Tille Family

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Meredith’s B-Day Party

Two weeks ago we held a birthday party for Meredith. She turned 2; although she’s been practicing for 6 months now. I’ve put up some pics of the party. As you’ll see, everyone joined in the fun. We had a pretty big crowd as we had Angela parents here, Oma and Opa made the drive along with Oma’s parents, and all 3 of my brothers made the trip with their families. We had some people over in the morning as they made their way to town and then off to the Pizza Hut for the party.

Oh my goodness, I messed up and didn’t chime in during the planning phase for the party. Even though there were TV’s in the party room, I feel like we missed the entire second half of the Northwestern vs. Iowa football game. Iowa lost and I blame it on myself. I was unavailable to give my full support to the old gold and black.

All kidding aside, we had some pizza when everyone came around. Meredith is typically a very picky eater but took it upon herself to get things started. She climbed up on a chair and began to help herself to the cheese sticks.

After pizza, we decided to have some birthday cake. A couple of special people helped out with the cake. One of our volunteers, Esther Sykore, and Sam Derks, the older sister to the Derks Quintuplets, made the cake. I think Sam did the frosting all on her own!!! We had an Elmo theme for the party and Esther told us a couple weeks prior that she had an Elmo mold and would make the cake. Yea for us! They did an awesome job! Thanks so much, you two!!!

After some cake, Meredith got to open up some presents. You can see all of the pictures on our “media” page by clicking here. She had a great time!!!

Thanks to everyone for their help that allowed us to get out of the house for a while.

Speaking of help, or a lack there of, I need to tell you all of the night when I fired my mother as a helper at our house. Later in the day after the party my mom (Oma), her mother and Angela’s Mom and Dad came over and offered to help out so that my bride and I could go have a quiet dinner. Since there were 4 of them and they’ve all raised children, we felt there were more than enough people so we sent our volunteers home. There would have been too many people and a waste of their time. So we got away and went downtown to Junior’s for dinner. My brothers and their families were staying at the Best Western connected to Junior’s and we stopped by to see them for a few minutes after dinner. Thank you Best Western for the family discount. If you’re coming to River Falls, stay at the Best Western, it’s the best hotel in town…Another shameless plug. Anyway, after a couple hours we felt the need to get back home. I even asked Angela during dinner how she thought things were going at the house. She replied with, “They’ve raised children before and there’s four of them, what could go wrong?” When we got home, things were a mess. The kids were noisy and fussy, except Emma (which I’ll come back to), and Meredith was running wild. It was 45 minutes after her bedtime and running around with clean baby diapers in her hand up and down the hall. There was also a pile of clothes on top of the back of the couch and more of them on the floor. I asked what happened to the clothes and apparently Meredith threw them in the dirty diaper pail. I asked if they were watching her and they said, “Yes, we could see her reflection in the glass of the sliding glass door.” So we had no clean clothes for the kids. They told us not to worry; they’d come over in the morning and wash them for us. That wasn’t gonna work; what if I needed something sooner…which brings me to Emma.

Great Grandma Lucy was feeding Emma. Actually she was letting Emma sleep instead of feeding her. I asked her to wake her up, but she couldn’t get her to wake up. I asked her to wake her up and it was clear that she really didn’t like that I asked her to wake up a baby and force feed her. Now some of you who don’t help out here may say, “Why the hell would you wake up a sleeping baby to feed one?” We do it because the kids are on a very strict schedule and they get a bottle every 3 hours. If they don’t eat during one bottle, they will not get anything else to eat for 3 more hours, no matter how much they cry. It’s just the way it works around here. So I took Emma from my grandmother, sat her up (she burped immediately) and they I gave her the bottle. She took nearly two ounces very quickly so I took the bottle away to burp her. It only took seconds, but she threw up all over the place. It was projectile vomit and it even came out of her nose. My grandmother looked at me and told me, “I told you she didn’t want it.” What was I gonna do…well it would be nice to have some clean clothes.

It took us about 45 minutes to get the house back in order after the next shift of volunteers came in. We love you guys. Thank you so much for being our Rock. This thing (our home) is a well oiled machine when you’re here and it’s a mess when you’re not.

Thanks so much to our families for making the trip to see us to celebrate Meredith’s birthday. It was so great to see everyone. It’s gonna be difficult to get back home to see everyone for a while.

I hope to have more blogs in the near future. I have a ton of things to write about. A little teaser for the next one…the kids weigh between 11 ½ and 14 pounds and had professional photos taken, kind of.

Until next time…