Wow! What a great weekend! What a year. Actually, when I think back on it, it’s more like the past 18 months. I can tell that the past year was “full” because every major memory over the past 12-18 months involves me crying. I cried a lot this year.

I cried when I drove home from Duluth after Angela told me that she was in the hospital and that we were expecting more than one baby. I cried that night after we found out that there would be five. What were we gonna do? I cried when Angela had very serious conversations about what we would do if the kids were born too early and also when we discussed how we would handle the burial of our children if any of them wouldn’t make it. What a horrible, but very necessary conversation that we needed to have.

I cried when I sent Meredith to stay with my parents while Angela was in the hospital. She cried, reached out to me and told me that she didn’t want to go. I remember that moment so clearly and I’ll never forget it. I never ever want to be in a position ever again where I can’t take care of my family. That was my first of countless doses of pride that I’ve swallowed over the past year.

I cried when I gave Angela’s mom a hug before the delivery of the kids. She told me that everything would be ok.

I cried when the quints were born. What an emotional day. After I saw that they were all alive and well and breathing I named them and came back to the delivery room and ever so gently kissed my bride on the forehead and told her that they were ok and everything would be fine.

I cried with Angela as we left the hospital when she was discharged after the delivery. Leaving the children behind was so difficult for her and I didn’t like seeing her like that.

I cried when we brought the last of the quints home. We were over the hump. We had a sense that things might be ok.

I didn’t cry much during the year, but it was full of really special moments:

● Taking two of the kids to the ER at Children’s in Minneapolis was a tough day.

● I should have cried, but didn’t when I had my little operation. I still have my bag of peas in the freezer. Yum Yum.

● 5 months in a row of RSV shots sucked a lot. Those nights were so challenging.

● Meredith climbing in her dresser drawers was a memory that will stick.

● Halloween night was fun. I won’t forget that. Our Five Things and the Cat in the Hat will be tough to beat.

● The night that I fired my mom and grandmother and sent them back to the hotel.

● Angela’s gall bladder surgery.

● Christmas

● Our first family photo during the night of the Iowa win in the Orange Bowl.

● Putting the kitchen furniture on the deck because Meredith climbs too much.

● Putting my kitchen furniture in the attic and replacing it with the kids new table.

● The flu, the flu again, a cold, the flu, a cold, a cold, vomit, lots of vomit, ARGH!!!

● Angela and I watching and cheering on the UNI Panthers at BWW’s. I love March Madness!

● Easter was a great day.

● Angela broke her leg. Damn it. Did we really need that?

● The BAV!!! Finally!

And then I cried again this weekend.

Saturday was such a great day. We took the kids over to the church for our open house a little before 11. They just got passed around all day. I never had a real good feel for where they all were at a specific time and I was ok with it. The party was a traditional birthday party with cake, food and balloons, but a bit larger. We think that we had around 150 people there. All of our family members made it at some point over the weekend. Thank you all so much for coming. It meant so much to us to have you all around!!! The kids ate cake…kind of. They aren’t very good with food yet. We sang happy birthday and I cut my first tear of the day. I tried to hide it, but I know some of our guests saw it. We had a party at the house later that day and in to the evening.

On Sunday, we took the entire family to church for the first time. The kids did GREAT. No real crying. Just a little fussing near the end of the service, but it was approaching nap time and they were hungry. They all leaned back at the time of the baptism. Not a peep from any of them, not even Meredith. I cried during the entire thing. Sunday was such a major goal for us. I was so happy. We did it! We made it through the first year! It was so hard at times, but we made it!

Thank you all so much. Angela and I are so blessed to have such supportive families. We’re so fortunate to live in and be supported by such a wonderful community. I’m sure that we don’t tell you often enough, but I hope you all understand how much we truly appreciate everything that you do for us.

Until next time…

We are only weeks away from the quints first birthday. Can you believe it? A year has gone by! It feels like just yesterday I was at my bride’s side during the delivery of the quints. Man, how time flies.

