Tille Family

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…

I made a mistake…

I am sorry. I am so far behind and I think about writing every day. I just can’t seem to find the time to get it done. I will do my best to try as we have a ton to talk about.

The first thing that I need to do is comment about it that I made a mistake in my last post. I boasted that the dessert was the best thing on the earth and I couldn’t even get the recipe right. I’ve made the change already, but if need to make the change to your own documents if you wrote it down somewhere. Please adjust the bake time to 75 minutes, NOT 90 minutes.

I am in the process on working on a ton of new pictures as we had a photo shoot done and we recently had a party for Meredith as she turned 2 since I wrote last.

I promise that I’ll get back to the blog soon!!!

Until then…

A Public Service Announcement

Well, I got up to help with the 4:30 am feeding today and by the time we got done, I didn’t think it would be good to just go back to bed for 45 minutes. I’d probably wake back up crabby and no one likes me when I’m an ass. I don’t even like me when I’m like that, so I decided to write a bit…

I’m not sure if I’ve talked about this much in the blog, but one of the things that Angela and I had to get used to and continue to deal with daily is the issue of privacy. There are always people here. We have the ability to go downstairs to our room for a while to get away from it all, but we do everything else in front of God and everyone. One of the things that continues to be awkward for us from time to time is meal time. We prepare our meals and eat them in front of our volunteers. It’s not out of the ordinary for volunteers to bring us food from once in a while and that’s so awesome. However, when we do the cooking, certain aromas float in the air; some good and some bad. Let’s be frank too, Angela and I like food. We like to eat so it isn’t all that uncommon for us to talk about food from time to time with our guests. Some of you that have been here during the 6-9 pm shift know exactly what I’m talking about. We’ll with the holidays approaching, I’ve talked about my favorite desert a few times and it’s generated a bit of interest. This new creation has taken the place (in my mind) of the most traditional of holiday mainstays. In my humble opinion, I never need to see a pumpkin pie ever again. There are a few other recipes that people have asked for, but this one is so special I feel obligated to share; like it’s my duty to advise the general public. A public service announcement, if you will. So, Rona Will (one of our regular 6-9ers), here is your request.

PUMPKIN PIE CAKE
Preheat oven to 350

CRUST:
1 Box Yellow Cake Mix (reserve 1 cup of dry mix)
½ C Margarine – very soft/room temp.
1 Egg (2 if small)
Mix together and press in to 9×13 Cake Pan

FILLING:
1 Large Can or 2 Small Cans of Pumpkin Pie Filling
3 Eggs
2 Tsp Cinnamon
1 C Sugar
2/3 C Evaporated Milk
Mix together and pour over crust

TOPPING:
1 C Yellow Cake Mix (reserved from crust)
½ C Sugar
¼ C Margarine (very soft/room temp)
1 C Chopped Pecans
Mix cake mix, sugar, and margarine together until crumbly. Sprinkle over the filling. Sprinkle pecans on top.
Bake 350 for 75 minutes
Serve warm with Cool Whip!
Also awesome served cold with Cool Whip too!

I don’t know how often I’ll do this recipe thing, but I kind of like the change of pace. Enjoy.

Until next time…

Our first healthcare scare

Let me start by saying that everyone is fine. Don’t worry.

Given our recent experience this past weekend, I’d like to kindly remind everyone to take care of yourselves. Please wash your hands, especially if you come to our house and use antibacterial gel/hand wash when washing your hands is not an option.

On to the story…

We had our first “scare” this past Friday. The kids have had some cold symptoms over the past week, including Meredith. Meredith was pretty crabby for a day or two, but nothing that made us worry or a little Tylenol couldn’t take care of. She did have a fever, but again, not big enough to get our panties in a bunch. Well, Brook and Emma woke up with fevers on Friday; over 101 fevers. Well, that’s enough to get mommy worked up. She called the clinic. Understandably, they wanted to see the kids. Angela scheduled an appointment to go in around 11:30. (For those of you who are reading this and don’t live in the River Falls community, you need to understand that the flu/swine flu has taken over our community. Rumors are just rumors, but I’ve heard from teachers and parents that absenteeism at some of the RF schools has been as highs as 25-30% and hundreds of H1N1 cases have been all over the UWRF campus in the past couple weeks. Seems like everyone is sick or knows someone who is sick.)

