First Easter together…

Easter weekend has come and gone and the children have come down from their sugar highs. It was nice to finally spend Easter together as a family of 5 rather than split our time between Mercy and our house and we actually got to go back and spend it with the rest of my family which was really nice as well.

Saturday was a rough start to the weekend which I worried was going to carry over into Easter BUT thankfully, it did not! I sometimes wish life was like the movie “Click". When Braden was in the NICU at Mercy I wanted desperately to have a fast forward button so we would know what Braden’s future held. The days where all 3 of my boys are playing and laughing with each other I want to push pause and bask in the happiness of having all 3 of them together making memories with each other, then there are days like Saturday where I want to click the delete on the DVR to erase that day and start over! Saturday demanded a re-d0!

Friday night Adam and I camped out on the floor since we didn’t have nursing coverage. I awoke at 5am Saturday to Braden pooping his pants. I went to go check on him and change his pants and when I turned the light on I saw Braden shaking and crying like he does right before he spells. I yelled for Adam to come help me and we started trouble shooting. His alarms hadn’t gone off yet but as Adam came to the crib everything started screeching. I went to bag him because he started turning dusky but as I took the vent off him to connect the bag, Adam yelled “grab a trache" because he wasn’t moving air at all through the trache he had in.  We quickly put the new trache in and Adam said he immediately heard air being passed through the new trache so we cranked up the oxygen and put the vent back on him and he pinked right back up. I grabbed the trache we had just pulled out and the end of his trache was completely webbed over with a mucous plug. Somehow, in the middle of the night, he occluded his trache and woke up with out an airway. I can’t imagine how horrifying that would be to wake up to. I felt horrible for him but was glad he bounced back as quickly as he did.

Not to be outdone, Jacob, who has been battling allergies/cold, woke up choking on his own snot and barfed all over the floor about 15 minutes after Braden’s episode. THIS is where I would have hit the “delete” button and started over….BUT OH NO! Evan didn’t want to be left out. At 6am he woke up to all the commotion and came down for the day. While everyone was occupied Evan decided he wanted to kick around his new soccer ball in the kitchen and went to kick it, completely whiffed on the kick and somehow the ball knocked his feet out from under him and he face planted on the kitchen floor. SERIOUSLY???? Luckily the rest of the day was uneventful but man did the 1st half of the day stink. I was on the lookout the rest of Saturday for the other ball to drop and get Adam or I…of course this was also the day Adam and Seann decided to cut down a 50 ft tree in our yard. Thankfully no one was injured except for the evergreen tree!

On a happier note, the boys have had a great time playing together now that Jacob is more mobile. Evan, the good brother that he is, always makes time for Braden, and brings him toys to play with which is a nice change for the B-man since he’s used to having Jacob come snatch whatever he has out of his hands.

    

P.S. I DO dress my children they just choose NOT to wear them once they get home from daycare…OK… EVAN chooses not to wear his clothes, Braden gets too hot, and Jacob usually tries to bathe in the dog water/toilet bowl requiring me to undress him…so there!

The boys really enjoyed Easter and the LOADS of candy the Easter bunny and their grandparents gave them. We attempted to do Easter eggs for the first time this year and the boiling of the eggs should have been an indication of of things were going to go. I started boiling the eggs before the boys got home and somehow in the midst of the chaos that is my life, I COMPLETELY forgot that they were boiling and when I went to get Braden’s food ready for his 4 o’clock feed I thought “that’s weird, why are the windows steamed over….HOLY CRAP!!! The eggs have been boiling for 40 minutes!!!!!” Needless to say our house smelled like rotten eggs for 2 days straight. I refuse to eat them but Adam has and he hasn’t died yet so that’s a good sign right? I laid out towels on the dining room table and let Evan have at it dying the eggs. Good thing they were SUPER boiled because his idea of putting them in the dye was to slam them into the coffee mugs. Then, he would pile them 3 eggs high in each color. After the snafu of boiling them, I didn’t really care at this point. Some of them turned brown after all the colors he put them in but hey its all about creating memories right :)

 

 

Easter morning arrived and the boys woke up and were ready to hunt eggs! Evan had a good laugh when I told him that the Easter bunny delivered their eggs the night before and I woke up to Squeak, our cat, batting them around the living room.  I think she liked the sound of the jelly beans sloshing about in the eggs! Evan of course hung back and let Jacob do all the dirty work. I wasn’t sure Jacob would be into an egg hunt but he was a rock star at finding eggs. He would crawl really fast to get one as Evan waited in the shadows and then he would swoop in for the kill and snatch the egg out of Jacob’s hand. Luckily Jacob didn’t care too much that Evan stole his loot! We also found out that even though Jacob has only 4 top and bottom front teeth he CAN successfully eat jelly beans! They also got marshmallow bunnies in their eggs from Gma and Gpa Byersdorfer. Jacob got his open before I could grab it from him and I WISH I would have had his reaction caught on video. He literally shoved the blue bunny in his mouth, gave me this look out the corner of his eye and would not let me within 3 feet of him. Anytime I took a step towards him he shuffled like a sidewinder away from me like a rabid raccoon all the while never taking his eyes off me. It was hilarious. The mess it made was ridiculous though. He was one hot sticky blue mess.  Also, daddy got Braden involved in the festivities and put an HME on his trache so he could “sprint” for a bit and be a wireless baby like his brothers. Hes getting better at that. He went as long as 10 minutes at my grandparents on Easter Sunday! Showoff ;)

 

 

Braden enjoying being a wireless babe                      Evan offering Braden some of his jelly beans

 

Evan finds one!!!                            Evan lying in wait while Jacob does the dirty work!

  

Evan spilled his Reese’s pieces and Jacob comes to “Help”

 

 

                                     BEFORE                                                         AFTER

After the egg hunt and candy overload, we packed into the van and headed back to Waterloo. Braden wasn’t a fan of the ride to the Loo so Adam had to take him out and give him a breather. We think he just got extremely hot and sweaty in his seat and then after a quick break he did great the rest of the way. The boys enjoyed hanging out with everyone and enjoyed all the attention. Sara and Jordan were nice enough to help Grandma get an impromptu egg hunt together for Evan and my nephew Phil. They had so much fun the first time around that they did 2 more hunts after. Evan REALLY loved the 3 eggs he found that had money in them! We even got to meet my cousin Joe’s girlfriend Voska who was super sweet and so nice. She even told Adam that her sister used to whip her head back and forth like Braden does when he’s tired to help put herself to sleep. That was kind of nice to hear considering we never really know for sure why Braden did that. It was great to finally meet her after hearing so many great things about her! The food was great, the company was great, AND it was my grandparents wedding anniversary so that was nice to celebrate as well!

Hope everyone had a great Easter weekend with their families!