Sunday Five - We bought a tank

1.  We are in trouble!  Spencer started making significant forward motion this week.  No clutter in the house is safe anymore.  The big kids are especially disappointed as they like to leave scraps of “very important notes” all over the house and Spencer finds them to be delicious snacks.

2.  Our pets are not particularly smart.  June has access to nearly 1/3 an acre of real estate on which to exist and Olivia literally could go wherever she wanted in Bozeman/Montana/North America as a free range cat, and yet they all hover in the 3 square feet surrounding Spencer.  I feel no sympathy for them as they consistently Park themselves in harms way.  Maybe Liv just misses Sky drooling on her and Spencer is a good substitute.  I used to think chasing the cats would be motivation for crawling, now I wonder if Liv is trying to prevent it as often as she plop herself down in Spencer’s way.

3.  We bought a new car finally!  We bought a new to us camper this summer to accommodate our growing family but needed a beefier car for towing than our poor minivan that we had already exploited to the maximum towing capacity with our little camper.  The gist of having 4 kids and wanting to tow something limits the search to Suburban-esque vehicles, none of which we particularly loved or are particularly cheap.  A salesman showed us the Nissan NVP on a whim and it not only met most of our requirements but brand new it was 10s of thousands of dollars cheaper than the  used Suburbans.  So now we own a 12 passenger van that looks like a tank.  We can’t wait to test it out over spring break on some mini-trips.


Obligatory dealer photo.  The kids were just DONE and wanted to get this thing home!


Everyone loaded in with plenty of room to spare, including Tenney, Catherine's musician doll that she will tell you all about :-)



4.  Spring is kinda here, but I feel we will be dealing with snow and ice for quite a while!  Either way we have all been eager to enjoy the sun and test out some Christmas gifts finally.


We just started our annual "pretend to clean out and organize the garage" series of weekends.  The new van and new camper literally don't fit in the garage so at least we don't have to pretend our end goal is cleaning out both bays for cars.  I don't know exactly what the kids were doing or why Catherine had to borrow my phone to take approximately 97 photos like this, but they had fun and stayed out of our hair and played all day with the neighbor so I'll call it a win:

We also still rely heavily on puzzles to keep John non-destructively quiet and entertained so we can work on projects.  It oddly works, though Spencer is a definite distraction:

5.  Poor Spencer is on week 5 of not feeling well or having an ear infection or both.  I think the only day he has not been sick in some way was literally the day of his well-check last week.  His post-vaccine fever/cold from last week turned into bronchiolitis and some freight-train style breathing and wheezing, so we're on nebulizer treatments for the week.   He really is an overall happy chunk though, even when he's sick.  He even still sleeps fairly well . . . except now he is awake all hours of the night breakdancing and spinning around in his crib.  We're all hoping for that to end very soon!