More Wes

Some of you may have already seen these, but I wanted to post them here too. Some of my faves to date of sweet Wes. Especially this last one- gives me the warm fuzzies:)

Tired

Last week we went camping at the beach for a few days(a story in and of itself- I will blog it shortly) and it really took a toll on Ethan. I tell you, this kid has a very hard time going to sleep sometimes. While we were at the beach, he would wake up at 7am and play in the sun all day long without a nap so you would think come 9pm he would be so tired that he would fall asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. But no sir- he still took a good hour to fall asleep. Drove me crazy! But I knew it would catch up to him eventually. A day or two after we got home we sat down to watch a few episodes of Wipeout(we love that show) after Tim got off of work and he tanked it. The big balls and shake-i-later were not enough to keep this tired kid awake! Here's a little snapshot- isn't he cute, all upright and asleep?

More to come...

Flashback

As promised, here is a flashback post from August 8, 2009. Last summer, Tim's parents came out to visit us and Tim's brother Chuck, who was stationed in DC from Germany (strange, huh?). So what better place to take them than to our nations capital!

My kids favorite thing about DC- the Metro!

If I had a dollar for every time I have been in the Air and Space Museum... actually, I wouldn't even have $10, but you get my drift.

Whoa- who is that stranger in the photos below? Some of the very, very few pictures I appear in. Shame on me, I know... Just look at those two willing subjects in my lap:)

Hangin' with my Ethan on the lawn.

Check out this air! My favorite thing about this shot is the bird flying just above Ethan's head, though it looks more like a spec here.

The whole gang...
Good times! More photos of Wes in a bit...

Welcoming Wesley

I can't believe we are halfway through the year and this is only my second post! Needless to say, I am sadly behind. But I have come up with a brilliant plan to catch up and keep this blog up to date: I am going to try to blog current photos/events on Sundays and do a catch-up post (for example, Jace's first day of kindergarten which occurred over 9 months ago and has barely been mentioned here on the blog, making my motherly-guilt feeling a 10 on the mo-guilter scale. Like that term? I am thinking of using it regularly here on the blog since I seem to refer to my guilt level quite often in posts about my kids. Okay, I digress.) on Tuesday nights while Tim is at church meetings. I won't make any promises, but I am really going to try to do better.

So enough talk. Now to our most exciting news, we welcomed baby Wesley Kline Carroll to our family on May 31st at 5:01 am. He was 7lbs 15oz and 20 3/4 inches long and came out looking like the spitting image of his brother Jace (as a baby, not a 6 year old), but with Ethan's chin. Both Jace and Ethan were born one day before their due date, so when Wesley's due date came around, I was super anxious, especially since my mom was flying into town in just one week- I did NOT want to have a late baby! So I came home from church on my due date and, just like I have done with every pregnancy before, I started Googleing ways to induce labor and signs of labor in hopes that I would find some new breakthrough way to get the process started or maybe just reading about it would put me into labor. Well, guess what? It actually worked because when I got off of my computer to go make dinner at 5pm, I started having labor contractions. We waited around for a few hours and my contractions were getting stronger and longer, but were not very consistent. So we waited around until about 11pm when they were so painful that I could hardly breathe. Surely, this was the real thing. So my friend Amy came over to stay with our kids, and we headed to the hospital. Sure enough, I was already dilated to a 7. PHEW- barely in time for the epidural, of which I am a BIG fan! I don't know how you natural child birth women do it- it amazes me! But I was pretty proud of myself for making it all the way to 7cm without pain medication. Go me- now bring on the relief! So that is basically the story- another 4-5 painless, numb below the waist hours, a few pushes and he was here! I will be honest and say that during this last pregnancy, which was very hard on me and my body, I was pretty sure that I did not want to do this again. But after seeing the miracle of birth and spending the first few days mostly alone in the hospital with my new little angel, I fell in love and wanted to do it all again! As much as I hate being pregnant (I know they say hate is a strong word but I will say it again and again!), having a new baby is like an emotional and spiritual high for me. It just puts so many things in perspective for me. And each time I am more and more amazed at how precious my kids are and how important family is and how so much of what I spend my time and energy on just doesn't matter at all. So we will see what the next few years brings- maybe one more is in the cards for us:)

Anyways, here are a few photos of sweet Wesley. I admit that I was a little frustrated that he didn't fully cooperate with my dozens of ideas for photos, and I only got about 8 days out of him, but looking back I really did get some amazing shots of him even if they were not exactly what I was envisioning. (Check my business blog for more, though I may add some of those here later.)

And I still have a few folders of images that I have yet to even comb through. So more to come! This set was taken at 6 days. So sweet...

Enjoy and be sure to check back soon!

An Author in the Making

I have been neglecting posting on here knowing that I have gotten so far behind that I didn't feel like I could ever attempt to catch up. Yes, it has been almost 1 year since my last post- sad indeed. So here is a recap of our last year in under 25 words:

Jace is in Kindergarten, Ethan is 3, Baby Boy #3 is due in May, I have a new business blog, and Tim is still working.

There, that was easy!

Really, I just felt very compelled to write a post about Jace because I am suffering from proud-parentitis right now. A few months ago Jace was watching PBS and heard an announcement for a writers contest they were holding. He immediately told me he wanted to do this, and I kept saying 'yeah, yeah' but putting it off because I knew this would require a lot of work on both our parts. Well last month, when we had 2 weeks of snow days here in VA (crazy, huh-should've posted about that too- trying not to feel guilty about it...) I finally agreed to let him write this story. So I asked him what he wanted to write about. Well, lately we have made almost a nightly ritual of watching an episode of Mythbusters with our kids on YouTube and Netflix. A few nights previously, Jace had seen the episode where Adam and Jamie build a boat out of Duck tape, sailing it successfully across the San Francisco bay and Jace thought that was the coolest thing since sliced bread. So the legend of the Pirate Duck Tape Boat was born (after all, in the mind of a 6 year old no boat story is complete without a Pirate, right?). So I showed him how to write an outline(seriously, psycho mom, what Kindergartner needs to know how to write an outline?), then we headed to Walmart and got him some paper, jewels, etc. for his masterpiece. And we set to work. I would say he set to work but I will not lie- it was a lot of work for me too ("Mom, where is my eraser? Can you sharpen my pencil? Which way points North? How do you spell compass? Can you tear daddies duck tape into 100 pieces for me? My glue isn't working...)

Seriously after a few days I was secretly hoping he would just give it up. But every morning after breakfast he would pull out his box of supplies and spend hours working on this thing. Looking back it is amazing to me that he stuck with it! Over the course of 2 weeks, he must have spent 24 hours on this thing. Pretty impressive in and of itself.

So today I got a call from WHTJ in Richmond, VA, telling me that Jace had won first place in his age group in our region. SO COOL! I thought his story was great, but never imagined that he would actually win. I was sure there were just too many kids that would enter- and statistically speaking it just wasn't very likely. But I am so proud of my little guy- and I can't wait until he gets his letter in the mail tomorrow telling him he won first place. Even though I am a bit worried about him getting a big head about this, I am excited for him to learn this valuable lesson: if you really put your mind to it and work hard, you can accomplish anything! Motivational even to me. So here is his story- complete with pictures. Now I am sure he will just be crossing his fingers that he gets first place nationally so he can win his very own laptop computer (which he talks about all the time.)

Enjoy!