In the meantime; Mom, Dad, and Meredith went to Ellsworth, WI for a free H1N1 vaccine for caregivers of young children, young children and other very high risk people. We stood in line for an hour, but we got our shots. Kind of ironic that we stood outside (in crappy weather) in line for part of the time to get a flu shot. Anyway, after we got done, we picked up Brook and Emma at home. The five of us made our way to the clinic.

Our time at the clinic didn’t go well and I’d like to leave out the details for now. We didn’t get to see our normal doctor as he was understandably out on Friday. That was not our problem. He had worked the overnight shift in the ER. Needless to say, they couldn’t provide the services necessary to take care of our needs so we were sent on an “Emergency” trip to the new Emergency Dept at Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis. So, I drove like a mad man to Minneapolis to another comedy of errors at the brand new ED at Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis. We have nothing to say but good things about our time when the kids were in the NICU there, but they clearly have some things to work out in the new ED. One of the nurses used a very poor reference to how things were going in the new ED Dept. He said, “This is kind of like in the movie Jurassic Park where they brought in some people for a dry run before they opened the park.” I replied quickly with, “it didn’t turn out so well in the end of that movie…maybe you should work on your movie references before you go that direction again.” Needless to say, we got home around 8 pm. Brook has something that warranted an antibiotic, but Emma is fine. Nothing was diagnosed, but Tamiflu was prescribed for all 5 of them. It’s unlikely that they have the flu or H1N1; most likely a cold. I understand that with premature children, we have to take things pretty seriously, especially early on whenever possible. I don’t regret the decisions we made or the decisions of any of the physicians. It just seemed like if something could go wrong, did go wrong. Thank God is wasn’t an emergency.

It was a very long day and our first real experience regarding the healthcare of our children since they were discharged from the hospital. Thank you so much to the people who helped us out logistically during the day. Let’s hope that we can keep those experiences to a minimum.

Lastly, thank you Ageson Family. You’re help this past weekend was huge!!!

BTW…2 posts in as many days. How do you like them apples? I’ve always been an overachiever, that’s how we got in to this mess. (that’s my smart ass coming through…)

Until next time…

Happy Halloween!!! Updated

I’ll be honest. I wasn’t looking forward to this “holiday”: dress up the kids, dressing them up in costumes a couple times, dressing up Meredith, taking Meredith all over the neighborhood, dealing with all the other rug rats at the door, carving pumpkins, and we were planning on having some family in town to visit for the first time. Sounds like the start of a drinking problem to me…

The day started out really well. When the sun finally came up, it was bright outside! A good start. The Iowa Hawkeyes were set to play at 11 am. When game time finally came around, something didn’t feel right. Iowa won the coin toss, but chose to defer to the second half and kicked off…they always take the ball when they win the coin toss…what the heck do I know? Captain Kirk hasn’t let us down yet…then Indiana went right down the field and scored. Argh!!! Everything they did went poorly from that point moving forward; penalties, dropped balls, mistakes, turnovers, turnovers, turnovers. It was just ugly. Then the fourth quarter started and the Hawkeyes flipped the switch and ran wild. I have no idea how they did it. It turns out that the wind played a big role in the outcome of the game. Most of the turnovers took place when a team was going in to the wind and all the big plays came when a team was going with the wind. Guess who had the wind at their backs in the 4th quarter? Maybe Captain Kirk had it figured out from the start when he deferred to the second half. I don’t know. All I know is that they’ve taken 10 years off my life this season. We’re still #4 in the BCS and we need to win out. Let’s not take Northwestern lightly this weekend. If we manage to take care of our own business in Iowa City, it would be really cool if LSU to beat Alabama this weekend.

After the game was won, I started in on the remainer of my pumpkin carving duties. Turns out that I’m not too bad…see all of my work here. I would have done more, but ran out of time.

As night drew near, we started to dress up the kids. We had a bunch of people around. I think at one time, we had nearly 20 people in our living room. It was nuts. We had a family give us some outfits for our gang of little animals. We started by dressing up our little wild things. See them here. After that was over, we added Big Sis to the party with her outfit. Meredith was the Cat In The Hat and it matched up perfectly with our Thing 1-5 Onesies. We had another family make some blue wigs to make the reference to the Dr. Seuss classic complete. Prior to Halloween, Meredith hated her costume, but once she got outside and saw all the other kids in the neighborhood, she just ran for blocks, literally. She wouldn’t stop yelling “trick or treat” and “knock, knock, who’s there” in the middle of the street. She had her stereotypical plastic pumpkin for collecting candy and shook the living day lights out of it the whole time. To top off the night, she had shoes on that squeaked every time she took a step. I can’t do it justice; you just had to be there. She had so much fun!!!