We’re planning on celebrating the first year of their life in a couple ways. All six Tille children will be baptized on Father’s Day, Sunday, June 20th. We’ll also have an Open House on their birthday, Saturday, June 19th for family, friends, volunteers, and anyone else who has helped us along the way. The Open House will be held in the Fellowship Hall at Ezekiel Lutheran Church here in River Falls from 11am-2pm. If you plan to attend, we’d greatly appreciate your RSVP so that we can plan and prepare enough food for everyone. That can be done with a simple email by clicking here. We really want this to be a celebration for the kids, but also as a thank you for our entire volunteer group.

Angela and I have really put a lot of thought and effort into planning this big weekend. We’re really looking forward to seeing you all there.

Before I let you go, here’s a pic from last weekend. We haven’t had anything with all of the kids together in a while. The all grown up looking gal is Lizz Berres. Lizz has been so wonderful with the kids and we took this picture for one of her classes prior to her graduation from River Falls High School this week. Congrats Lizz!!!

Until next time…

We got it!

My life flashed before my eyes yesterday, again. It’s happened several times over the past 18 months or so. I guess this is just another dose of reality. Our BAV is exactly what our family needs for the long run. I hope and pray that we’ll have some enjoyable life moments with this BAV. I’m sure we will; it’s just really surreal seeing that thing sitting there in the driveway. We’re hoping that we can get the kids to 10 years old before we need to upgrade again.

Our ’08 Chevy Express has about 26,000 miles on it. It has a full ton of towing capacity and can handle up to 15 passengers. However, each row of seats will hold just two car seats so we needed at least three rows of seats. There are four rows of seats in this BAV, but I’ll be removing the last row of seats so that we have some storage room for bags, strollers, groceries and all of the other crap that we’re gonna have to haul.

Now that we have the BAV, a few things are going to be set in motion soon. We can’t last much more than a year or so in our current home. Angela reminded me yesterday that in 1 year from now, we’ll have 5 more Meredith’s running around. We need a bigger house and we need it soon. We’ll likely have our home on the market in the next couple months. Now that we have the BAV, we can pack everyone up and leave if we need to so that we can show the house to a potential buyer. We can also make a road trip. We plan to visit our families this summer. The details are TBD, but we’ll hit both Rock Rapids and Tama this summer.

We bought the BAV at Moody’s here in River Falls. I want to thank Randy Leonard at Moody’s. Randy helped us with the purchase of our Impala a few years ago and we wanted to keep our business local. Unfortunately, these BAV’s just aren’t on any dealer’s lot. An extensive search was done to find the one we wanted. There were only a couple BAV’s available within a few hundred miles of River Falls. Randy located a couple options for us; went to the other dealership where it was located and drove it back for us. I test drove the BAV on Friday while Angela rode shotgun. She couldn’t drive because of her bum leg. We went back yesterday afternoon and had it home in the driveway by 4. Thanks Randy and thanks Moody’s.

You can see all of our videos by clicking here.

I guess I can take the Big Ass Van off the wish list!!! Sweet!

Until next time…

It’s been a long time since I’ve put up some pics so here are a couple from the other night. Somehow, Alex found his was in to the toy basket and Meredith couldn’t stand to not have some of the attention too so she climbed in while Alex was getting fed.

I drove a BAV (Big Ass Van) yesterday. Holy crap it’s huge…20 feet long huge. Surprising, it rode really smooth and handled very well. Outside of a wide turn or two and intersections, it handled very much like any other car. It isn’t in the driveway yet…

Until next time.

There’s a rumor floating around in River Falls today.

We’ve heard that there’s a Big Ass Van sighting in River Falls. It’s not in my driveway…yet.

We’re taking any and all suggestions on a personalized license plate? How ‘bout, “OUR BAV.” I’ll share some of the best recommendations with everyone in an upcoming post.

Until then…

I am trying desperately to update the website and add some photos and videos so please bear with me. It takes a lot of free time and I don’t have any.

This weekend was a good one.

