bi annual blog (just kidding)!

Going to try to post more frequently and briefly.
I’ve recently had a lot of reflection time while sitting in the parking lot of the kids’ nursery school. Some of these reflections include, but are not limited to:

• Why is Gillian so crazy? Will this remedy itself with age or will it be a battle of wills for the rest of eternity?
• WHY DOES BRYCE CRY EVERY DAY AT SCHOOL DROP OFF? (This thought is sometimes followed by hysterical laughter or tears).
• Why do I spend so much time sitting in my car? Is this normal?

Do the really look like two children who can wreak so much emotional havoc on a mother??
In uplifting news, we enjoyed an hour of impromptu, yelling free, very fun sledding last week! It was a blast:

Until my next parking car time...

Whoops!

Somewhere in early July, I decided to take the summer off from this blog. No big deal! Summer is only three months. You can imagine my horror when I discovered about 30 seconds ago that I hadn't written since April! Whoops.

Ahead lies the most boring blog post yet, which is a brief summary of the past five months:

Please See Chalkboard

• Gillian had her adenoids out one day and received stitches the next after a playground mishap
• Bryce turned 3 and still tells everyone he is two, so maybe you didn't miss much there after all!

Turtleback Zoo 

July 4th @ RCC (Bryce won the worst snack award)

4th of July Parade (We were the first to leave and it felt great)

Trip to Ocean City to see Aunt Carol + my cousins and their kids

Well, what do you know! Chad and I even had our own fun this summer. Enjoying Pizza with and w/o gluten at Spring Lake's finest after a night at the parker house (full disclosure, it was 9pm)

Snow Day Recap

On March 14th, we had the pleasure of experiencing a late season "blizzard" totaling about 8 inches of snow and a days worth of activities. Below is a photo journal of our day! Notably absent is dear daddy, who had the chance to play in a PGA Pro-Am in Orlando, and rather than stay home and join the entertainment committee with Mommy, he boarded the last flight out of EWR on Monday and headed for greener pastures. 

8AM: Day started off swimmingly in matching pajamas and a late sleep in thanks to the miracles of daylight savings time. No one complained about breakfast, a great and unprecedented start to the day.

930AM: Time for Art! Bryce was entertaining by this for nearly 30 minutes and Gillian almost an hour. Thanks to the McGoldricks for this easel, which is a gift that has been giving for years! 

Little more of an effort from our four year old princess here.

11AM:Time to play in the snow.
Me: "Bryce, put your snow bib on."
Bryce: NOOOO, NOOO (crying, screaming)
Me: "Okay buddy. How about some snow boots"
Bryce: NOOOO, (crying, screaming, sweating)
Me: "Okay buddy. Here are your sneakers and two stop and shop bags to tie around your shoes so you don't get hypothermia in the first 30 seconds we go outside" Bryce: NOOOOOO (crying, screaming, sweating)
See below

Me  "okay buddy, stay inside and watch gillian play in the backyard"

12pm: Channeling warm weather and sunny skies

1PM: Coloring for hours

2pm: Making Sugar Cookies

These left a little to be desired but we enjoyed them all week!

4pm: Car Wash

7pm: Ninja kicking, crying and overall a bit of a choppy storytime

the 8pm picture is me with a glass of wine. Happy Spring!

Winter 2017

This winter has been as great as winter can be for the kids. They’ve done a great job at hibernating: constantly playing the Sneaky, Snacky, Squirrel Game until someone cried (twenty minutes), building magna tile castles in every room of the house, watching a huge amount of TV and movies (it feels so good! How could you turn down Trolls)?  The kids even resorted to begging to run errands. Bryce, not one to chat about his feelings, would respond immediately after being asked if he wanted to go outside with “shoes” “coat” and be standing by the door in 30 seconds without either, ready to roll.

Bryce has been talking so much better! The other day, trying to passionately insist that Mommy put him to bed, he covered his heart and said “MOMMY….PUT….. BED”. Got it, buddy! I was so excited to hear him say put in a 3 word string (WITH A VERB) that  I nearly fainted. He is so sweet that sometimes I forget that he is a two year old boy, and am reminded when he doesn’t listen, lays on the ground, stomps his feet, hides in the closet, screams “AWAY! ALONE!” which really sound like “WAY! LONE!” ... all when he doesn’t get what he wants.

The Majestic Diner (gluten free diner we've been going to since Gilly got diagnosed with Celiac)

How about those Pats?

Chad and Glenna finding common ground

Bryce is still **a teeny bit** attached to mommy. Example? Sometimes you’ll hear him sitting somewhere by himself saying, “Mommy…. Bryce.  Mommy…. Bryce” on repeat. What could be better?  If I could fit this cuddly little mama’s boy in a baby bjorn, I’d stuff him right in there and take him out  in a few years for kindergarten. Then I’d put on camo gear and head to the bushes where I’d watch him all day to try to soak in the sweetness.

