My big boy.

Man I love him.

2 Months old

It never ceases to amaze me how much time flies when you have children.  It's like after they're born your life is on fast forward and if you're not careful it'll just all zoom by without you realising.

And although it's cliche I'm going to say it - I can't believe Viliami is 2 months old already!!

He's definately getting bigger, weighs about 15lbs now, and most of it is fat and rolls which I LOVE!  Malachi was and still is a skinny baby.  Vili is a chunky monkey and I just wanna eat him up.

He is a smiling machine.  If he's awake he wants to smile.  And talk.  Talk to himself, to his brother, his grandma, the wall.  He coo's and gaa's all day long.  And this week he's started getting ticklish and laughing too.  Love it!

Malachi just adores his brother.  We spend most of the day telling him "Ok Malachi, that's enough kisses.....no hugs while he's asleep."  He no longer runs in to see me in the morning, instead its "Mummy where's bra-yah?"  He has made it so easy to be a mother of 2.  Not at all the nightmare I imagined it to be.  He's pretty self-maintained and that leaves me alot of time to snuggle and cuddle my little chubs.

Before I know it he'll be crawling, walking, talking and I'll wish I had my baby back.  So now I'm just enjoying being able to hold him all day.  What a blessing it is to be a stay at home Mum.  I know it's a personal choice, but I can't imagine having to leave him and only see him a few hours a day.  I wouldn't trade my job for the world!

Road trip

Once we were in Turangi, we figured we were more then halfway up to Hamilton anyway so we continued on up and spent 10 days up there with my family.  We stayed with my sister for a bit and then my Grandparents.  It was so nice for Malachi to be able to play with his cousins and get to know them all better.  And once we'd gotten to hamilton, we figured we were almost there to Auckland so we went up there for a day too, to see my other grandparents.  So in a week Vili was able to meet almost all his immediate family on my side, including two sets of great-grandparents.  For Tui it was more like a working vacation, he spent his time lifting furniture, digging holes, laying concrete, hauling rubbish, you name it, Tui was doing it.  But I think he secretly enjoyed doing some man work, a change from his usually house-daddy routine.

Our boys with their Nana and Pop Brunton, my dad's parents.

Vili with Grandma Park, my mum's mum.

Malachi had lots of fun in Hamilton.

We went to the swimming pools - yes, in the middle of winter.

We played at Lolipops, an indoor play center for kids with a bunch of toys and rides and stuff, totally worth the money on  a cold winters day.

They had all these costumes for little kids to dress up in, here we have an elephant and a dog.

We walked around the Hamilton lake.  We had attempted this last year but didn't get the whole way round.  This year we did.

Self-timers on bigger cameras are a pain to use without a tripod!

We visited the temple.  It's been over a year since I have been to the temple and I was so grateful for my Grandma watching both our boys so we could go.  Malachi was able to go outside and touch the temple and listen to Jesus talking in the VC.  He also found Sister Hafoka, aka Aunty Ofa.

Touching the temple.  He talks about it all the time now.

Chloe, my cousins daughter, Katherine, my sister's daughter.

The maintainance worker at the temple took Malachi for a ride on his motorbike, so lovely.

We celebrated my brothers 26th birthday by helping him move house.

The cake that Pak'n'Save made for him.

We're a close family.....aparently.....

On our way back home we stopped at Huka falls and at the hot pools where Vili went for his first swim.  He loved it of course and stayed in for about an hour.

These are the hotpools we would go to as kids.  They were just as warm and wonderful as I remembered.

He looks like a corpse due to terrible lighting, but he loved those bubbles.

It was a long 2 weeks, but so much fun and totally worth every $ and every km.

Poor sickies

So up until I gave birth to Malachi, I had never been to hospital.  I never really got sick (except the occasional fainting episode here and there), never broken any bones, I'm usually a pretty standard healthy, no fuss person.

Well.

