Playing and Working... Hard

It has been a while since my last post.  The last couple of weeks, it seems, our activities doubled as the weather grew warmer.  Not only are we playing harder, but we're (I'm) working harder, too.  I struggle every day to balance time for my children, my husband, my God, my house, and myself.  And when there is so much to do that it never gets done, well, it's hard to justify time spent on a hobby such as blogging.  But writing about the boys helps me to remember what incredible blessings they are to us, and it somehow helps me to forget, or at least to laugh about, their messes, their mischief, and their sometimes incessant demands.  One day the house will be quiet and clean and we will miss all the excitement and chaos.  So today I'm taking a break from the laundry to write down these memories, to freeze still in time their sweet little faces and their funny antics.

One of our most recent projects is growing a garden--right in our kitchen!  This year we decided to start our flowers and vegetables from seed.  The boys took interest right away; afterall, it involves lots of dirt!  So far, we have plenty of seedlings to plant outside within the next few weeks.  We'll see if we can keep them all alive in the hot Kansas summer... check back with us in August!

My Sammy is still planning to work with heavy equipment and power tools when he grows up.

Every night, he prays for farmers and anyone who builds tractors or plows.  So you can imagine his delight the other day when he found a huge John Deere plowing up the field behind our house!  He ran outside to watch and wave as the farmer passed by.  I had to drag him out of the field and back into our yard several times!

And then there's little Zach... when you last checked in with him, he was busy causing trouble.  Well, he's up to his old tricks and then some!

Zachary walks all over now, and is getting pretty steady on his feet.  He still needs to pull up to a stand, so he will crawl to a "launch point," but then it's bipedal from there, baby!  So he seems to be catching up with his gross motor skills, but his speech is still delayed.  His preliminary screening concluded that he had above average fine motor skills for his age, but he was recommended for follow-up testing for gross motor and speech/language.  So today and again next week we will meet with therapists from Rainbows United to determine if Zachary is eligible to receive in-home therapy sessions.

We are also trying to plan out the summer, as best we can, so we have a call in with his surgeon at the U of M to set a date for his Fontan surgery.  As much as I would personally hope to delay this scary part of his treatment, we'll go with his surgeon's recommendations and trust in his experience and expertise.

But it hardly seems our baby has heart problems when you watch him "ham it up":

Zachary was awfully excited to visit the zoo last week. 

How many kids can you push in a stroller?

They played so hard at the zoo, they just didn't survive the trip home:

And the boys worked very hard at decorating the perfect Easter eggs.  (They also work pretty hard at their camera poses...)

(In case you're wondering, this was right before bedtime... they sleep in their shorts.)

What color dye do you think Sammy chose?

On Easter morning, the boys woke early and ran outside to hunt for treasure. Zachy wasn't quite awake, though...

Later that day he got more involved in the egg hunts.

From our family to yours, many blessings this Easter week!