labor day weekend

we spent our labor day weekend at the river (surprise, surprise). it is a wonderful place to be. the entire fam is there, laura forces us to go out to eat without kids, people are genuinely interested in holding babies, and we drink lots of new age. mary and I even went shopping for a bit this past weekend!

the girls were delighted to see paul again. he is already out growing them at 12 weeks old! ellie is on the left gripping paul’s arm.

 

another perk about hudson is we hang out in our pjs for a long time. charlie loves his bubba.

a classic scene. one of the girls fussing and paul just chillin.

charlie is so sweet to paul. I bet he can’t wait until they can do guy stuff. it was probably during this kiss that he gave paul the wicked cold he had. by the end of the weekend everyone had caught c-little’s cold. lovely.

oh paul. why do you have to be so diffcult?!??!  this kid rocks. he really does nap a lot in big beds.

we attempted to lay all the kids down. charlie would not stop chewing on the wheels of mater, claire and ellie kept trying to roll or sit up and were fussing and paul just hung back and took it all in.

it was a pretty cold labor day so we did a lot of hanging around. I got mastitis again on saturday and was thankful for the help on sunday to recover.

I wish I had more pictures of the hold hold holding that goes on while we are at the river. there are many many hands on deck to help out with the babies and it is quite a love fest. dotes does a mean two-step lunge squat move that calms claire down. tombo and ellie have mini convos. pete and charlie have unkie/nephew bonding time shooting the paintball gun. E&E (eliot – mary’s boyfriend and ellie) hang and enjoy sharing almost the same name. bubba is in high demand by all the babies. margit slaves over paul and the honey badgers. it has been such a blessing to be able to spend so much time as a huge schmitt family this summer. even if it is often disturbed by fussing or screams we have loved having bill available to go to hudson frequently and since the kiddos are up at the crack of dawn we get extra hours of chatting over coffee (and key’s sticky buns) each morning. next year we will be chasing 3 – 1 yr olds and 1 – 3 yr old around in the morning…do you think we will be chatting more or less?

on tuesday morning we left from hudson to drive to madeline island for our first family “vacation” (read – Trip with a capitol T) with just the 5 of us. a lengthy post will be coming soon…