I don’t know what we’re gonna do with this 2-year old. She is so much more challenging than the quints (as a group) are. I’ve said this already, but Meredith is the wrench in the gears that makes our home operate smoothly. I love her to death, but dear Lord, we’re in trouble when they all turn 2.

I don’t remember exactly when this occurred, but I know that my mother cursed me when I was younger. I was being an ass of a teenager and she told me that I was gonna have a bunch of children just like me. Angela just told me today at lunch that she is all Tille. The mother’s curse works!!!!!

As I mentioned in a prior blog, we took the front off Meredith’s crib so that she wouldn’t hurt herself trying to climb out of it. Somehow, she got the crazy idea that she now has free reign at naptime. This is where I found her just a little while ago.

Only seconds after taking that photo and putting her back to bed. I came out to the computer to start to download this picture and write this blog entry. Seconds later, I went back in to her room because of the talking and giggling, I found her here.

Outside of strapping her to the bed, I will consider any and all suggestions to get this child to take a nap.

Until next time…

I also have some photos from Christmas Day on the media page. Not a very huge selection, but we did our best.

So here I sit here on Christmas Morning. I look out our front window and see a mix of rain and snow. I would’ve been happy to get a foot of snow, but we didn’t. I hope that it doesn’t turn in to ice…

Last night, after finishing with the wrapping, Angela and I sat on the couch for a few minutes and talked about how wonderfully blessed and lucky we are to have all of you with us. Last night, on Christmas Eve, we had 5 volunteers here at 9 pm, wanting to help out. Do you believe that, 5 people on Christmas Eve!!! I have 3 wonderful women in my living room right now at 6 am on Christmas morning. It’s been a very long year with so many challenges and rewards and I don’t want to make this in to a year in review but with today being Christmas, I can’t help but think back and reflect on what a year it’s been.

One of the many blessings that we’ve had this year, and probably the most important, has been the health of our children. We had our 6 month well visit with our physician, Dr. Zimmerman this week. They kids continue to do great. Their updated weights are:

Brooklyn – 15 lbs., 3 oz.
Lauren – 14 lbs, 3 oz.
Alex – 15 lbs., 15 oz.
Emma – 13 lbs., 2 oz.
Madeline – 15 lbs., 2 oz.

The important thing to remember is that if you consider their gestational age, they are only 3 ½ months old. The kids are starting to reach for things. They all visually track well, although it took Emma a bit to catch up to the others with that. They are all chewing on their hands and starting to drool. I think we all know what’s coming there and it scares the hell out of us. Meredith just got done teething and she’s two. Will it ever end? The kids will sit up very well for extended periods of time if they are in their Bumbo chairs, but they cannot sit up on their own without assistance. Some of them have rolled over, and the others aren’t far behind. We will continue to get a couple more RSV shots at home and we’ll send in the updated weights from those appointments to the doctor. That way, we won’t have to go back for 3 months for another well visit. That’s a huge deal. Transporting these kids to the doctor, or anywhere for that matter, is so difficult and not having to go back for 3 months is so helpful. The kids are just doing great!!!

I took a picture of each of the quints yesterday and added them to the Media page. Go ahead and see if you can figure out who’s who. They’re a lot easier to tell apart then they were 4 months ago when they came home from the hospital.

Meredith continues to develop as well. Yesterday, during nap time, Angela walked into her room as she was making too much noise and not lying down. Angela found her standing in her dresser. Her dresser has 5 drawers. The bottom 3 drawers were fully extended and she was standing in the 3rd one from the bottom playing with the stuff sitting on top. It we could have only gotten a picture. This child has a climbing problem and we don’t know what to do with her.

Lastly, I wanted to see if I could use all of you readers for a big favor. I heard that the McCormick family from the Sioux City, IA area brought the last of their quintuplets home from an Omaha hospital this past week. I’ve tried briefly with a Google and Bing search online for more info, but not found much. I’d like to reach out to them. I know more than anyone how disruptive things can be after the kids come home with nosy people and the media begging for info so I don’t want to call them. However, if any of you know someone who knows someone who knows them, please pass along a message that I’d be happy to talk and share any experiences that would help them out. We had and still have one of the best resources possible in Brenda and we would like to be a resource for them if they’d like it. I will eventually call them, but if any of you have a way to reach them by email or any other method, please let me know.

I want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas. Be safe out there.

Until next time…

Wow, that’s an attention grabber, huh? No lie, she did leave me…for the weekend. Angela got in the car and drove to Tama, IA (her hometown) last weekend and left me with all the kids. Her sister Katie graduated from the University of Iowa over the weekend. That a way KT!!! In addition to the graduation, Angela had a chance to spend some quality time with her grandmother, who hasn’t been in the best of health since a knee replacement gone horribly bad, but is getting better. It was a great opportunity for her to spend some time with a lot of family. She finally came home on Sunday around mid-day.

So how the heck did I do it? Lots of great help. The volunteers were awesome again! I also called in some additional help. My mom and dad made the trip from Rock Rapids to spend some time with their grand kids for the weekend. After Friday, I told some of the volunteers, (and my wife later that night on the phone) that I’ve possibly been undervaluing her. What she does every day is flippin amazing. I have no idea how she does what she does and wakes up every morning. There’s no way that I could do what she does.

