Boogerville

As you can tell by the fact that I'm posting a blog on a Saturday night, it's another disgusting exciting weekend here in the Groff household.  We are up to our eyeballs in snot and warm mist humidifiers.  

Koala Patchwork Baby Blanky (discontinued - similar here)

We have had a horrendous stroke of luck over the past couple of years health-wise.  We are quickly approaching the 2 year anniversary of finding out we were preggers, and I can only remember a handful of times in the past 2 years that we have all felt good simultaneously.  I was sick throughout my pregnancy, Jane and Emma were born 2 months premature and Janey needed surgery 2 days after she was born, and then the RSV and stomach viruses hit, and now we've all been passing around the dreaded DAY CARE COLD since the girls started day care.


The worst part is, everyone has the same advice:  
They're just going to have coughs and runny noses until the spring, and then next year they won't go through it again.  
They're building up antibodies, that's a good thing.  
Honey for the cough, Tylenol for the body aches/sore throats, lots of fluids, warm steam humidifiers - nothing else you can do.

Every time someone gives me the same advice I want to scream. Can ANYONE offer some DIFFERENT advice?  Pretty pwease??

Poor little Emmy feels so yucky that she actually climbed up on the couch and fell asleep in her Daddy's arms today.


I love the choopiehanginoutofdamouth.  So so adorbs.

And I don't know about you, but I am scared crapless about this Enterovirus D68 thing that's going around!  But every time I voice my concern, the person I'm talking to looks at me like I have 9 heads.  Is anyone else freaking out as much as I am????  Every time one of my kids coughs I cringe and I am up all night long checking on them, putting a hand on their little chests to make sure they are rising and falling and no one is struggling.

The good news is that the girls are still fever-free and eating everything in sight.  They are lapping up the apple juice, and learning new things in leaps in bounds.  Yesterday, I taught Janey how to say "More please" although it sounds more like "mo pa" which is fine, the message is coming across.  And today, we practiced blowing our noses!


She even marches it to the garbage can like she is on a VIP mission and throws it in the can and then claps enthusiastically.

And Emma has learned the dreaded N-O word.  Everything I ask her to do is "nooo" or "NOOOO" or the even more fun "NONONONONONOOOO!"  She says it so much that Jane follows her around the living room saying, "Emma NOOO" and waiving her finger at her.  

Emma has also started doing laps like it is her JOB.



I'm not sure what she's so excited about, but if she's excited, I'm one excited Mama.  

Hope you are all snot-free this weekend!  xoxo

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It's Not All Roses...

Being a parent is hard.  Really hard.  But being a parent of multiples is impossible.  I mean for reals.

Saturday morning I woke up feeling good.  The girls slept a little (tiny) bit later than normal, and I was ready to make them a big, nummy, homemade breakfast.  I got out the eggs, broccoli, bacon, cheese, muffins, butter, milk and got to work.  And then the you-know-what hit the fan.

Jane was marching around and around in circles, throwing every toy she owns on the floor, climbing on the couch and trying to swan dive off, while Emma chased Hallie and put her in a choke hold, while screaming AHYAYAYAAAAA!  I tried to corral them as I put the bacon into the oven (on 425 degrees) and got the omelette going on the stove top.  I then chased the girls off of the couch for the 512th time and finished up with the omelette.  

This is when it got real.  As I turned to put the omelette on the counter and began cutting it up, I heard a loud CRASH and then hysterical crying.  Times two.  I fully expected to turn around to blood and burns, but instead found both girls, laying on their backs in the middle of the kitchen, with the oven door wide open.  I bent down and scooped them up to assess the damage, and looked up to see Hershey hurdling the baby gates at the bottom of the stairs to see WTF just went down.

Something that you never think of when baby-proofing a home is the handle on that useless drawer under your oven that just houses a graveyard of cookie sheets.  START THINKING ABOUT IT PEOPLE!

The girls had stepped up onto that at the same time and held on to the handle of the oven door to boost themselves up to see what was going on on the stove top.  Their combined weight brought the door crashing open, sending them sprawling to the ground.  Awesomesauce.

Hershey took both girls out of my shaking hands and I contemplated cracking a beer for the first time that day, and I looked at the clock to see it was 8:07 a.m.  Crappity.

Daddy brought the little twin tornadoes into the living room to get them out from under my feet.  They were in the living room no more than 15 seconds when I heard another BANG followed immediately by hysterics.  Hershey had turned to put Emma down on the ground and as he did that, Jane climbed onto the couch, and walked RIGHT OFF ONTO HER HEAD.  No blood, but she most def looked a little bit dazed.  In fact, I think I actually saw those little cartoon Tweety birds floating around her head.  Ugh.

The rest of the day was spent crying, not napping, and flinging toys all over the world, while pulling on our pant legs and wailing "UP! UP!" It was one for the books.

The final straw came at bed time.  I had bathed the twincesses and they were stomping back and forth between their two rooms, carrying their books around and planning their evening poop.  Emma was the first to let it fly, and as I laid on the floor in a puddle of my own drool, my beautiful little Emmy, with her little curls  bouncing, singing "uh ohhhh" in an adorable little singsong voice, sat down on the floor in front of her father and started PULLING POOP OUT OF HER DIAPER AND SMEARING IT ON THE RUG.

I freaked.

