The Birkeland Family Blog

I can't tell you how fun the beach was.  First time for my kids and they kept busy the entire time.  Next trip to California we are going to ditch Disneyland and head to the beach.  Give my kids a pail and a shovel and they are good for hours.  It was absolutely beautiful weather.  We spent Brian's birthday on the beach, and celebrated with a shave ice and the bum handing out animal balloons!  Could life be any sweeter?

Here we are in Disneyland! Yes, we took a 10 hour car drive to sunny California. We took off early Tuesday morning and caravanned with Eric and Kelley and their kids. We did the drive in one day. Are we crazy? YES!!! The kids actually did well on the drive it was the next day that we wanted to strangle a little girl named Emmi. (and that is putting it very nicely) We all got to bed around 11:00 pm that night and Emmi woke at the butt crack of dawn asking us over and over if it was time to go to Disneyland. Right then I knew we were in for it. By noon she was a wreck. She was asking for anything and everything and if she heard no it was meltdown central. Good thing our hotel was close so we could take her back and take a nap. Emmi loved to jump from bed to bed in the Hotel. After the 5th casualty we had to separate the beds further so she couldn't jump anymore. Welcome to Disneyland. Our Hotel was just across the street from this entrance. Just a 5 minute walk and we were there. ...

Hey guys.....It's me Jack Jones. I am 20 months old now and I keep my mom going all day long. My favorite things: 1. dressing up (I just want to be just like my sister. Can you blame me?) 2. my bottle (I totally con my mom into giving me one everyday sometimes more...he he :)) 3. reading books (The Mitten, No David, Animal picture books) 4. brooms and mops (My mom thinks I will grow up to be a janitor one day. Thanks mom for having such high hopes for me) 5. Spatulas and tongs (My favorite thing is to unfold all the clean laundry piece by piece with salad tongs. Good times folks. The look on my mom's face is priceless) 6. Playing in the toilet. (You would think that with all the scolding my mom does the novelty would wear off....oh no I love getting the toilet paper all soggy and sweeping across the bathroom walls and floors. There's nothing better than being a kid.) 7. Seeing myself pee. (I have to admit I do like this. My mom takes me to the potty and I say, "I peed...

After 1 year of roughly 10-12 sick visits to the drs. and 6 months of NO SLEEP it finally came down to having a tonsilectomy and adenoidectomy. When I say 6 months of no sleep I mean 6 whole months. Emmi would go to bed no problem but after being asleep for about 2 to 3 hours the wakings would begin. We would be waked by panic screaming. When we went to her room to comfort her she would say she was scared. She wouldn't talk about dreams or anything. We would lay by her and she would quickly fall back to sleep. That was happening over and over all night long. We have been zombies for so long. We read every sleep book in the planet. Then she would be sick again. We would try to "sleep train" her over and over with different techniques. One was to give her one chance to come out of her room, then after that was to lock her in her room. That seemed awful and cruel but we thought it will just take a couple of bad nights. Well, the panic screaming got worse and worse. Not bette...

I am back in the blogging world. I am going to take extra effort to take more pictures and to take more time for my mommy journal this year. CHEERS 2011