So I mentioned that my parents were here. My dad was telling me that they got a Wii for Christmas back at home. I’m probably not doing it justice, but for those not familiar, a Wii is a video game. This one is a bit different in that when you play sports on this game, you actually make the motions of playing the game. When you go bowling, you hold the device in your hand and make the motion as if you were really bowling. When you play golf, you make the motion of swinging the golf club. When you play tennis, same thing, you swing the device as if you were to swing a tennis racket in your living room. So my dad is telling me about this and he goes on to tell me about boxing in the game. As he tells the story, he was doing a great job boxing against the computer, but when it came time to box my mom in the game, his handheld video controller quit working well. He got his butt kicked so bad, he actually used the excuse that it was the handheld controller and asked to switch with my mom. Guess what, he got his ass kicked with that one too. He went on to tell me about this and I suggested that he not tell the guys at work as he may be ridiculed a little bit. I thought this would be a pretty good opportunity to have a little fun.

So here’s the deal…I have no idea if my father is a regular reader of this blog. I don’t think he is, but I know that he will read it if people tell him that there’s something worthwhile to read, SO DO NOT TELL HIM ABOUT THIS AND DO NOT TELL HIM TO READ THIS BLOG. We’re gonna play a little joke on ole Opa. The next time you see my father, please ask him if he could describe to you what it’s like to get his ass kicked by a woman. Do not tell him that I wrote this. Do not tell him that I wrote a blog lately. Maybe we can have a little fun with this. If you have a funny story related to this little joke and how he responds to your comment, send me an email about it and I’ll post it in the blog. I’d like to know if this works out.

So I have some updates on the kids…

Meredith crawled out of her crib this weekend for the first time. Just another development. Dear Lord, we’re in trouble when the others get to this stage. Opa and I took the front off her crib making it a day bed. She does a pretty good job of going to sleep when she needs to, but we’re gonna have our challenges there. Meredith took her climbing to a new high over the weekend. It was too quiet during the day and Meredith was missing. Oma went looking for her and found her in Lauren’s crib. That’s right; she crawled up the front and threw herself in to her crib. Lauren was also in the crib, sleeping, and was completely undisturbed. Good Lord, all the things that could have happened with that scenario. NEW RULE…all doors on the main level of our house are now closed when Meredith is up and awake during the day.

The kids turned 6 months old this weekend. Can you believe that it’s been 6 months already? I actually spent some time thinking back about it yesterday. I got an email from my mom about a new family of quintuplets from the Sioux City, IA area. The kids were born at a hospital in Omaha and the last of them went home from the hospital this past week. I saw a video of them and it brought back so many memories of our time at the hospital and how far they’ve come since then. We have our 6 month well visit with our doctor later today. The kids are doing so well. We’re no longer using a higher calorie formula and we took away an overnight bottle. We’re allowing them to go on demand in the early morning hours. They’re typically going 5-7 hours overnight before they need a bottle in the morning. They need a little rocking and cuddling during the night to make it, but most volunteers don’t seem to mind. I’ll have a much better idea of where they are developmentally after today’s appointment, but I can tell you that I know that they weigh between 12 and 16 pounds. They are doing really well developmentally. We worry about Emma’s vision a little, but it’s so much better than it was a couple weeks ago. I should know a bunch more after our appointment later today.

I’ve written enough this morning. I’m going on a couple hours now and it still isn’t 5 am.

I’ll leave you with this…with Christmas coming up; we want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas! If you’re traveling, please do it safely given all the weather that we’re expecting this week. God Bless.

Until next time…

I’m trying to play a bit with youtube to improve our website. Below is a video that I’ve shown before in a blog, but you had to click a link to go to our youtube page and chose a video to watch. You could always look back through the blog, but you’d have to find the “click here” where I talk about it. It just wasn’t user friendly. Now, I plan on having the videos right on the page and also on the media page in this fashion. If you haven’t seen this video before, enjoy. If so, please stay tuned to new ones in the future.

Thank you Matt Patterson. Matt is my “go to” for all things technical with our website and is the reason that I was able to figure this out.

Until next time…

It’s been nearly a couple weeks since I’ve last written and so much has happened. I realize that I’m very behind and I’m gonna try to do a better job a writing in the coming week to get updated on everything.

In my last post, I wrote about our upcoming trip to Cedar Falls, IA to see the UNI Glee Club Christmas Variety Show. Angela has shared that she cried a little when we left home for the weekend and a little more on the way home. We (especially Ang) were so ready for a break away from the kids. We had a great time together. Angela finally had an opportunity to see her grandmother, who’s had a bad streak of luck regarding her health over the past couple months. She’s on the mend and doing better now. We had a chance to do some shopping, which was very much needed. We had dinner together…alone. It was the first time in as long as I can remember that it was just the two of us. I think it was our wedding anniversary back in September that we sat alone together over a meal. Normally, all of our meals are right in front of our volunteers. Not that that’s bad, it’s just the way it is given our arrangements at home. It’s part of that lack of privacy thing that I’ve written about in the past. We saw some old friends from college. We met up at the OP, had a few “pops” and had a House Special. Still my favorite pizza! The Christmas Glee Club Show was great, great seats with great friends and great music. It’s always a great way to kick off the holiday season! You can read more about the Glee Club and even purchase some of their music through their website by clicking here.