After mom and dad finally screamed, “Uncle,” we headed back home to take care of our 5 other little animals. Meredith helped grandma hand out candy to all the other kids that came to the house. We had about 75 kids in total come to the front door. We gave out our last pieces of candy to a few dumb ass high school kids that came to the door at 10:30. Guess they thought that because my light was on at 10:30 it was ok to ring the damn door bell. I forget that I was a dumb ass high school kid once too. You may ask, Heath, why didn’t you turn off the front light. Well, I never turn them off. Safety first! I keep them on all night so that our nighttime volunteers can see their way in to the front door in the middle of the night.

Halloween was a big day this year and I can see how this is only gonna get bigger in the years to come! I just hope that the Hawkeyes don’t manage to kill me before 3 in the afternoon in the years to come.

Until next time…

Happy Halloween!!!

I’ve got a ton of stuff to update. Will put up a bunch of new posts up during the week. I promise. In the meantime, I put up some new pictures from Halloween. Click here to see the new one’s.

Until next time…

Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

I just got done putting Meredith to bed. She didn’t take a nap today and it wasn’t because Angela didn’t try. There’s just a few days from time to time where she just won’t go down. Needless to say, she was a bit crabby this evening, especially after she threw her entire dinner on the floor and I wouldn’t give her more ketchup to lick up off her tray. Seems like that’s the only thing she’ll eat these days.

After dinner, I took Meredith to her room for a little time away from it all. She was pretty upset so I took one of my favorite books from her bookshelf and started reading, hoping that she would eventually listen and sit with me for a while. It eventually worked. 30 minutes later (it felt like 90 minutes) Angela came in to save me. Meredith and I read Dr. Seuss’, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! I love this book. Even at 31 years of age, it’s still relevant.

The kids are 4 months old now. Can you believe that it’s been four months already? I can’t. Oh, the places we’ve been. It’s been a really long journey so far, and we’re just getting started. If you take in to consideration their prematurity (their due date was September 2) the kids are only 7 weeks old, but they’re doing so well. All five of them are right on pace developmentally if you adjust their age for the prematurity. They’re getting so big. I just put up some new pictures last night. See them here. All of them are smiling now and tracking objects. Alex and Brook have been cooing the past couple days. I took a small poor quality video of Brook with our camera and posted it on YouTube. You can see it here.

We have updated weights of the kids. We got these last night when we had a nurse come to the home.

Brooklyn – 11 lbs., 5 oz.
Lauren – 9 lbs., 9 oz.
Alex – 12 lbs., 8 oz.
Emma – 9 lbs., 3 oz.
Madeline – 10 lbs., 14 oz.

She was here to give the kids their first RSV shots. It took forever and they will get these shots every month until spring. RSV is a serious deal for kids like ours. We do not have it in our home. These shots are preventative. If you’d like to know more about RSV, please read up on it by clicking on this link. Speaking of last night, the past couple nights have been long. The shots last night just drug on forever. I think she was here for 3 hours! The kids have been showing signs of colic too. Monday was bath night. All 4 of the girls screamed for the entire 6-9 shift and the only time they quit was when I had them in the tub for a few minutes. Meredith didn’t cut us any slack either.

With all that said, we’re amazingly blessed. We’ve had one very minor complication that I really haven’t written about, but if you’ve spent any time in our home, you’d know what I’m talking about. Madeline has had some feeding trouble for several weeks now. We’ve tried a variety of things, including medication. She’s better than she used to be, but it sure isn’t resolved. We took Maddie to a pediatric gastroenterologist yesterday for a second opinion. For those who don’t know the medical lingo, he’s a guy who figures out what’s wrong with her tummy. Many have made suggestions as to what’s causing her trouble; let me assure you that it isn’t’ the iron supplement that she gets every day. We have multiple physicians who have promised us that it isn’t the iron that’s making her crabby. We’re gonna try a few things here at home, and if we need to, we’ll go back to Children’s Hospital the first week in December to do a swallow test to confirm this is reflux or something more serious. Seriously though, we’re so lucky that this is the most serious thing that we’re dealing with.

