Family Photo Time

After the twins birthday party, I really wanted to take some family pictures. We got a new bedroom set and each morning the kids just love to be up there and play. I felt this would be a fun picture to take. So the grandparents got out their cameras and we spent about 30 minutes just taking pictures. Let me just say, It is really hard take pictures of our family especially getting 3 kids to look at the camera, but it turned to be fun.This is the one good family photo that we got.

Daddy, Tyler, and Xander.

Silly Time.

Cute Tyler.

Love Tyler's smile.


The twins are tackling Mommy.

Daddy giving sweet kisses to Xander.

Mommy and Liam cuddles.

Twins 1st Birthday!

It's Catch Up Time!

In September, Xander and Liam turned 1 years old. WOW! Can't believe my baby boys are 1. At one years old, Both Liam and Xander are walking. Liam started walking right before he turned 11 months old and Xander started walking one week before he turned 1 years old. They both have 8 teeth and the most cutest laughs and smiles. They say "mama and dada" and it just melts my heart. These boys have turned our family upside down, but have brought so much joy into our home. .... and a lot more mess.

Xander and Liam's first birthday party was a Cat in the Hat theme. I made all the boys in the family, including Eric, tie shirts with suspenders. I hung pom poms and we even had a photo table. Each kid got to take home a book with a treat bag. It was a really cute party.
I decorated the tables with dots and thing 1 thing 2 vases.
We had a friend make the cupcakes and they turned out adorable.
We had the party at the park and as you can see Tyler had a blast. We almost did not see him for the entire party. Xander and Liam were blessed with so many wonderful gifts. They were two lucky boys.

The cupcake eating was really fun and cute. The boys really got into eating the cake.

Liam had fun squishing the cake in his hands. He was not as interested in eating it.

Xander was the king at eating his cake. He thought he was pretty funny and the more he smeared himself the more reaction he got so he kept doing it.

We are so blessed to have this little balls of spunk in our family. I couldn't be more happy to be the mom of three great boys.

Peek-a-boo Liam.

Tyler turned 4 years old.

In July, Tyler turned the big 4 years old. This last year Tyler received a great gift of twin brothers, but at the same time he received a lot less attention from his parents and extended family, less time outside playing, and less trips to fun places. For all these reasons, we decided to have a nice birthday party of Tyler. We had party at John's Incredible Pizza. This place is Chuckie-Cheez on steroids. The have bumper cars, a small roller coaster, a kids bowling alley, a swing ride, tons of arcade games and 4 buffets of food. It's a lot of stimulation for the kids. We reserved a party room. The best part of the party was that we had 2 hosts for the party so all I had to do was mingle, take pictures, and enjoy it all. Tyler has been really into Pirates lately so we incorporated that into the theme. Each kid got a fun treasure box from us filled with Pirate treats galore. Everyone was very generous towards Tyler and he got so many wonderful gifts. I think everyone had a good time.
Tyler loved this huge pirate balloon he got. Sadly it popped from the heat in the car on the way to his party.


Here are some of Tyler's friends at the party.

Grandma Bev also was able to come and celebrate.


Happy Birthday time!


John the Incredible Bear came and gave Tyler a special gift. All the kids loved hugging him.


Tyler was very generous and gave some of his tickets to his best friend.


Bowling time.

Tyler also got a new Buzz Lightyear bike for his birthday. It's his "Big Boy Bike."


A Pirate Boat water activity center from his grandparents.

Summertime

July is my favorite time of the year, not just because it's the month that Tyler was born in, but also because it is truly a summer month. Being outside and playing makes you feel alive. The kids have been having a lot of fun playing in the backyard in the evenings. Once our small trees start to provide a little shade on the grass, we take the twins and let them wander. Tyler has become good friends with our neighbors kids. It is nice to finally have kids that he can play with on a regular basis . Eric built a half gate between our backyards so the kids can go back and forth without having to be watched and worried that they will go into the street. We love it.


For Tyler's birthday, he got a pirate boat water activity center. What is so nice about it is that it is low enough for the twins to play with it too. Liam(left) and Xander(right) love splash and drink the water.
The kids found a pile of dirt on the side of our house and spent a lot of time building a castle.


Xander(left) and Liam(right) love sitting in Daddy's lap.


Tyler is a water super hero.


We took a trip to Grandparents house in Corcoran. This town is right in the center of the valley and it gets sooo HOT! We are fortunate in Sacramento to have the Delta Breeze, especially at night to cool us down, but in Corcoran it is hot even in the evenings. We made sure while we were there to let the kids have some outside time in the evening and cool off in the pool.
At 10 months old, our little Liam is almost ready to walk. He just loves this walker from IKEA and cruises around with it everywhere.