Angela got out of the house for a little girl time and got her toenails done. Thank you Karen Swenson for taking my wife out of this house for a while!!! Here’s the first picture of “The Purple Boot.”

My parents (Oma and Opa) were here and helped get a lot of things accomplished around the house. Thank you both so much!!

The weather was great and the kids (mostly Meredith) had a great time. Meredith played hard and she has the bruises and scratches to prove it. The quints were out in the yard a few times. They really enjoy it and love the swings we have hanging from the deck. I may have to get another one or two.

Angela (Hop-a-long) and I got out of the house to run some errands on Saturday afternoon. We had dinner at one of my favorite spots, Buffalo Wild Wings. Our waiter said something to me that just took me aback, but I decided to take it in stride. What other choice did I have really? Over the past couple weeks, Meredith has told every person that she has seen: “Momma fell down the steps. She got hurt. Momma broke her leg. Momma got a purple boot.” Some people just giggle at her, some look at her and turn the other way, and others look at me like I’m some kind of wife beater and one actually asked me if momma is okay. Well, Mr. Funny guy at BWW’s was just trying to hold a conversation and asked Angela what happened. She told him that she fell down the steps. Without skipping a beat, he looked at me and said, “That’s what they all say.” Smart Ass. Guess I had it coming.

I’m gonna finish this quickie with a note of thanks. The volunteers here have been wonderful. We’d be lost without you. I have a video below of a day a few weeks ago when one of our volunteers, Monica Schack, came to give us an extra hand for a few days after Angela broke her leg. Monica came nearly every day after work for a couple weeks to help us get through the dinner time feeding. On this particular day, she took Meredith off our hands for awhile so that we could tend to things in the house without any distraction. You can see all of our videos by clicking here.

Until next time…

I’ve tried to write tonight’s post on 3 different occasions, but had some major writers block. My friend Dan told me recently that it sounds like I’ve been pushing Jell-o up hill. I’ll be honest, he’s right. As an example, a few nights ago, I went upstairs for Meredith on 3 different occasions and once with the dog because she needed to go out to pee. Guess who wanted to play in the yard at 3:30 in the morning? Not me. As I was trying to get out the door for work that morning, Angela let me know that the dog threw up on the floor in our bedroom right next to the bed. Argh!!!

Not every day is horrible, though. We had a great moment tonight. From time to time if we need to occupy the kids before their final feeding of the night, we blow bubbles. Kinda gay, huh? I blow bubbles. Anyway, those bubbles will keep the kids happy for 30 minutes or so. We gave Meredith a spill proof bubble container for Easter so we blow bubble in the house and everyone has a great time. Tonight Meredith insisted that she do it herself. She’s really trying to be independent with everything she does. She took the plastic stick, placed it right to her lips, but couldn’t get a bubble. As she took the stick away from her mouth, she exhaled. A big giant bubble appeared around her lips. That image was worth a million bucks and gave mom and dad a very much deserved laugh. We needed it.

The kids are all doing really well. They’re a bit behind developmentally, but that’s to be expected and we’re not really surprised or too concerned at this point. They’re not crawling yet, but can get to something if they want it bad enough. Madeline loves to walk around the house with assistance. Many, but not all of them, are babbling; lots of da, da, da, da, da’s. Alex is clapping. Emma and Madeline each have two teeth. The others do not have any. We are still going with scheduled feedings, four of them per day. During three of the feedings, the kids are getting baby food about an hour prior to their bottle. Oh Dear Lord, how the kids are eating the baby food. We go through about a case of food per day. There are 16 packages of food in a case. We expect that to only increase with time. We’ve talked about making food, but with Angela’s bum leg, that’s out of the question for now. This past weekend, we ordered 39 cases of baby food from Wal-Mart. We hope that this order will get us through a month. We’ll likely switch the kids to whole milk in the next month or two so their food intake will need to increase. Angela joked today when they were choking down peas that they need to get better at eating their food or we won’t be giving them any of their birthday cake.

Yeah, she referenced a birthday party. Do you believe that in less than 2 months, the kids will be a year old? Angela and I have finally made some decisions on their birthday and we’ll be announcing that to everyone very soon. We have a few more details to work out first.

