It's been a while, and maybe I'll apologize

Okay, so I'll be the first to admit, I have fallen off of the blogging wagon. Shame shame on me. lol. It has been well over a month since I last updated you all, but you know, I really don't feel so bad about it. I have been enjoying my time that I have with Mark and the kids and we have just been enjoying life. Okay, so it's not all fun and games 24/7, we relax and veg a lot, we get frustrated with each other and our kids, but hey, we are human...right?
Mark is leaving all to soon if you ask me. It seems like he just came home yesterday. :( This will be my 4th deployment but it still makes me sad, upset, nervous and unsure of what the time away holds. Its a hard job being a single mom to 3 little kids...2 of which depend on me for just about everything. I'll get through it and we'll find our "Mark isn't home 'groove' " again...I always do. It just sucks that the this time has come again.
Okay, okay, enough sadness. There's plenty of time for that later. Our Christmas was small and quaint. Mark and I chose not to exchange gifts this year due to budget restraints. That and we really wanted to focus on the kids and make sure that they had a great day. We were finished opening up our Christmas gifts in about 20 minutes, if that. The house was cleaned up of all debris in about 5 minutes. That was awesome. And then about 1 hour later, Dave showed up. Dave has become an adopted member of our family. He's a lot like a brother to us, and an adopted uncle to the kids. Taylor loves rough housing with him and Austyn just loves bugging him. Lucky for us, Dave is used to young kids. He has a 6 year old brother, so he does well.
Our New Year's was good. We spent it with some friends of ours. We played a horrible drinking card game called "F*** the Dealer" It actually wasn't a bad game, but I don't recommend you play more than 3 rounds of it. If you do, you will regret it the next morning when you have a horrendous hangover. I don't remember how many rounds we played, and I had a horrendous hangover the next morning. lol.
Just last week we went snowboarding with Dave. Mark, Taylor and I were the only ones to join him. It's about a 2 hour drive to the mountains from where we are. Austyn and Ryleigh stayed home with my friend Heather. The weather was really bad. It was snowing like crazy and the wind was blowing like crazy. It was blowing hard enough to knock me on my behind. There were moments when all you could see was a big blur of white and you couldn't see more than 20 feet ahead of you. Taylor called it quits about 1/3 of the way down the mountain. It was monstrous. Mark carried him down and Dave carried Taylor's board. I think Taylor and I would have had more fun if we had only gone about halfway up the mountain. It took me about 5 hours to make it down. I am a very inexperienced boarder, but I still had a blast. The snow was about 2-4 feet deep in some areas, and since I haven't quite mastered the skill of turning, I kept ending up in it. Let me tell you, it is not fun trying to get yourself out of a 3 foot hole when the wind keeps knocking you down. Mark started to get really worried about me and went down the mountain twice and couldn't find me. He sent Dave up a few times and on Dave's last run, I was found. haha. I was almost to the end of the run, and I was beginning to do really well since the mountains had been groomed by then. Right at the very end I caught a gust of wind and my feet shot behind me, I lost my balance and was basically body slammed into the nice hard packed snow and ice. I swore I had broken some ribs or my collarbone. It took me a good whole day before I could take deep breaths without feeling like I was being speared in the chest. I am okay and I didn't break anything. Thankfully.
So, that pretty much brings us up to date. Here are some "progress reports" on the kids.
Taylor-He has been back at school now for a week. Thank goodness. He and Austyn together all day for 3 weeks straight is a ginormous headache. He is such a smart boy and a very quick learner. He reads everything he sees and is in the top of his class in every subject. He is a math whiz. That he must get from Mark because we all know I stink at it! lol. He is growing up so fast each and every day and I love it and I hate it. He has a great sense of humor and he likes to crack jokes every so often. He still says that when he grows up he wants to be just like his Daddy which is great. He just lost his first tooth TODAY! Well, actually he didn't really lose it. Mark pulled it out. It was pretty much just sitting there wedged in his gums. His adult tooth is already in thanks to the "Hammer Genes". :) He's pretty excited about it. Mark and I will pay him a visit whenever Mark gets home from work tonight. We haven't quite decided on how much the tooth fairy will leave him. I guess it doesn't really matter. My son who still believes in Santa does not believe in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. What is this world coming to? LOL. I am trying to convince him that the Tooth Fairy is real. We'll see what he thinks in the morning.
Austyn-Oh that boy. He isn't a handful, he's two handfuls! He is a smart alec and so opinionated. He's bossy and mean. He's lovable, sweet and generous. He is doing very well with potty training. He has had the whole "potty" thing down for some time now, but the last month or so we have been working on the 'no diaper' thing at night. It's been rough, but he has his good nights and his bad nights. He is on his third night in a row without wetting the bed!!! Every morning he gets up and he says, "Mom, High-Five! Me no pee-pee in mine's bed!" He is doing really great with talking. He says anything and everything now. He still has his moments where he just melts down into total screaming mode, and that's when I remind him that he uses his words. We are working on speaking correctly. He says "Me love you" all the time, which is super adorable, but in a realistic world, he needs to learn to speak properly. Or at least I think so. We just remind him to say "I" instead of "Me". He is also doing a LOT better with his annunciation of letters. He used to say "Pish" instead of "Fish" and all of his F's were P's. He's getting a lot better and sounding out the Ffff sound. He's also a big helper and helps with all kinds of things around the house.
Ryleigh-She is doing so wonderful! She reminds me so much of Taylor these days. She has the great big gap in between her two front teeth just like Taylor did, and they share so many personality traits. She's usually very calm, she's very shy and quiet. She isn't quite talking yet, but that doesn't stop her from talking. She carries on full and very elaborate conversations in babbles. I think she makes jokes sometimes too, because she'll babble something and then she giggles. It's actually super cute. She is walking and running all over the entire house. When she wants to be alone, she can be found in one of two places. She'll either be in her room playing with all of her babies, or she will be sitting in the hallway pulling all of the books off of the shelf and looking at the pictures. She is constantly pointing at things wondering what they are and occasionally mumbles something that resembles the word. She loves to play outside and she definitely loves her doggy. She rests her head on him, gives him hugs, pets him, and my least favorite; she hand feeds him right from her tray. She thinks its funny.
Well, that is about as up to date we can get for now. This will be the longest blog in the history of blogs! J/K I'll post some more up to date pictures in a blog as soon as this is posted.