5 More days until Christmas!

Today is a pretty relaxing day, if you call Wal-Mart at 8:30 am relaxing. Well, I guess it is better than Wal-Mart at 12:00 pm on a Saturday, 5 days before Christmas! I have been busy making cookies to give to friends, and will soon start rolling out cookies for the kids to decorate tomorrow for Santa, and US to eat! I have not wrapped ANYTHING at all - that will be tonight. I guess the kids haven't noticed, as none of them has asked where the presents are. I hate to wrap them as I get them because I don't want to hear the "so-and-so has X number of presents, and I only have X" whining. It's better that they just appear one morning.

On a more relaxing front - the girls are pretty consistently sleeping all night. This morning I awoke at 7:30 - NO ONE was crying, up, or in bed with us! At 8, Emily came down and said someone was crying. Thus all the girls were up. That's OK, I'll take 12 hours of sleeping babies!

Today is my Mom's birthday. Rocky's parents are going to come over and watch the kids, eat dinner with them, and put them lovingly to bed while we take them out to eat at a REALLY nice place. I'll save the place for later, as it is a surprise!

Oh, well. Back to baking!

It finally happened!

Well, sort of. I put the girls down last night, upstairs, in separate beds. GUESS what happened? Well - I woke Abby up this morning to get her dressed for school! Izzy had different ideas last night. She wanted some one-on-one bonding time with mommy. She got it! Well, it was definately less painful waking up to one baby between us rather than two. I did warn the daycare that Abby was probably REALLY hungry, as she had gone from 9:30 to past 7am without eating. She did cry all the way to daycare, but stopped when I pulled in the parking lot. Way to go girls! Maybe our no-sleep-sore-back-no-room-in-the-bed days are coming to an end!

TTTS Awareness day

I just stumbled upon the Twin to Twin Transfusion Website the other day and noticed that December 7th is World Awareness day for TTTS. I am working on getting a fundraising page up, but if you would like to contribute, please go to the TTTS Foundation webpage and you can donate from there. It's amazing, as we just past the girls 1 year birthday, where we were last year at this time. Even though we didn't progress to the laser treatment and/or we didn't have to choose which one of our girls would live, I am forever grateful to the Doctors, nurses and other staff in Houston for their care and concern. We made 7 painful (just long) trips there and came home each time with healthy babies. I'll never forget the whirlwind events the few days before they were born. I didn't have a good feeling the week before I was admitted, and I had actually scheduled another visit to Houston to have things looked at again. I never got to make that trip. I am so grateful that I listened to my body. By the Sunday before the girls were born, I was having difficulty sitting on the couch and getting a big breath. It turns out, Abby was doing worse and her fluid had increased. Some of the extra fluid was removed on Monday and my doctor told me I was in the hospital for the long haul. I spent the rest of the day making sure that I had all the necessary things for a few months in the hospital - toiletries and a laptop! What else do you need? The next day, things were ok and we celebrated Olivia's birthday in my hospital room. By wednesday, things were looking grim again and the delivery was scheduled.

All this to say - thank you to everyone who helped us through this most stressful time in our lives - we couldn't have done it without you. If you feel like giving back to someone - please consider the TTTS foundation, as they were very quick to mail us resources free of charge. These were invaluable in helping us understand in detail what was going on. Have a wonderful week!

Luau Pictures

Here are some of the pictures from the Luau. We had a relaxing day on Sunday, the day after and opened presents. It was wonderful that way - not rushed, etc. I tried to get pictures of everone with their respective gifts, but soon they tired of that. Enjoy!

Make a Smilebox slideshow

What a difference 365 days makes!

Abigail Hope Then...
Abigail Hope Now...
Isabelle Joy Then...
Isabelle Joy Now...

Birthday News

Well, we have passed all 4 birthdays in three days. Matthew turned 4 on November 11th, Olivia turned 2 on November 13 and today was Abigail and Isabelle's first birthday. We had cake twice this week and celebrated at dinner. Today, not even one picture of the girls on their first birthday. Oh, well - that will change tomorrow. We will be having the grandaddy of all parties tomorrow night. I'll post many pictures, but we have been busy all week with preparations. I took off this week to get the house ready, shop and cook. I'm exhausted. I'm almost ready to go back to work. (ALMOST). Anyway, more tomorrow!

Halloween Night

Well, instead of trick-or-treating the usual way this year, we went to "Old Town" and participated in the first annual BOO BASH. Everyone in the community came together for one HUGE block party. Some of the local churches and businesses, instead of having their own independent events, had booths, cars, bounce houses, etc in the streets of Old Town. I think they were predicting a few thousand people. It was way more than that. There were people everywhere. I will be interested in finding out how many people there actually were. I really like things like that, even though they are crowded, you always run into someone you haven't seen in ages. Mom went with us and Dad stayed here with Mema to hand out candy. Mom hadn't realized how much a magnet the twins were. Everyone would stop to admire, compare twin stories, etc. There is such a bond between families of multiples you don't realize until you have them. It's so neat to compare stories, get and give advice and just commiserate sometimes! Anyway, enjoy the pictures.
Joshua, dressed up as, well, a 13 year old 7th grader trying to be cool but still wanting candy.
Caleb, the pirate, arrrrrrrg.
Emily the Mad Scientist, who said she wanted to be a cheerleader again next year...
Olivia, the Pixie. What is a pixie, anyway? CUTE.
Matthew the Spider.
Isabelle, the baby...

and Abigail the baby.

Here is everyone. I had to dress up as 50's for work, so Rocky just did a quick change from PJ's to match me. Maybe I should have changed into PJ's to match him. Oh well. Have a great saturday. We will be doing the soccer thing all day!