Tyler graduated from Preschool this month and entered Pre-K. I was so relieved when his teacher told us it was time for him to advance. I was a little worried that he was going to be the oldest kid in the class. The best part was that he advanced with his best friend, Xander.

Catching up: June

I sometime feel like life is like a roller coaster. It's going by so fast, there are many emotions, some days are up and some are down, some are scary and some are exhilarating. At times I feel that I just can't get catch up with it. Life with 3 kids is amazing, but it is so CRAZY!

So I am going to attempt to catch up with my blogging because this is a journal of my family and someday I want to print it.

In June, Tyler is 3 years old and Xander and Liam are 9 months old. Xander and Liam are both standing and Liam keeps making the attempts to take some steps. Because the twins are becoming more mobile, our house is becoming more of a tornado zone. I keep calling it tornado alley because there is a trail of destruction everywhere these kids go and then when you include Tyler, it's 10 times worse.

Tyler has become such a fun and active kid. He loves to pull all the cushions off the couches and make forts. He is so creative and likes to build fun toys out of different objects. I can't get enough of this kids smile and let me tell you he knows how to use it. His laughter is contagious and fills our house morning and night. Tyler is testing his limits even more lately. He does find ways to try and manipulate situations. For example: Tyler knows that when his TV show is done then he has to go to bed. So about 5-10 min before his show is over and before we give him a warning of bedtime, he tells me that he does not want to watch this show and wants to watch another show. Of course we don't give in. I have to give him credit for trying. Lately Tyler's speech has improved and he is trying to say words and sentences more correctly. He will still need speech therapy when ever they finally get back to us. Tyler is also feeling more comfortable with his brothers, but at the same time as they become more mobile, he also becomes more worried and protective of them and afraid that they will get hurt. He truly does love his brothers and we truly love our Ty-Ty.

In June, there was a lot of fun and cheap activities that we did. Eric took his qualifying exams for his PHD so he was pretty busy studying a lot and stressing out. He did pass his exam of, course, but there was a lot of sweat and tears. We tried to take some time and let the kids have fun outside during all of the craziness.

Bath time in our house is a lot of fun, especially with 3 kids now. After bath time, Tyler loves to get on the our bed and jump around like a monkey. Liam and Xander love to get in on the fun too.

It has been nice the have warm weather again. The weather this year has been weird. It is either raining and cold or too hot so when we get the chance we let the kids play outside. Since Tyler was a baby, he loved the sprinklers. As you can see, he still gets excited about them. I love to watch him make up games and try to get everyone to play them with him. Liam and Xander are so funny and they just chill.. This is the first time they got wet in the sprinklers. They just sat their and squinted their eyes then played with the grass.

We took the kids to a nice park and the twins got to play in the bark for the first time .Once again they are such chill kids when they try something new. We had to use the pacifiers to keep them from eating the bark. Tyler just loves the park and went all crazy running around every where. It was hard keeping up this guy and he wore his parent.
Liam is such a sweet and cute boy. He loved being in the swings for the first time.
Xander is my funny boy. When he gets excited he kicks his chubby legs and rocks himself back and forth. He really liked the swings and was trying to tell us. He is the most loud and talkative kid that we have had at this age.

Life in the West house is never dull, it's very loud, and full of energy and laughter, but we couldn't ask for a better life. Well, maybe some peace and quiet sometimes.

One of my worst nightmares did happen.

Do you sometimes have nightmares about what things could happen to your kids? I do. I get scared that my kids will hit their heads, run into the street, break a limb, etc. I really try not to think about these things, but I feel at times that it makes me a little more of a cautious mom and though I cannot always isolate my children and protect them from all the harms of the world, I do try to at least not do anything that could cause them to be harmed. Well, last Thursday one of my fears came true. My little Xander started choking and we had to call 911. If you want all the gory details then keep on reading. If you don't then skip to the end to see the pictures and be assured that Xander is alright now and back to his spunky, happy self again.

On Thursday morning, Eric got up and took care of the kids while I got to sleep in. Around 8am he came to get me so I could go take care of him and get Tyler ready for school while Eric got ready. Xander was playing on the floor with toys all around him. When he saw me he started whining for me to pick him up. I put him on my lap and he started clapping from being happy to see me. Tyler came over and started playing with him. At some point I thought I saw him chewing on something so I checked his mouth and did a sweep, but did not see anything. I put him on the ground for a moment to go get Liam who was trying to crawl up an object when Xander started coughing. I picked him up and he looked like he was choking. At that moment I let him cough a little to see if he could clear it himself, but he couldn't. Next I lifted up his arms to see if that would help then patted his back. He then started to look like he was really choking so I ran him to our bedroom where Eric was and told him that Xander was choking. He started to get bright red so I turned him over on my knee, kind of upside down, and started to pat his back really hard. Next my worst fear happened. Xander started to turn purple and at one point he started to go a little limp on me. I yelled for Eric to call 911.