This pregnancy with Vili seemed to be the beginning of the end.  There was all his complications, then the c-section that required me to be a pill popper and have to take it easy to recover from the ordeal.  Then, when he was about 4 weeks old, I got mastitis, which then developed into an abscess (a horrific thing I wouldn't wish on anyone).  So I spent a few days in an out of the ER room and then finally I was admitted to hospital and after 3 days had surgery to remove it (they told me it was the size of a lemon, yikes), leaving me with a gaping wound.  This wound has had to be dressed daily by a nurse (which, at first, hurt worse then labor, no lies.), so even while on our vacation I've been visiting hospitals, clinics, and district nurses.  Then, while away, I picked up this nasty flu that's had me in bed most of the last week.  Then 2 nights ago I must have rubbed by eye wrong and I've scratched my eye, like my eyeball, so it's hard to see out of that eye.  Then last night I popped something in my back and it hurts like no other.

It's like my body is suddenly making up a lifetime of healthiness with a year of sickliness.  It's horrible.

And to make it all worse....

Poor little Vili had terrible conjunctivitis for the first 3 weeks.  Then he developed colic which continues to plague him from 6-9pm.  He's had a yeast nappy rash for the past 2 weeks, which has now turned into oral thrush, making nursing a nightmare.  AND he's picked up the flu from myself and Malachi so he's clogged up and can't breathe through his nose which means he doesn't sleep and can't eat properly.

We're just a bunch of sickies.

You don't realise how important health is until you don't have it.  You just take for granted that you feel fine and you're healthy and can do normal things.  Because of the abscess I couldn't shower for 2 weeks and had to do sponge baths, LAME!  So I'm determined that once all this yuckiness passes I will have a new found appreciation for health.

But for now, I'll just feel sorry for myself.

Turangi vay-kay

When we were little, we used to go to this holiday house that the airforce own in Turangi and go play in the snow.  It was serious family fun time.  I loved it.  So I was super excited for our family, now big and grown and constantly increasing in numbers, to go back there with our new families for a weekend.  We stayed at the same place, all crammed in, and enjoyed 3 days of family madness.  I loved it!  The noise, the mess, the mayhem, I was in heaven.  I've spent so long away from my family while we've lived in Hawaii and it was so good to be able to be immersed in them for a bit, especially the munchkins.  Everyone was there, except for Andrew who had to work.  It was fantastic.

Vili meeting all his Brunton cousins

5 little monkeys jumping on the bed, more then one of them fell off and bonked their head.

Overwhelmed with she-cousins.

Uncle Matt teaching Malachi how a real man relaxes and unwinds.

The man reason for our trip was to bless Viliami, but we also wanted to go to the snow.  It was the first time for all the kids, including malachi (unless you count last year where I stopped on the side of the road, dumped him on a pile of snow, he screamed, I took a picture, and we left.).  So much hype and prep building up to it, we get there, after 15 minutes, the kids are over it, and we go home.  But it was fun while it lasted.  They enjoyed the ski lifts the best I think, and riding on the shuttle bus.  Grandad made a snowman with the kids when we got back to the carpark, just so we could at least say we'd done that.  But I think they're all too little for it.  We might wait until they're 5+ before we go back again.  Viliami did the best out of all of them, sleeping through the whole experience.

Snow fight! (Malachi won of course.)

The snowsuit for Vili was a size 6-9months, so his arms n legs didn't even come half way down.  My family called him a gingerbread man.

The whole gang, with me behind the camera and Richard up in the mountain snowboarding somewhere.

Blessing the babe

Aug 1st 2010

In order for my family to (almost) all be there for Viliami's blessing, we met half-way in Turangi.  We drove up from Wellington, and they drove down from Hamilton.  It was done at our holiday house.  I was able to convince my brothers to at least wear a white shirt and tie.  Tui performed the blessing with all bar one of my brothers participating in the circle, as well as my dad and brother in law.  It was intimate and special.  Tui's sister, who I'm sure would have LOVED to be there, sent him the cutest little white outfit for the day.  It meant so much to me to have by brothers be part of it.  Malachi was blessed in Hawaii and only Tui's family was able to be there for it.  This time only my family was able to be there.  Maybe next time we'll get lucky and have all of them.....maybe....