Back to the Regular Routine

After a great, long visit, my mom had to get back home.  Tavin would ask "why Mommy?"  I told him that she had to go back because she missed Grampa.  So then when I said that I missed my mom this morning he said, "Damma go back to Dampa cause she wuv Dampa."  He gets it!  The boys, Doug and I are finally just us in the house again.  It's a little weird after almost 3 weeks with visitors, friends and family coming in and out of our doors constantly, but it's also nice to re-figure out how to do life as our little family unit again.  The last 24 hours have gone quite well thankfully and this morning especially felt good to be back to our usual routine.  Tavin ate his breakfast after Koen had left for school.  Penn sat coyly in his exersaucer munching on his toys.  

Soon after, we headed upstairs to give Penn a much needed bath.  Tavin was pretty excited to give his diggers a bath too.  They had fallen to the wayside as he enjoyed having people playmates at his beck and call over the past few weeks.  Here he is cleaning these little trucks up for some big play.

And here's the happy Penn.  He loves bathtime and I love his toothy smile!!

Penn was ready for his nap around 9:30am and I was excited to get cleaned up myself.  Tav chose to use his "ticket" (the tickets are the motivation to be quiet at bedtime and until 7am in the morning, they are actually working quite well!) to watch a Thomas show while I took a quick shower.  Here his honing in on that "cheeky" engine!

Now that everyone was clean, it was time to clean the house a little.  Tavin saw me getting started and actually asked me to turn off Thomas so that he could help.  That's my boy!  

After we finished our chores we headed upstairs for some more cleaning and playtime too of course.  Tav was excited to help clean up there too, but eventually got bored and asked if we could make a train track.  It was a really nice time for us to just work on something together (something fun, for Tav, I mean, the cleaning doesn't count even though we did both enjoy it).  Here's our track!

At 11:30am I had to feed Penn because then we had to head out to pick up Koen from school.  Usually someone brings him home on Thursdays, but with many of his classmates suffering from some kind of cold bug, our little carpool buddy was absent today.  The outing went pretty well and we got home around 12:30pm.  I was a little sad because it meant Penn had to wait for his solid food until we got home, but he didn't seem to mind a bitI had prepared the big boys' lunches beforehand, so they sat right down and ate and I quickly got Penn's cereal ready.  All 3 boys were hungry and pretty quickly.  Penn enjoyed sitting near Koen and catching up with his biggest bro.  Koen just has to look at Penn and he lights up.

After lunchtime Koen and Tavin played with the train tracks for awhile.  It sounded pretty intense at first, but by the time I got upstairs with Penn they were playing really well together building some stations for the tracks with their Legos.  Phew!  At 1:30pm I laid Tav down for his nap.  We are really enjoying reading through his children's Bible before nap and bed.  He loves it.  Very special to be familiarizing him with these stories now.  Thanks, Gramma and Grampa!  Penn went down a little before 2pm and around that same time Koen wanted to go out and play in the backyard.  He ended up staying out there for about an hour and 20 minutes.  Amazing!  I was so happy he could get the fresh air and he said he was having a lot of fun (he was cooking up a muddy, snow/ice concoction in the watering can most of the time).  The little guys are taking some good naps.  Just about time to get them up and got on with our evening.  I'm so thankful this first day back to reality has been a positive and encouraging one.  We miss you, Gramma!!!