Katie and the Boys: Happy Birthday, little boys!

The little boys woke up to their balloons on their birthday. Z and I chose Elmo for N, Lightning for C, and a fire truck (kind of random) for L. I tied them onto their cribs so they would find them first thing in the morning. So this is how we woke up: "MO-MO!!!!" bam, bam, giggle, bam. "LI-NEE!!" bam, giggle, bam. "MO-MO!!!!" bam, bam, bam, giggle. "TRACTOR!!!" bam, bam, giggle. Pretty fun way to wake up, to the sweet voices and giggles of my boys as they played with their balloons.

We had no plans, so we went to the Butterfly House. We have a membership to the Botanical Gardens, and I discovered a few months ago that it was affiliated with the Butterfly House, but we hadn't visited yet. It was a cold day, so I figured being in a greenhouse full of butterflies might make it a bit warmer.

I took them without the wagon. It worked out pretty well, until the end....go figure. In the house the boys did great. It is kind of difficult to wrangle them all, but it is small and it wasn't crowded so I wasn't too worried. They all were kind of wigged out by the butterflies at first, but got used to them.

Then we decided to walk another bit to the Carousel (thanks to Nate's grandparents for the gift money...we enjoyed it here!). The rules say that if a kid is under 4 an adult must ride with them and hold them, or they need to go on the sleigh. So the sleigh was my intention at first...but there was NO WAY my kids were going to sit on it. It would have been more dangerous for me to try to hold them all on there than stand between 2 and hold the third (which is what I did). The workers weren't exactly happy, but no one kicked me off. We decided to ride again, and I was going to let C ride a horse since I held him the first ride, but he was against that...in fact, he became anti Carousel and screamed and writhed the entire second ride, while I tried to hold him and "hold" L and N on either side of me going up and down. It was ugly. And then we had to walk all the way back to the car...probably a total of a quarter mile? And it was lunchtime...well, I should know by now...but it was fun.

After lunch and naps, and Nate got home, we let the boys loose in their Cardinals shirts. We tried to get them to show us "2" with their fingers...L was confused, N wouldn't do it, and C actually got it. They got pretty tired of the shirts quickly, so it was short lived, but fun.

The boys opened one gift, it was a package from Nate's grandparents. It was 3 bath Elmo/Abby books. They LOVED them. They settled right into the couch and passed them back and forth and traded and kept shouting "Mo-mo! Bab-be! Cook-eee!!" Z loved them as well, so he was happy to "read" the books to the boys. They got a little TOO loved, and the boys started not sharing enough, so they got dumped into their cribs, where each boy can enjoy his own book without someone else screaming and taking it from them.

After dinner we set up the boys cakes. Again, I am winning no awards here! I chose chocolate cake with chocolate icing. Maybe when they get older they will want a different flavor, but for now, I'M picking! We sang to each kid, starting with C, since he was pulled out first, then N, then L. Loved their eyes as they watched the cake come out and we sang to them. Sweet, sweet boys.