I am so glad that I have taken CPR multiple times because I knew what to do and I was preparing for the worst. I was praying so hard for him to start breathing, but he was just trying to cough. Just at the moment that Eric started talking to the someone on the phone, Xander gave out a cry and continued to cough. The color in his face was turning back to red and then pink, but he was still coughing like something was in his airway and he was wheezing a lot. I knew then that he was doing better and we prepared for all the commotion of the firetrucks and ambulances to arrive at our house.

It took about 8 min for the emergency teams to arrive which seemed like a long time. Xander was doing much better, but he was just wheezing a lot. When they arrived, they listened to him and determined that he did sound like something was still in his airway. They gave us the option to drive him to the hospital or take him in the ambulance, but that he really needed to be seen very soon. Of course, we chose the ambulance and I went with Xander on the ride. It's amazing how resilient kids are, but their little bodies cannot handle being in distress for a long time and my worries were that if this object moves and Xander starts choking again, I needed a medical team who can treat him fast. On the way to the hospital we were trying to keep him calm so that he did not start choking again, but at one point he started crying and he was not stopping so the paramedic started getting all her supplies together in case he needed to be intubated. It was scary looking at my poor little child on this bed with oxygen on and this paramedic looking a little worried that he was going to stop breathing. I was praying so hard that he would be alright. Thankfully he kept doing fine.

Well to make the story a little shorter, they did a chest x-ray on Xander and did not see anything. On a side note, I had no idea what Xander could have choked on. I was thinking that it could have been a tissue or paper. The only things that would have showed up on the x-ray would have been something with metal or possibly glass. Everything else is like your skin and the x-ray goes right through it. Xander was still wheezing even after 2 breathing treatments so the ER doctor consulted with the Pediatric ICU doctor and they decided that they need to put a scope or camera down Xander's airway to see if they could determine if he did have something stuck in his airway. The ICU was pretty busy so we had to wait over 2 hours for a room. When we finally arrived in the ICU, we were prepped on the procedure and an hour later Xander was put under anesthesia and they scoped his airway. Eric and I were not able to be present during this procedure due to some policies, but it only took about 1o minutes before the doctor came out to show us the picture of the STICKER that was stuck in Xander's bronchial tube. You could even see the smiling face on the sticker.

How in the world did this kid get a hold of a sticker? Tyler had not been playing with any stickers recently. After discussing this further, we realized that Tyler had put some sparkling stickers on a book and that book was where Xander was playing. Xander must have pulled the sticker off the book and put it in his mouth. Now that we knew what was in his lung, they now needed to get it out and that required having a bronchoscopy. Xander was going to have to go the Operating room where they would put him under anesthesia, stick a big tube down his throat that had a camera in it and find the sticker. When they found it then they put an instrument in that had these tiny clamps on it that would grab the sticker and pull it out. It was a short procedure, and lasted a total of 30 min. After it was done we went into the recovery room and the nurse was trying to control Xander who was trying to wake up and squirming all over the place. He looked like a really drunk baby. He was also starving. We waited a while for each procedure that entire day. Xander choked around 8:30 am, We were in the ER until about 1pm. He had the first procedure to find the sticker at around 2pm and he had the bronchoscopy at around 6:30pm. Xander had not eaten since 7:15 am. When we were finally able to given him a bottle of glucose water, he scarfed it down in about 2 minutes. He immediately then started to wake up and even smiled at the nurses. The poor guy just needed to eat. So he got 2 more bottles of food later and we were discharged from the hospital at around 9:30 pm. Xander came out of this all with bruised arms from the IVs, a hoarse voice, and pretty little ladybug sticker in a cup. Eric and I were just so glad that the day was over and we could not wait to jump into bed.

I want to just say that I feel so blessed for the knowledge that I have about CPR and that I actually listened in my classes. I am also thankful for the power of prayer and for the gift of the Holy Ghost who I know was comforting me during this whole ordeal. I know that Xander was being watched over and that the hands and minds of the doctors were being blessed. What I did not say earlier was that after we got to the ER, I felt a very comforting feeling that Xander was going to be alright and even when they were performing the procedures, that I still felt very calm and comforted. I love my little Xander so much and this incident made me love my children even more. Did I mention that we banned stickers from the house?
Little Xander after his first procedure where they saw the sticker.

This is the picture of the sticker stuck in his airway. the white, red, and blue spot are all the sticker. You can't see it here, but there is a yellow smiley face on the right side of the sticker. He was very lucky that the sticker was lining the airway because there was still some air able to come through it.
This is the lovely book that Xander took the sticker off of. Tyler must have gotten it from the bookcase and was reading it to them at some point.
This is the ladybug sticker they retrieved from Xander on a note pad.