Ohio Caverns

Every year our ABF (Adult Bible Fellowship) class at church plans out activities to do together each month. They include things such as playing games, going to the zoo, doing a service project, and holiday parties. So last weekend we went to the Ohio Caverns northwest of Columbus. I had been many (many) years ago on a school field trip, but didn't remember too much about it, except that we walk through a cave with a bunch of stalactites and stalagmites. Speaking of which....POP QUIZ...what's a stalactite and what's a stalagmite...??? Our tour guide gave us a neat way to remember it - a stalagmite might reach the ceiling and a stalactite hangs tight. Haha!

Anyway, the tour was fun, although it's definitely a different experience when you have a baby and toddler with you. We weren't supposed to touch ANYTHING around us, not even the walls next to us. So needless to say, we kept quite busy keeping Jenna's curious little fingers away from it all. Jenna did really well though. A few times she had had enough and told us, "No..cave...no" - she was ready to leave. I guess it's just not that exciting for a 2-year old and it probably all looked very redundant. Grant did GREAT. We put him in a hiking backpack and I carried him the majority of the way because the ceilings were low and it would have been really difficult for Drew to bend over that much. But Grant's so heavy that Drew did end up carrying him the last 10 minutes of the 45-minute tour.

Mommy and Grant - ready to go

A view of how narrow the walkway was. These are some of our ABF friends as well.

One of our closest couple friends - Jeremy and Krista Estes (and baby Jeffrey). We first met them at Cedarville and were so excited when Jeremy got a job nearby and they moved to Troy! Now we all go to the same church and Drew and Jeremy carpool to work.

Daddy and Jenna

Yes, I look like the hunchback of Notre Dame...I'm tellin' ya - HE'S HEAVY! ;)

Love this family picture (even though neither of the kids are smiling - haha)

Another family picture - this time Grant is holding a pacifier. He started getting a little restless near the end of the trip and the pacifier calmed him down (and probably gave him something to play with).

The long walk back UP. Jenna walked up 1/4 of it and then I ended up carrying her the rest of the way. That was a workout!! (I know, pathetic!)

Our group talking afterward while the kids ran off some energy.

Jenna loves "playing" with older kids. She'll follow them around and do whatever they do. It's so funny to watch her.

And then our typical Jenna...doing something she shouldn't be doing (and something I'm pretty sure Mommy just told her not to do). Of course, Daddy was so proud of his little adventurous girl!

We all went to McDonald's afterward and we couldn't resist getting Jenna an ice-cream to go. She does surprisingly well with them - her face is the messiest.

Happy St.. Patty's Day!

Happy Saint Patrick's Day

Since it's St. Patrick's Day, we just had to all wear GREEN today. We don't really have any true green shirts for Jenna, so she's wearing a yellowish-green one from B. I tried getting a pic of the 3 of us in front of our St. Pat's sign on the blinds. Unfortunately, with the light shining through the blinds, the flash on the camera wouldn't work so the picture's a little dark.

Here we tried taking the picture again in the other room.

And one of just the kids...no smiles - I had to take the picture quickly to get one of both of them facing the right direction. haha!

Some more decorations on our back door

I had to snap this picture of Jenna watching the neighbor kids playing. She loves watching and playing with the neighbor kids.

We decided to make a St. Patty's Day treat - rainbow cupcakes. Isn't it always so interesting how PERFECT they look in the pictures, but I don't think it's possible to make them look that good in real life. Our cupcakes weren't as pretty, but they still tasted good!

Jenna's looking at a four leaf clover decoration that I hung from our kitchen light fixture.

And of course a picture of Jenna enjoying all my...I mean, her...hard work. :)

February and some updates

Thankfully Jenna's stomach bug was only a 48 hour thing. She woke up sick on Friday and was feeling back to her normal self by Sunday morning. Although she then got a nasty cold, but that seems to be going away now too. Grant also had a cold before her that has since gone away, except for a big, raspy cough. Hopefully that will go away soon. So it looks like we're all on the mend now.