I grabbed Emma and whisked her into the bathroom, screaming at Hershey, "WHAT DO I DO WHAT DO I DO OH GOOOOOOOOODDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD?!?!?!?!??!?!"  Hershey, in turn, picked Janey up and followed us to the bathroom, where he stood in the doorway and laughed.  I sat Emma down on the counter of the sink (Why are you putting her on the sink when we have a perfectly good bathtub?) and started to run the hot water to warm it up, plunging her pudgy little feets into the water.  The water heated up too fast, and she flung her foot out, sending poop nuggets flying across the sink.  

I, in my infinite parental wisdom, just kept screaming "OH GOODDDDD OH GOOOOODDD EWWWWWWWWWW UGHHHHHHHHH BLUBRP!!!!!!!!" and poor little Emmy sat there with a horrified look on her face with her little nose crinkled up.

It was my lowest moment as a parent in the last 2 years.

The good news is, Sunday came.  And Sunday was WAY better than Saturday.  Sunday we woke up late, snuggled in bed, got dressed up for the big game, took three and a half hour naps, and were an overall pleasure to be around!






Ruffle Butt Pants (similar here) // Sneaks from Stride Rite Outlets

The girls are also saying so many words now!  Last week we learned alligator (alilayla - I'll take it, it has all of the correct syllables) and elephant (elelen - ok, so we're not rocket scientists yet, baby steps).  The last two days Jane has also been running around screaming "EMMMAAA NOOO" while shaking her pointer finger at her (uh oh, better start watching what I say/do!) and Emma has, in turn, learned how to use "Uh ohhh" correctly.  I went into her room this morning, and she had thrown wooby over the side of her crib and she was looking down, pointing and muttering, "Uh ohhh" to herself.  So dang cute.  

It also makes it that much harder to get mad at her when she chucks giant handfuls of rice over the sides of her high chair and then looks at you with her pouty lip and her big brown eyes and says, "Uh ohhh" in the sweetest little girly voice.  Gotta love it.



Happy hump day everyone!  Have a great rest of your week!  xoxo

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Chatty Little Pumpkins

Ok, ok.  I owe you an apology.  A whole MONTH has gone by, and I haven't been able to get around to writing a blog post!  In my defense, we have friends who say that we are like skunks - disappear in the fall, all over the place all summer long - and it's totally true.  Shut your mouth about the smelly part....

This month has been pure insanity, guys, so THANK YOU, so much, to those of you who have stuck with us.  I've been trying to update Facebook and Instagram, but my cell phone keeps running out of storage and...well...life is what happens when you're out making plans.  And so it's gone.

We went back to school the first week of September, and the girls started day care at the same time.  They have been snot factories ever since, and after 2 doctor visits ($40 later), we have resigned ourselves to the fact that we will be covered in a thin film of slime from now until May, and then we'll be able to move on.



We also finished the mud room in our house.  After LOTS and lotsandlotsandlotsandlots of spackle, we painted the room and I even went a little Pinterest happy on the steps (see my love affair with home projects in my former post).  The really fun part about this project?  The part where we realized that the color that we bought was completely different than the color that we thought we were getting when we were 7/8 of the way done with the paint job.  Oy vey.  I had to hear a lot of "I TOLD YOU IT WAS PINK" talk (that's what you get when you send the color blind chick to the store, aka moi) as we re-painted and finished up with the CORRECT color.  Anything to get rid of the scratch up, nicked up, diarrhea color.

We have also had a couple of serious chatterboxes on our hands.  We are starting to have to really watch what we're saying around Jane and Emma, which, if you know teachers, is turning out to be harder than I could have ever imagined.  I swear, teachers are the biggest potty-mouths out there!  But the twincesses are repeating EVERYTHING now...




They are also imitating everything:


I caught Emma reading this book in a rare moment where the hair on the back of my neck stood up because I was in the kitchen with Jane and Emma was in the living room - ALONE - and was dead quiet.


Typically the silence means that something more like THIS is happening these days:


Yes, they are totes tall enough to get up on the couch on their own now.




But they are also really starting to play together (and get into trouble together) and even though Hershey and I say the word "no" more than we say anything else in a day, and even more so because we are high school teachers, they have become INDEPENDENT WOMEN and are off to the races doing things their way or the highway.  Which also means a lot of bumps, bruises, and hysterical crying.






The great news about this past month was that I was able to sneak out for a little Mama's night out action with my BFF.  We went to see LUKE HOTTYPANTS BRYAN!  I'll pause to wait until you can see through the jealousy.  It was so much fun, and he was so good.  My mother-in-law came to help my hubs with the kids, and I was on the next train to the hottest cowboy around.  We met at a concert, and we haven't been to a concert together since before her daughter was born soooooo 5 years???!!!  CRAY!!!  



Now, that's MY kind of night!

Hope that you are all enjoying this sweet autumn weather so far.  We're hoping to get some pumpkin picking in soon, although we have a VERY busy October ahead of us.  I'm going to be trying to dig out our Halloween deco, although I DID get a jump start last weekend on our TV credenza.  I also hit up Trader Joe's for some pumpkin muffin mix and pumpkin waffles and pumpkin pancake mix and ... well, you get the idea.


WOOT!

Thanks again for sticking around, and for all of your sweet and thoughtful comments.  I've been having trouble commenting back, but I promise that I read and appreciate every single word you send our way.

Have a pumpkinny weekend everyone!

xoxo


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