As we drove home, we just knew that it couldn’t go smoothly. I heard a very good speaker recently refer to this period of time as “re-entry.” A couple hours after getting home Angela started having some pretty serious pain in her lower right abdomen; right under her lung. All the kids were feisty and Meredith was just unruly. Turns out that Angela felt that a trip to the ER was needed. Diagnosis…a gall bladder attack. Angela drove herself there. There was just too much going on at the house for me to leave, given the scenario. I called the ER a little later and the nurse gave me a run down. Angela got a shot in the ass and I was called a little later to come get her. Amy, one of our volunteers, drove me to the hospital where I met up with my bride and I drove her home. On Monday, she went back for an ultrasound to see how bad her gall bladder looked. Full of stones! Friggin fantastic…Surgery is scheduled for the 29th to have it removed. Might as well, we hit our family out of pocket max back in February.

On to the kids. Everyone has been asking how they’re doing because I’ve done so poorly writing lately. I have no idea how much they weigh now as it’s been a month since they were weighted last. My guess is that they’re all around 15, give or take a couple pounds. We’ll find out tonight when they get their 3rd installment of RSV shots. They’ve all had colds here and there, but nothing serious. Brook rolled over from her belly to her back a week or so ago. Lauren did it the other day for the first time too. The other three will eventually get it. We were concerned a couple weeks ago about Emma’s vision. She just wasn’t tracking items well compared to the others. She was clearly behind and it was starting to get a bit concerning. Since my last post, she’s done a complete 180. So much better than before, but we’re still working on it with her.

This past weekend, we took one of the overnight bottles away. For those of you who don’t help out with the kids, our schedule is very regimented. Every 3 hours we start a feeding cycle: 1:30, 4:40, 7:30, and 10:30 am and pm. We overlap the feeding schedule with 8 three-hour shifts of volunteers. That’s right, 24-7 we have people here. Normally 3 people to a shift, but we sometimes deal with less. If you’d like to see the schedule and pick up a shift, click here. It isn’t very often, but as I write this post, I only have one volunteer here. Annie is our overnight rock star! I got up at 2:50 am to make sure that we had proper coverage during the 3-6 am shift. It’s a tough shift. Getting back to the bottles…last weekend we pulled the 1:30 am bottle. It’s gone pretty well. For the most part, they’re sleeping through until the next feeding. Some of them need a little rocking and a binky, but they usually don’t need a bottle until the following 4:30 bottle. So that’s a major advancement that we’re pretty happy about.

This week was our first real snow storm of the season. Meredith knew what snow was, but didn’t really know, if you know what I mean. She had never been out and played in it. She was only a year old last year at this time. I took her outside to play after cleaning off the drive and sidewalk. We had about 8 inches here and the wind blew a lot so we had some really nice sized drifts. She really likes to eat the snow and she had a great time. We even had a second snow fall a couple days ago and she went outside to watch me use the snow blower. She just loves being outside, no matter the season. I’m clearly a bit biased, but man, what a cutie!

We have our 6 month well visit for the quints next week. Oh my god, their 6 months old this week!!! I drive a lot for work and I spend a lot of that time just thinking about stuff. Yesterday on my way home from Duluth was no exception. We have a lot to be thankful for this year as we approach Christmas. I don’t know if I get a chance to say it enough to all of you, but thank you all so much for your tremendous support! You all help in so many different ways and we appreciate it so much!

Until next time…

A new video…click here.

Until next time…

Brook rolled over this week from her belly to her back. Alex and Madeline are close to doing it too.

Angela and I have been talking about changing the feeding schedule a bit. Nothing is set in stone yet, but we’re gonna start to stretch them out a bit. The feedings will still be scheduled. Eventually, we’ll start to stretch them out over the night for 6 hours or so, but we need to work our way there first.

Angela just cut my hair last night and it’s finally official…Brooklyn has more hair than I do.

All 6 of the kids (including Meredith) have cold symptoms in varying degrees. Yuk!

Angela and I can’t wait for the weekend. We’re leaving. We’re headed down to Cedar Falls, IA. Back in college, I sang in the UNI Men’s Glee Club and the group holds a Holiday Variety Show every year over the first weekend in December (this weekend). Angela teases that the glee club was a singing and drinking fraternity. She’s kind of right…anyway…We’re gonna go back to UNI, do some shopping, and see some friends. We really need to get away for a couple days. http://www.unigleeclub.com/

I’ll close with this little tidbit and I may be sharing too much info here, but I don’t really care anymore. We don’t have any privacy anyway so I’ll share…the ironic thing about us getting away from all of our kids this weekend is that the quints were conceived last year on this very weekend after the Glee Club Variety Show. No more kids, I promise!

Until next time…