Not much else to talk about other than a little story about our friend Jill Lubich and her big brain. For those who do not visit our home, we have a split level home. The upstairs is devoted to “baby land.” At the top of the steps is a very sturdy baby gate. It has a latch on it that some may describe as “challenging.” Others may describe it as a pain in the ass. I would go so far to say I think one or two of the women who come here may have lost their religion trying to get that thing open. Some don’t even try any more, they just ask for help or just step over it. I’ve seen my father do that too. So last week, I decided to fix it. I took the cover off the latch and ultimately the entire thing came apart. I gave it a little squirt of WD40, got it put back together but I couldn’t get it to work. Son of a B—-! Meredith was starting to need my attention so I rigged up the gate with a bungee cord until I could come back to it. Later that week, Bud Ayres, one of our volunteers, saw the cord prior to entering and asked Angela what woman shot it. She got a laugh. So this past weekend Jill Lubich walked in, saw the parts lying on the counter, looked up, and asked, “A puzzle?” It didn’t take long for Jill to have that thing together. She was able to point out my mistake. I had a piece turned upside down. Wow, look at the big brain on Jill! Seriously, that was it, a piece was turned upside down. So here you go…mark it down, I messed up and a woman fixed my mess. It was still difficult to open, so I had to do a little rigging with some parts from my fish tank and some epoxy. That thing is smooth now; probably easier to open now than the day I originally installed it. Thank you Jill for helping me fix our gate.

That’s it for now. I’ll try to get some photos and videos updated this weekend.

Until then…

I’m so sorry for not writing more often. It’s just so busy here. As an example, I started the first sentence of this post prior to 8 am and its now 9 pm. Running “The Machine” is a nonstop operation from before sun up to past sun down. I have several topics to write about (Jill, I’ll get to you and your big brain in the next one) and plan to get to all of them this week, but tonight just won’t work. I have a very full day at work tomorrow. I will have people from our North American Headquarters here in Minneapolis and also someone from our worldwide headquarters in Denmark ride along with me on several sales calls on Monday and Tuesday. I have some prep work that I have to get to tonight and I must be up early tomorrow.

…but, I want to hit on this very important point before I get back to “the machine.”

Today is Mother’s Day and I want to wish all of you moms out there and all of our adopted moms here at our Tille house a very Happy Mother’s Day. You make the world go round. God Bless all of you!!!

Until next time…

The quints are no longer the youngest Tille children. My younger brother Brad’s wife, Jill, delivered a healthy baby boy this morning in Sioux Falls, SD. Brody Marcus and his mom Jill are healthy and doing well. Brody has an older brother, Braden who will turn three this summer. If they let me, I’ll share a little more info the next time that I write.

Brody is the 9th grandchild for OMA and OPA under the age of 3.

My brother Brad and his wife Jill now have 2 sons. My brother Robert and his wife Gwen have a 1 year old daughter, Lucy. I have 6 rugrats and my youngest brother Eric and his girlfriend Jessica do not have any children. If its ok for me to speak on his behalf, I’m sure he isn’t in a hurry just yet. Eric and Jessica, if you think you want kids, just come to our house for a couple days and it will change your mind. Just kidding

Congrats Brad and Jill!!!

