8 months old...and a trip to Portland!

8 months old!!!

Beautiful Grace

Oliver likes to hold his hand out and stare at it...
until he gets distracted by something else!

Our strong little girl!

Our big bubba!

Gracie relaxing on her hotel bed

Grace is still working on her neck muscles:)

Daddy and the crew

Mama and her girls

Oliver looks a little cold and miserable in this one...

Grace had a rough night and the only thing that
seemed to help was taking a bath with Mommy!

"Hey, Mom! Get this hat out of my eyes!"

That's better!

We're now one of "those" families
that takes up an entire huge booth at Red Robin!

Our hotel room at the Hotel Monaco
there's little Oliver peeking out of the backpack!

Yep, they're "twins"! (Oliver and Audrey)

Oliver took a nap like this for 4 hours on the hotel bed...isn't he darling?

Daddy made the couch into a "crib" for Oliver and Grace
(they don't roll as much as Audrey)

They were very interested in the television...

Daddy and his boys downtown

Daddy and Gracie in her "Amelia Earhart" hat

The babies got to spend the first 8 days of 2010 on vacation in Portland! And Mommy and Daddy got to enjoy getting out of Bend for the first time since last March right before I ended up on bedrest! We packed up the car on New Year's Day, loaded up our pup and three babes and headed over the mountain to P-town! Our original plan was to spend 4 nights there, but the babies were doing so well (and we were having so much fun!) that we found another hotel downtown and extended our stay 3 more nights! We spent the first half of our trip in Tualatin (where Robert grew up) and spent our days shopping at Bridgeport, Pioneer Place, and Washington Square, as well as enjoying some time relaxing in our hotel room and watching T.V. (which we don't have at home...man, I've missed Jeopardy!) What we learned, however, is that loading and unloading three babies in and out of a car over and over and over again is the most exhausting part of getting out and doing things which is why we "smartened up" and moved to a hotel right smack in the heart of downtown Portland for the second half of our trip so we could just walk out the door of the hotel lobby and be in walking distance of all the shopping and eating we could handle! For the most part strangers did really well at keeping their distance and admiring the babies from afar, but we most certainly did get lots of stares, questions, and sideways glances! Pretty hard to be inconspicuous when you're marching through shopping centers with a double stroller, backpack, frontpack, and 80lb dog - we felt a little bit like modern day Clampetts. Most people thought Audrey and Oliver were twins and that Grace was their baby sister (I don't think they did the math on that one...), a few people thought Audrey was a boy (I guess that's what happens when Mommy dresses her in a green sweater and blue socks - hey, I'm not used to dressing them for public yet!), and pretty much every single person that got within a 10 foot radius of us felt the need to let us know that we had our "hands full". I think we ended up more exhausted after our vacation than before (which is saying a lot), but it was definitely worth it. Trying to find public places to feed and change three babies made for some great family memories (think back corner of Qdoba restaurant, all 5 of us packed in the men's restroom at WestMarine, a bench in the middle of the mall...), and it just felt so wonderful to be out of the house and out in the real world! Robert and I were starting to feel like nobody believed we were really parents since we never have any babies with us, but the attention we got on this 7 day trip more than made up for the 7 months we've been hiding the babies at home:)

And today the babies are 8 months old...incredible! Grace is still gaining weight rather slowly, but she's just a petite little thing and is eating really well so we try not to worry about it. Audrey is so incredibly strong and just days away from crawling (that will add a whole new dimension of fun to having triplets!), and Oliver is eating solid foods like a champ and weighed in at a whopping 20lbs at his doctor's appointment yesterday! Just to give you some perspective, 20lbs is the weight of an average one year old and Mr. O is 8 months and should really only be 5 months! His doctor even advised me to start giving him more water and try cutting back on the amount of formula he gets each day. With where our babies started, who would have ever thought we would be worrying about our babies being too big??? What a blessing; we sure have come a long way!

Audrey is cuddled up with her blankie on our bed next to me right now wheezing her way through dreamland. Gracie and Oliver are alseep in their cribs and will be needing their bedtime bottles soon. Time to wash some dishes, make some bottles, fold some laundry, feed some babies...and get ready to do it all over again tomorrow:) Here's to a successful first 8 months... I can only imagine what the next 8 will bring!