Our basement is coming along too. Yesterday the carpet repair guy came and installed new carpet padding and reinstalled our carpet. Then today the cleaning crew comes to clean the carpets. I'm itching for them to get here so that we can start moving things back into the basement. It will feel sooo good to get things organized again. One good thing that came from all this, is that it forced me to clean up my crafting area in the basement and for us to clean up our storage area. It always feels good to get some cleaning and organizing done.

Below are some pictures from February...

Jenna loves helping me in the kitchen. Here we're making some cookies.

You might not be able to tell in the picture, but Jenna LOADED all Grant's toys in the seat with him. I was glad to see her sharing (not a strong suit for her right now). :)

Drew and I call this picture "Grant's Cleavage". Haha...gotta love the chub!

All clean!

We have a dress-up box and Jenna decided Grant should wear the cowboy hat that day.

Jenna pushing Grant in the swing. We've since added a "big girl" swing next to the baby one, so Jenna has a swing as well.

Another example of my busy girl. She got in my pots and pans cupboard and pulled out bags of cookie cutters. Then she strewed them all across the floor. :)

And here are the pots and pans on the floor, counter, and stovetop. She said she was making dinner for Daddy.

And one last picture of my kiddos together. Jenna tends to shy away from pictures. We usually have to catch her by surprise in order to get her looking at the camera. So apparently I was too slow in taking the picture and she was able to turn away in time. :) At least Grant's smiling!

EDIT: The above was written last Wednesday. I just didn't have a chance to edit and post it until today.

We just had a refreshing weekend with "B" (Mom Borton). She arrived Saturday and left late this afternoon. It was SO WONDERFUL having her here. The kids loved it, especially Jenna. She's quite attached to her "B". I loved having the company (since Drew left Monday for a business trip this week), catching up, and spending time with Mom. She was a HUGE help with the kids and gave me some nice breaks. I have to say, I'm very blessed with a wonderful mother-in-law! Most of the pictures we took this weekend were on Mom's camera, so once I get them from her, I'll post pictures of the fun we had! :)

Poor Jenna

It's been another eventful day in the Borton household. Drew left early this morning (around 5:30am) to catch a flight down to Austin, TX for Brian's bachelor party. I'm happy that Drew is able to go because I know it's special for Brian, but it will also be good for Drew to have some "boy time".

However, when Jenna woke up this morning she told me her tummy hurt. I thought she must just be hungry, but when I picked her up to take her downstairs for breakfast, I heard it coming...we ran to the bathroom just in time. That started off our morning. She continued throwing up all over the place (couch, carpet, computer keyboard, cloth chair....) off and on over the next 5 hours. Poor thing. I just felt so sorry for her. She kept telling me, "tummy hurts" as she'd hold her stomach. It's so difficult for a parent of a sick youngster because 1.) you feel so helpless, and 2.) they don't understand what is happening, why we can't fix it, and what to do about it. She took a nice 2 hour nap and seemed to be feeling much better when she woke up. However, I had put her down to bed in just her diaper because she had already dirtied 4 other outfits just that morning. So when I went in to get her up from her nap, I found that she had taken her diaper off (which she is very good at doing!) and had wet the pillow and crib sheet in her bed.

Then the rest of the afternoon she literally just laid around the house. As you've probably learned from this blog, Jenna NEVER lays down unless she's taking a nap or going to bed. So this was very unusual for her. I set a pillow on our bedroom floor and put Aladdin on our portable DVD player for her to watch. Whenever I'd have to leave the room, she'd follow me into the other room and lay down in there. She started telling me mid-afternoon "body hurts". I think she probably had a fever, although it's a struggle to take her temperature - she HATES it. And since I didn't feel like wrestling her to the ground just to take her temp, I went ahead and gave her some Tylenol since I'm pretty sure she had a decent fever. Around 5:45 she wanted to eat, and although the doctor's office said not to feed her anything today, I gave her a saltine cracker. She ate it with her head slumped against the back of the highchair. I knew she was tired, so I asked if she wanted to go to bed and she said yes (which is something else she rarely does). So the poor thing went to bed at 6pm. I'm not sure if she'll end up sleeping all night or if she'll wake up at 3 am ready to get up. I'm hoping she'll sleep all night because the rest would be good for her.



