Tille Family

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A big week ahead.

I really want to take some time in this post to thank some people who have really helped us out lately.

This past week Becky left us and went back to her home down in Iowa. Angela’s mom was the glue around here for a long time. She was with us for a month. She slept on a crappy bed in our basement with no privacy whatsoever. When we first started bringing the kids home, Becky took on some difficult shifts overnight feeding the kids. She helped out with meals and cleaning up around the house. Most importantly, she took on the lion’s share of caring for Meredith during the day so that Angela and I could focus time on the kids, sleep, and all of our other responsibilities. She’ll be back. I have a feeling that we’d have to beat her off with a stick to keep her away for too long. I have a funny feeling that she’ll have others with her when she returns.

Angela and I really want to thank the wonderful people at Satuci in Marshalltown, IA. Becky is a substance abuse counselor at Satuci and we can’t thank them enough for letting her go for such a long time to help us out. We will never forget it.

This weekend is Labor Day weekend. As you all know, it’s typically a very big travel/vacation weekend for families. Our volunteers have really come through for us. All of our shifts have been full over the weekend. We even got a little sleep. One of our volunteers is coming over today over the lunch hour to give us a break and let us get out of the house for a while. We’ll try to grab a little lunch downtown. I think we may try a new place in town and if we like it, I’ll write about it.

I don’t have a clever transition to my next talking point, or any transition for that matter, so I’m gonna make one up. In a situation like this, I think about John McDonald back in my home town of Rock Rapids. John was my English teacher my senior year of high school. (I have no idea if John reads my nonsense or not) In that English class, we had to write a research paper that was intended to prepare us for writing in college. I hated working on that thing and did poorly at it for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is that I never had a smooth transition from one thought to another. I’ll never forget the amount of red ink used on that thing. After every other paragraph he wrote “Transition?” I didn’t even know what a transition was, but I understand now. Thanks John. Please take no offense when I say that I’ve thought more of you in the past few months than I care too. As I mentioned, I hated that project, but I can tell you that it prepared me better for writing in college and writing this silly thing every few days so that I can tell you all how our kids are doing.

So how are the kids? They’re doing great!!! Gaining a ton of weight. Some of them are even starting to look chubby. Click her to take a peek at their most recent pics. I gave weight updates in the last post so I won’t have an update with details until Wednesday night, but we’re pretty sure that they’re gaining weight. All of the kids are starting to wake up and spend some time awake with us between feedings, which is keeping all of us a little busier. They seem to be a little more consistent in how much they eat per feeding. They’re between 2.5 and 3 oz per bottle and we may increase them again soon as it isn’t uncommon for them to suck it dry from time to time. I want to make sure that I don’t leave Meredith out.

We’re trying really hard to not make her feel left out so we went out and got her something to play on outside. She’s such a little monkey and climbs on everything she can in the house so we got her a slide to play on outside. We took these pictures over the weekend.

If you’re a person of prayer, please say a quick one for us this week as we will be truly tested. I will be going back to work full-time on Tuesday and Angela’s mom will not be here to help out with Meredith. Getting enough sleep will be an issue for both of us and giving up some of the control over the quints is gonna be extremely difficult. We will have to trust our volunteers to do more without us. We’re prideful and giving up that responsibility will be a very big pill to swallow. Thank you in advance to everyone coming to our home to help out!

Until next time…