Sleepy guys...

I love my boys so much. Of course I adore my only girl, but right now I'm writing about the boys, and there is an abundance around here.  It's amazing how differently God makes each child. I know I've posted about their differences before so I won't wax poetic about it all again right now, lol. It's just so neat to me to observe and appreciate their differences throughout the days.

Take Eli, for one.

This is so typical of him. This morning he looked at me and growled, pulled his shirt above his head, and went racing around the house. He is my busiest child by far and keeps me hopping all day long, but he is also the child who is the most naturally joyful. His "default" is joy and exuberance, and what a blessing that is to me. He can get in trouble for something and be crying and upset, and then right away he mentally dusts himself off and bounces right back to being playful and fun. I love that!

Carter has always been a blessing because of how easygoing he is, just like his daddy.  He also feels things very deeply, and we are working with helping him cope through that. When he gets upset, he gets REALLLLLLY upset and lets out this scream and immediately hunches over and bawls. His whole body gets rigid and his shoulders curl over into this tight hunchback. You can imagine how scary that would be in a full grown man, especially since he will most likely be over 6' tall, so we are working through this now.  Just now I had to stop and take a break to help him through this. Eli threw away the cards he had been working so hard on. He pulled them right out of the trash and they were fine, but he was REALLY upset. He did his rigid hunchback scream thing so I leaned down and told him to pull his shoulders back. I rubbed his back and told him to take a deep breath and relax. I showed him how his papers were just fine, I kept reminding him to pull his shoulders back and take deep breaths. Pretty soon his back had relaxed and he stopped crying. He just needed a little help, and I need to be better about this. So often it's easy to get angry and tell him to calm down, which he does pretty quickly on his own, but it doesn't help anything if he just stuffs all of that and doesn't learn how to deal with these things when they come up.

Then we have Nathan. I was surprised to see how red his hair looked in these pictures. It doesn't look this red in real life. Chad has a lot of red in his beard and I have red highlights in my hair, but I'm thinking this is as much of a red head as we'll get.  

(it really doesn't look red at all in real life, although I guess he obviously has some red undertones!)

He's getting to be so much fun. He snorts a lot and has always made funny sounds with his breath, even as a newborn. The other night he was fussy so we gave him a pot and wooden spoon and he banged away.

Well it's time to change yet another poopy diaper, so that's all for now.