My big girl Gillian is so … big! She has been very busy running a full service orphanage, stocked with baby dolls of every shape and size, all of which she would try to feed, bottle, diaper and bathe if their body types allowed it.   They are now all sleeping on a well disguised shoe rack after I couldn’t take the sight of them piled on top of one another in Gillian’s toy kitchen oven. #disturbing.  For her birthday, she has requested even more babies, complete with a potty from Grandma, that Gillian has told me is currently being made in London. I don’t ask questions.

Gillian’s birthday festivities just ended, so I will follow up with a post that is full of sap, omitting all the moments this past year when Gillian pushed me so far to the brink that only wine could save me.

xoxo

T'was the Season

Greetings from the new year!

2017 is off to a great start. First of all, 17 is a lucky number (Bryce's birthday and my aunt carol's birthday), so we expect this year to hold lots of great things for our family.

We are attempting to ensure this happens by clearing the not so great stuff out of the way, first!

On Jan 3, Bryce had a bi-lateral inguinal hernia repaired @ Cornell in NYC. He was a trooper, the hospital staff and physicians were all wonderful, and he recovered in two days.  Everything went well and we're happy to have this behind us!

Working backwards, we had a GREAT christmas and a trip to Florida that, in all honesty, went a teeny bit downhill for some people. I'll tell you the whole story.

Team Tully flew down to florida to visit Mimi, Papa, and Uncle Tim (who has sworn never to reproduce since our visit). No one threw up on the flight, and there was a double rainbow on our drive from the airport to the house. A sign of a great trip to come!

 We went to the beach, and had a glorious day. Gillian said that she LOVED the ocean, and frolicked in the sand. Bryce ate more NOCKS (= snacks) than you could imagine a two year old eating in the span of a day, and life was good.

Then something happened that I have no pictures of.... Gillian barfed ALL OVER THE PLACE after she went to bed one night. In an unexpected turn of events, I was out with a friend, ignoring my phone, and arrived home at 11 to Mimi doing laundry, and the faint scent of puke still lingering in the hair of Gillian's dolls. Luckily, Chad got barfed on (not Mimi, as in previous years), and everyone went to bed sort of clean, but pretty unhappy about the night's events.

It took Gillian approximately one day and 15 episodes of Doc McStuffins to make a comeback, and she was back to her carb only diet in no time.

 Unfortunately, with daddy as the barf target, he fell ill shortly after Gillian recovered. Mimi refused to acknowledge that he was unwell and I was only able to offer a limited supply of true sympathy before I encouraged him to get back in the game. Poor Chad.

This aside, everything was still going great. Someone is always throwing up in Florida, so you can't let that get you down. We took the kids to the carousel and they had a blast riding around, until they didn't and Gillian melted down and we had to leave immediately.

The wheels officially came off the trip on Day 5, which we have now been informed was exactly two days longer than we should have stayed, with two additional days remaining on our trip.

Mimi and I took the kids to target. To avoid fighting (between the kids!!) , we had separate carts. I was with Bryce, who was on his 48th NOCK of the morning, when he started to choke and then PROJECTILE VOMIT ALL OVER HIMSELF, THE SHOPPING CART, AND THE STORE. For the second time in a week, Mimi found herself being paged to assist someone covered in vomit. Having learned from her first mistake (answering her bedroom door when chad knocked on it asking for help with Gillian), she went in the opposite direction and never returned... sending two Target employees in what should have been full hazmat suits to clean up the area. I stripped Bryce of his clothes and zipped him into these nifty batman pajamas. He made a remarkable recovery, but I think this was the beginning of the end for Mimi.

 But look at how cute these kids are in their pajamas!

 Anyway, we made it to the end of the trip without anyone checking out to go to the Hampton Inn. We got to the airport (somewhere between 2-4 days too late) and sat through another two hour delay (see activity below).

 We finally arrived at JFK in the pouring rain (seamless travel day for us), only to discover that Gillian (specifically her frazzled parents), had left her bag with her new baby alive on the airplane. For those of you who ever leave something on the plane and don't realize it until you get to baggage, might I recommend that you just replace what is lost and move on. 90 MINUTES LATER we recovered the backpack and the baby alive, in another terminal, delivered by an airport employee who pitied us so much that she went and retrieved this for us from "lost and found" out of the kindness of her heart. *

Here's Bryce trying to lose a few fingers and catch Malaria at the baggage claim while we fretted about how we were going to recover the lost and soon to be dead doll.

All in all, and I cannot stress this enough, we had a great time in Florida! Our best (and Mimi's worst) visit yet! FUNNY how you can just be on two totally different pages when it comes to this stuff!

Shell, this post was for you. Thanks for your dedicated readership. God bless you if you made it to the end. Great to see you in FL!!!

xoxo
morgan

*As soon as we got home, baby alive became baby DEAD. The g*ddamn doll stopped working, after our incredible efforts to recover her on a rainy, freezing night at JFK. You cannot make this stuff up.