Until next time…

I am so torn emotionally and physically since my last post. I don’t even know where to begin. The last week has been SO SO difficult. I have dealt with so many new pressures. Not only am I fulfilling my old role as husband, father and provider for 6, but I am doing so much more. Angela contributed so much to this well oiled machine that is our home and family. She takes on the responsibility of watching Meredith but also a baby or two all day long. She manages all of the daily chores (laundry, meals, dishes, baths, bottles and so much more during every day that I can’t begin to list them all). Spending a few hours here once or twice a week doesn’t begin to touch what goes on when you’re here 24/7 with no breaks. It is absolutely amazing how much Angela does during any given day and after nearly a week of it, it is really making my head start to spin. I’m wearing very thin. Angela tolerates the crying so much better that I do (and OMG there’s so much crying). And then there’s Meredith. If you’ve ever spent time watching and caring for Meredith for an extended period of time, you have a small idea of how much action we’re talking about. Constant motion. It isn’t that she’s naughty (and she isn’t), it’s that she is just always moving and never stops. Everything is fair game. You really can’t keep up. By the time you’ve taken away something that she shouldn’t have she’s already dropped something else and moved to the third thing she shouldn’t have before you even knew it happened. Time outs don’t work and you can’t take toys away, because she’ll just play with the babies toys. The child locks on all of our cabinets have no real value. She just reaches her skinny little hand in the gap and takes whatever she wants. Argh. Back to Meredith in a bit…

So here I sit writing this silly post. I have 3 wonderful volunteers taking care of the two babies that have woken from their naps early which has allowed me the time to write. I feel so bad for my bride. She’s in pain. She has to listen to “the machine” as it’s in full throttle up the same set of stairs that caused her to be where she is laying her head right now. I wish she could use this time to get some much earned rest, but she’s worried and guilt ridden that she has placed all of this responsibility on others and feels helpless to the situation. Since her fall, we’ve had wonderful support. So many of you have stepped up. A daily meal plan was created for us and we have nightly meals coming in every day through the first week of May. It has helped a lot. Thank you all so much! The schedule for volunteers was full last week and is full again this week. Next week is nearly full. Angela’s mom and aunt made a trip to see her in the hospital for a day prior to going back home. My parents took a couple days off work last week and made the trip northeast. They stayed through the weekend. Momma K. (Angela Kaiser) took a couple days off work to fill my bride’s role during the day on Monday and Tuesday and Wendy Hill is here today and tomorrow to help out all day so that I can work. You guys are just awesome.

Here’s the hammer…the kids are sick, AGAIN!!! Alex and Lauren threw up a few bottles and all of them have spiked temps between 101 and 102.5 since some time in the weekend. That’s all under control now, but they have cold symptoms which makes bottles and sleeping difficult. I don’t know if it’s a cold, flu, allergies, teething or all of them at once. I’ve been averaging about 3-5 hours of interrupted sleep each night and that’s wearing on me and I hope and pray that I haven’t been too short with anyone. If so, I am so sorry. I don’t behave well when I’m short on sleep. What sucks is that I don’t nap well so that’s out of the question.

Back to Meredith…So what are we doing with her during the day while I’m working and Angela is in bed? Two words: day care. Although we had many wonderful offers from family and friends to take her, I hate having to send her away. I had to do it last summer and I swore I wouldn’t do it again. I cried last summer after one exchange where she screamed and cried that she didn’t want to go as I sent her away with my mother for yet another week away. So we’re fortunate that we’ve found a place for her close to home; just down the street a couple blocks with another young family. They have two little girls Meredith’s age to play with. She’ll get a chance for a little socialization with kids instead of infants and 30-70 year old women. Bless all of your hearts, but Meredith really needs to play with some other kids to develop that kind of socialization. She will go every day during the week until Angela is back up to running at full steam.

So when does Angela get back up and going. Next Tuesday she has a follow up meeting with her Orthopedic Surgeon to take a peek and determine long term planning for her recovery. My guess is that she’ll be semi mobile, but still very limited for the next 4-6 weeks at a minimum.

Angela and I have been truly tested this past year. We are both stronger now, no doubt, but we still have times where we question what the heck the good Lord is doing to us. Someone close to Angela said something to her yesterday that really made me step back for a second and think. There are times (especially recently) where we feel like things are hopeless and things just never seem to go right, but we have to consider that as difficult as things are, we are still VERY blessed. We have six beautiful, healthy children. We have an army of friends and volunteers that love us and help us tremendously every day. We have our own families that love us. We have a solid home and I have a GREAT job with an even better boss in a down economy. The sun is gonna come up tomorrow and it will be a new day. I just pray the lord gives us an easy one sooner than later.

Until next time…