April 11, 2006

Hi everyone,I got back last night from a really wonderful trip to Rosalynde's house to see her family and their new baby. I got in late Friday night (had a really exhilerating 6 hour layover in Newark), stayed Saturday, Sunday, and half of Monday and arrived back home Monday night. Mara is beautiful, alert, and very happy as long as she's in her mama's arms! Rosalynde looked as though she had never even been pregnant, let alone pregnant a mere 2 weeks before... Elena and Jack are really good with the baby, much better than Brigham and Joseph were with Moses! I took some pictures while I was there, of course, and I'm still going through them. I've posted my favorite so far of each of the kids, though. ( http://gabrielleturner.blogspot.com/). I didn't get as many of the baby as I'd have liked because when she was awake she STRONGLY preferred to be held by Rosalynde, and she is a pretty light sleeper so it was hard to get her to sleep and then put her down in a picture-friendly way. But I managed to get some good ones, don't worry. Back at home Ben was manning the fort. He took the boys camping out in the Everglades on Friday night, encountering numerous alligators (Ben assured me none were closer than 40 feet to their tent) and a large snake that they think was a cottonmouth (YIKES!) which actually lunged at them. Scary. Glad I wasn't there and VERY glad everyone ended up safe. Poor Ben, though, he was not feeling good the whole weekend with a sore throat and ear ache. The boys all did great, though, and didn't seem at all traumatized that I was gone. Rosalynde showed me that I really want to change the way I do some things here at home, and tonight was night 2 of re-implementing the bedtime routine. We've gotten too lax and ended up too many times with the boys falling asleep on our bed or getting up a thousand times. Rosalynde has a good, streamlined bedtime routine that I admired greatly. She also has her kids eat every meal AT THE TABLE, and they eat very healthy, so I've turned over a new leaf with that too. No more snacking on crackers and hot chocolate instead of lunch, and no more sending them out the door in the morning with fairy bread (what we call bread and butter sprinkled with sugar).
Anyway, today was sort of back into the swing of things. It is spring break for the boys so no school. We went to the pool in the morning, then after lunch we worked on cleaning up the house (the house did suffer a bit with me gone, but not as bad as I thought it might be!) and then went to the gym. Tomorrow is laundry day and somewhere in the afternoon-- maybe the zoo. I hope all of you had a good weekend!