Noah is also becoming quite the eater, he will eat just about anything put in front of him without much fuss. He recently started eating broken down goldfish and loves them.

I’ve been busy doing some cleaning and organizing. Today I’m feeling a bit under the weather and spent the day resting. I hope to be ‘back at it’ tomorrow (with moderation, don’t want to over do myself). I’ve been enjoying my snuggles and loves with my boys (all three of them). I’ve been busy scrapbooking and crocheting. Dave and I’ve been making plans for the yard and inside of the house. I’m starting to do some online shopping for house stuff – time to decorate!!!

My sweet baby boys!!

Dave – put in some crazy hours at work over the holiday season. In the two weeks prior to Christmas he worked about 115 hours – CRAZINESS!!! We were quite glad to have him home for two 3-day weekends, in a row. He has since been busy trying to find someone to mud/tape some rooms for us. He keeps the boys home with him on Mondays, his day off from work. Which is great for us, saves us over $200 a month in daycare cost. On Thursdays, when he doesn’t have worship band practice, his band gets together to practice. There is talk of a gig coming up soon. We’ll keep you posted.

Eli – is still a busy, busy boy. He loves playing with his cars and trains. He is still obsessed with Thomas, James and Percy. It is kind of funny, he knows all the characters in his Thomas movies. He also knows all the characters in his Arthur books. He loves to sit and read stories with us or with Noah. At the moment, he still adores his little brother. As I type this, Eli is laying on the floor next to Noah giving him kisses on his head. Oh fer cute!! ;)

Noah – is a growing boy. We had his 2 month appointment this week. He is up to 13lbs 5oz and is 24.25 inches long. He also got his 2 month shots and did great with them. He loves to talk and smile. He also loves to watch his big brother be silly. Noah is getting a little bit better at sleeping at night, his first stretch of sleep is typically the longest 3-5 hours, the rest of the night is anywhere from 1-3 hours until he decides to be awake for the day.

Both boys are doing great at daycare. Eli is protective of ‘his Noah’ and gets very concerned if other kids get too close. Lynn, our daycare lady, says at least once a day Eli will lay down next to Noah and chat with him for a few minutes before getting up to go play some more.

House – is slowly coming along. I’ve been going through and purging things. We have too much stuff and I want to have less stuff. So, I’m slowly getting rid of what we don’t need or want any more but I’m also reminding myself to not go buy more – that’s the key. As Noah grows out of his clothes I’ve been separating them into two boxes for some friends. I’ve been slowly giving away my maternity clothes. Yes, this means I’m done having children (that’s a story for another time). Two boys are enough for me.

Me – I’m recovering from a recent bout with the stomach flu. My stomach still hurts but the aches and chills are gone, thank goodness. I’ve been keeping busy with work, bible study and the boys. I enjoy my time home with them. I still try to find time to crochet in all my busyness and enjoy making baby blankets for friends.

That’s a semi quick update of our family. Once the picture galleries get sorted out, we’ll start update those as well.

Eli…is now well adjusted to his new bed. He does a great job of staying in bed and has only fallen out two separate times (once at our house and once at Grampa and Gramma’s house). I have to laugh, a few times I’ve needed to get the pack n’ play out for other kiddos to sleep in and Eli gets mad. He must think it is for him to sleep in. It has been fun for us to see his language (talking/signing) abilities take off and we really enjoy communicating with him now that we can understand him. Eli LOVES LOVES LOVES to watch some signing DVDs we have on loan from Gramma P. called, ‘Signing Time’ (can be found at www.signingtime.com). Lots of verbal language and lots of sign language has been picked up by both Eli and Dave (sign language component). Eli enjoys helping Dave and I around the house. He has his own water can (my old one) and likes to carry it out to my raspberry and tomato plants to help me water them. Just this morning he and Dave finished putting a culvert ring in the fire pit. Eli’s feet have also grown by leaps and bounds this summer, in the spring he was still wearing a size 4 but now he comfortably wears a 7 and sometimes an 8. I think this is just an indication of how much shoe shopping we’ll be doing as he grows up.

Dave…has been keeping very busy at work. They have needed him to come in early many times this summer. Lots of deliveries needing to be made. Softball is now over, but his team did a great job and played well together. Eli and I didn’t make it to very many games due to times, the heat and other events going on. Dave has been very diligent about working on the house and has made some great progress. We (and by ‘we’, I mean Dave) have been making steady progress in getting things done around the house to make room for the baby. I’m excited about what is done and a little anxious about what still needs to be done (pray please!!). Dave has gotten some new musical gear and has been selling other musical gear. He has been ‘fine tuning’ one of his basses and has been enjoying every minute of that. I love my husband!

Me…I have thoroughly enjoyed my summer home with Eli. We’ve had lots of fun hanging out together, working around the house and yard, running errands, going for walks, etc. I used my one free day each week (Eli had to go to daycare one day a week to maintain our spot) to get homework done. I took a class this summer called ‘Environmental Education’ it was a requirement for my teaching license. I have no intentions of using the knowledge at all, but who knows, maybe it will come in handy one day. I head back to work full-time next week for the upcoming 2010-2011 school year. Part of me is excited to go back (because I love my job) but part of me is not looking forward to going back (because I love being home with Eli).

Gilbert…has steadily been growing, the doc says I’m on target for size and should be on target to deliver a nice size baby boy (not quite sure what this means). Gilbert has taken to waking up and moving a lot from 10-11pm and 5-6am. If he can have a sleep pattern like that when he’s born, I’d be alright with that.

Dave and I celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary on August 7th. We had a great weekend together, kidless (well, as kidless as we could be). Eli spent the weekend with Gramma and Grampa Paulson. They had all kinds of fun. Dave and I got a hotel room for Saturday night, ordered in pizza, went swimming and went to see a movie (we wanted to test out my new hearing aids in a theater). Sunday we did lots of house and yard work, it was a very productive day. Then we went out for a fancy dinner at Vic’s in Minneapolis. It was such wonderful food and a great experience. We took a little stroll down by the waterworks system as well, since it was right there. We also saw a beaver!

That’s our not so quick update.

Now that the problem has grown from one to many, I’ve implemented some new strategies. I’ve added more traps, poison, and the garage classic: the 5-gallon bucket. Hopefully we’ll go several days without incident so Megan will be a bit more at ease once I leave for hunting.