Speaking of blessed, I can’t tell you how appreciative we are of our volunteers. We have 3 people in our home helping out 24-7, but we still have some open spots from time to time. Spots open up because of people getting ill and changes in everyone’s personal schedules. Having people here all the time allows me to go to work every day and Angela to care for Meredith during the day. That is so important for us. As I mentioned in last night’s post, there will be another orientation meeting for new volunteers on Oct. 31. You can see more information about the meeting by clicking here and you can see the current and future volunteer schedule by clicking here. A volunteer just covering one 3 hour shift is worth his/her weight in gold. Thank you all so much to everyone who has been here to our home. We’ve had some people sick recently and the flu is running wild in our community, so please take care of yourselves. Wash your hands and use the hand sanitizers often.

With all that said, I’ll try to do a better job of writing more frequently.

Until then…

4 month update

The kids are 4 months old now. I know. Wow!!! It’s been a long year.

I haven’t written in forever and I’ll write about the kids tonight. I promise. I guess the title was a bit of a tease to get everyone to read, so keep reading, please.

A public service announcement. Our wonderful volunteer coordinator, Brenda, will be holding another orientation meeting in the very near future. If you still want to hold our kids, we would love for you to attend.

Saturday, October 31st from 8:30-9:30 AM at St. Bridget’s Church in River Falls (211 East Division St) in the Garden View Room (just off of the Fellowship Hall). To learn more about our volunteer schedule, click here.

Before I let you go, a gentle reminder to wash your hands. You really can’t over do it. Spend a little time on it. You’re not that busy. There’s so much going around these days and washing your hands is still the best way to keep yourself and your family healthy.

More to come on the kids in the next post.

Until then…

My winnings

For those of you who either don’t know or don’t remember, I had a little “heat” on the Iowa State vs. IOWA HAWKEYE football game earlier this year with a couple friends. The Hawks beat ISU like a drum and this picture is evidence of my winnings.

Thank you Vickie and Amy for being good sports. I really do respect your loyalty to your university, even though its that dirty ISU. I really don’t know how you do it. I would put up a picture of Amy as well, but she wears her Iowa Hawkeye Football Shirt PROUDLY every time she comes to our home to help with the kids. So with that said, I want to put this up for everyone to see (and Vickie, I hope you knew this was coming).

Thank you ladies and GO HAWKEYES!

Until next time…

My First Road Trip

I got home today around 4:30. I had been away from home since early Tuesday morning. It was the first time that I was overnight for work since nearly a month before the kids were born. I went to Sioux Falls, SD for 2 nights. For those who don’t know, I grew up 35 miles from Sioux Falls. It was good to get back as all of my family is there. I got together with my brothers to watch the Twins ballgame on Tuesday night. We had a great time. Wow, what a game!!! Outside of Game 7 of the World Series in ’91, it may have been the most memorable game in Twins history. For those of you who didn’t see it (shame on you), it was extremely entertaining.

I missed Angela while I was gone. I missed Meredith and the kids. I even missed Maggie, our dog. I didn’t sleep well at all. I guess I missed that elbow in my back or a nearly 2 year old kicking me at 5 am. The first that came to mind when I got home was; my wife is so amazing. The house was in awesome shape, the kids were all quiet and Meredith was in a great mood helping with laundry. I don’t think I can describe how great she is at running our household. I really want to thank Brenda for coming through with our schedule and to all the volunteers for filling it up while I was gone. It won’t be the last time that I have to go on the road. I feel a lot better about taking future trips after how well it went this time. Thank you all so much.

This is where I would normally like a smooth, witty, well thought out transition, but I have nothing.

The kids are growing a ton!!! They get weighed every other week now. The last weigh in was last week so these numbers are not entirely accurate…they’re clearly bigger than their listed weights.

Brook – 9 lbs., 12 oz. – she’s over 10
Lauren – 8 lbs., 6 oz.
Alex – 10 lbs., 11 oz. – he’s over 11
Emma – 7 lbs., 15 oz. – she’s over 8
Madeline – 9 lbs., 9 oz.

I just updated the site with some new pics of Meredith and the Quints. See the rest of them by clicking here. I got those pics taken of the kids dressed in Black and Old Gold that I promised. Go Hawkeyes!!! Oh…Almost forgot. I heard that I will have a pic of a certain ISU fan who lost a bet. Her mug will be seen here for everyone to admire by weekend’s end. I can’t wait.

That’s it for tonight. I need to spend some time with Angela. I owe someone a dedicated post and the creative juices have been flowing. There will be more to come in the next week or so.

Until then…