Just Another Day in the Park: 2012

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Luke & Logan turned 1!

I can’t believe my little itty bitty boys turned on year old on October 21^st! It is amazing to me that a whole year has passed! They were such little guys when they were born, and my how they have developed since then! They are so active and busy these days, it’s hard to remember how things were a year ago! Here are a few pictures of way when last October/November 2011:

About 2 hours before I gave birth..yikes!

Luke - 1 Day old

Luke Eating!

Daddy and Luke time - kangarooing

Logan - my little trooper!

1st picture together - 1 week old

Logan eating in full Buckeye Spirit!

Going Home from the Hospital - we are very little, but very ready to get out of this place!

First stretch once we got home!

All bundled up

Hanging out with Mommy

My little pint-sized monsters

Loving each other

Very proud papa

We also had a very fun 1^st birthday party for the boys. We had close family share in their big day! We went with a sesame street theme and the cupcakes turned out great! I would like to thank Tim, my mom, my sisters and everyone else that helped make the decorations and the food for their big day. They ended up having a lot fun playing with their cousins and the balloons we had. They didn’t tear into their cakes too much, but Luke is definitely more of the sweet tooth out of the two! Overall it was a great first birthday and I’m sure it will be hard to top next year!

Birthday festivities - blowing out candles, eating cake, opening presents and of course very tired and relaxing on their new couch at the end of the day!

The boys had a lot of fun with their cousins and all the balloons and toys!

We LOVE our family - Thank you for everything!!

All the fun Sesame Street Decorations (and the smash cakes - can you see the hand print in the chocolate one?)

Changing my mind and balancing my priorities!

I usually post about our family and the boys, but thought I would take a quick break and let you know about a big change coming into our lives.

You would think by now I would have made up my mind, but it’s amazing what having two little boys can do to your life! At this point I definitely want to spend more time with Luke & Logan and really enjoy them while they are growing up! Thus, I have recently left my full-time job at Cardinal Health to spend more time with the boys! It was a tough decision as I loved working there and had built some very good relationships while there, but in the end spending more time with my family was more important to me. A motto I have been thinking about lately is “you work to live, not live to work”. I have thought a lot lately about what we live for and what is important in life and in the end my boys, my family, (and my sanity J) were more important than staying on some imaginary career path that I had made for myself. It’s amazing how your priorities shift throughout your life.

So now I’m just rolling with the punches and trying to figure out the right balance. I plan to still work on a part-time basis as I do have my CPA and Masters degree and don’t want to completely forget about all the hard work I’ve put into things so far, so we’ll see how things go. There are a few things that I have in the works right now, so I think I’m on the right track. All I know at this point, is that this is definitely the right decision for me and our family right now. I’m sure there will be a lot of big things to come and I’ll try to keep you all posted as they arise!

A few boring pictures from my last of work J

I had a really nice corner "cube" with a huge window!

Look at all that paper - cleaning house for the next guy!

Of course my screensaver has pictures of the boys on it :)

Packing just a few bags

Thursday, November 1, 2012

The kinds of "toys" we like

Luke & Logan - while enjoy playing with the toys we buy them, really enjoy playing with "non-toys". This can be a variety of things such as bottles, bottle caps, empty gallon jugs, empty boxes, balloons, remote controls, etc, etc. Here are some pics of the boys loving their non-traditional toys :)

Empty Gallon Jug

Balloons!

Crawling around with clothing in our mouth

Tissue boxes

Vacuum Cleaner - we LOVE this!

climbing in our high chair seats - we also love to do this with our car seats

Love boxes!

TECHNOLOGY - can't get enough of ipads, cell phones, etc

Good old remote controls, fan favorite

clothes bin

newspaper adds

Luke loves to climb in things! (cute little face he does for us!)

Sunglasses (Logan's cheese face :))

Friday, October 19, 2012

Catching up - August & September

So it's been much longer than I wanted it to be since my last post. So much has happened since the end of July! I don't know where to start! I"ll debrief what we have been up to since then. I'll have a nother post (hopefully sooner rather than later) with some October updates!

August 5th - Kimmet family reunion at the Welly's. Lots of fun to catch up with all the Kimmets. Even had some time in the pond eating stones.
August 15th - Luke & Logan got their first cold/illness. It lingered about a month! No need to go to the Doctor, and we have been very blessed by how healthy our little boys have been over their first year!
Luke had a tough time sleeping through the night starting mid-August and going through almost the end of September. It was a loooong 6 weeks, but I think we might finally be over the hump...
August - pulling themselves up on furniture, it didn't take long to start scaling the furniture. We now have little mobile monsters that are all over the place. They love to be where we are. They especially like to be in the small bathroom with me in the mornings when I'm getting ready.
August - finally starting to enjoy chewing/eating food. Love eating puffs and starting to really want to eat what both Tim and I are eating. Also they finally started feeding themselves bottles. I think they could do this for a while, but always preferred us to feed them :)
August - Annual Fantasy Football Draft party with the Siebenallers where we got to catch up with everyone
September 14th - We all packed up and went to Washington DC to visit Alicia. The boys were superb in the car (perhaps because we drove through the night both ways :) ) We had a lot of fun visiting Alicia and even got to walk around the National Mall for a while too. It was especially nice to have so much help from my mom and dad, and both Brittany and Alicia. Definitely made the whole trip run very smooth. Such a fun first family vacation!
Mid September- First teeth (finally!) Luke's first two teeth (bottom front) poked through first and then about a week later, Logan's came through. I feel like they were "teething" for almost 5 months, (sometimes grumpy, lots of chewing and slobbering, waking up in the middle of the night, etc), so I'm glad we finally have something there to prove we aren't crazy!
September 29th - visited Tim's aunt, uncle and cousins - Dave, Cindy, Daniel, Ben, JT and Rachel Kuhlman in Indiana, we had a lot of fun on our short visit!