In the midst of all that, I'm doing LOTS and LOTS of laundry from our flooding in the basement. We have a storage area down there and have a mixture of plastic tubs and boxes. Well, lesson learned - plastic tubs it is from now on. Everything that was in boxes that got wet, I am now having to either clean, launder, or throw out depending on what it is and how bad it is. And I had a huge box of all my maternity clothes down there as well as blankets, quilts, queen-sized bed sheets/skirts, and clothes from when I was a kid. So that's been a huge task of washing those items, folding them while also having to wash Jenna's dirty clothes from today and a few bath rugs that have gotten dirty today as well.

I've also been going down to the basement every few hours to make sure we're not flooding again and emptying the bucket from a dehumidifier we borrowed from a friend. This weekend we're projected to get another 1 1/2-2 inches of rain...ahh! So I'm praying that the sump pump works and that there aren't any problems, especially with Drew being out of town.

And you might be wondering what little ol' Grant was up to today while I was busy with Jenna. He is such a sweetie!! He's a very happy, content baby. I put him in the family room with some toys and he just plays by himself. Every so often he'd get frustrated and all I needed to do was move him around or give him some new toys and he was good to go. I don't normally ignore him all day long, but it was definitely nice that he could play by himself while I took care of Jenna. Although I did get some one-on-one time with him during her afternoon nap and for an hour and a half after she went to bed this evening.

He is such a joy!! I just love his sweet smile - his whole face lights up. :)

The Great Flood

Well...so technically it wasn't a flood...and it wasn't so great. Let me start over, last night as we headed downstairs to the basement to enjoy a relaxing evening eating popcorn and watching American Idol, we discovered that our basement had "flooded". Worse yet...it had probably happened Monday when we had quite a bit of rain. So that means it had been sitting down there for 2 days...grrreeaattt. ;) After standing there in shock, we started taking things upstairs to the garage. Thankfully we only had about 1 1/2 inches of water, so nothing was damaged. My parents came over and helped us get everything moved upstairs. There were a few big items that we left in the basement, but we put pieces of 2x4's underneath them to at least get them off the wet carpet.

Our full garage

Then this morning we called our insurance company who gave us the name of a carpet cleaning company they recommended. Upon talking with them, we agreed to let them take care of the mess for a few reasons: 1.) Drew is leaving early Friday morning to head to Texas for Brian's bachelor party, which means I'd be left to do quite a bit of the work, 2.) the water's already been sitting down there for a few days so we want to get it cleaned up as soon as possible, 3.) it would take at least a small army to get the wet carpet out of there, and 4.) we don't have a clue what to do. Plus we were very pleased with the quote they gave us, and we just wanted to get this taken care of, especially with two young kids - one being a VERY curious toddler. They said they'd be here in an hour and that it would only take 2 hours to soak up as much of the water from the carpet as they could, rip up the carpet and pad, discard the pad outside, and put fans down there to help it dry. Then another guy will come early next week to install a new pad and reinstall our carpet (thankfully it was salvageable!), and the carpet cleaning company will come back next Friday to clean the carpet and stairs.

We also borrowed a dehumidifier from a friend of ours to help dry up the basement.

Here's our beautiful lawn ornament. I've thought about possibly making that a permanent fixture in our yard. Haha...thankfully the "special" trash pick-up is every 2nd Tuesday of the month, which is this coming Tuesday. Yay! So it won't be out there too long.

What an adventure! This has at least made us more aware of the possibility of flooding in the basement. Drew went out this afternoon and bought a water alarm to put next to the sump so we can at least be warned the next time this happens.