Fair

So, it's been an exciting and busy weekend.

On Friday I drove with the monkeys to our old city and dropped two of them off with their grandparents.
It was an interesting drive, one we've made a million times now since we moved. It was pouring rain, and foggy and just overall gross.  But, the kids did well. They behaved for the most part and no one was injured ;)
After we dropped them off (Big N and little N), we went to visit some friends and it was SO wonderful to see them <3.

We drove home, and went to bed.

On Saturday, we went to the fair with my friend A, who I blogged about previously.  She's so stinkin' awesome. I cannot express her awesomeness to you all.
We picked A and her crew up and of we went around 2pm.  We didn't get home until after midnight!  We were there alllllll afternoon.

We saw all sorts of animals (including, pigs, llamas, chickens, turkeys, chicks, cows, sheep etc!). I won a $50 gas card!! (whooooo!) We saw Monkey#1's most favouritest part: The smash up derby ;)  We watched the entire thing, the first year ever that that has happened.  Normally, we would have had a meltdown of some sort because of the crowd and the noise combination.
This year though, we parked ourselves in a special section that was made just for folks with disabilities.  I think it was mostly intended for people with physical disabilities, but I asked and we were welcomed to the area with open arms.
After the demo, we went and did a few quick rides, grabbed some elephant ears and funnel cake and before we knew it, they were shutting down the park!  We dropped A and her crew off, and came home.  Monkey dude didn't wake up until almost 1pm this afternoon, lol.

Today, was a lazy day. lol

Oh how I'm missing sleep already, lol.

So my second post is about how the monkeys went to visit my friend A, and this mama monkey got to sleep.  *yawn*.  How I wish I was sleeping right now.

The littlest monkey just doesn't sleep well :(  He's constantly up throughout the night and unless I'm holding him all night, neither of us get any sleep at all :(

I know eventually I will long for the days of the snuggles and the closeness. But right now, this mama is tired.

Yawn.

Going to try for some more sleep!

Meltdown central.

I can always tell when Big M has had a good day at school.  Wanna know how? He has a huge meltdown as soon as I pick him up.  :s

He works SO hard to keep it together when he's at school.  I know he does.  The only problem we've heard about with him as school is attention, focus, completing his work, etc. No meltdowns, no freak outs, no over the top behaviours.  None of that.    When I pick him up in the afternoon, he's just so exhausted after holding it together all day, he just goes into serious meltdown mode.

We can't possibly be the only family who deals with this.

What are some of the ways you cope with the afterschool meltdowns?

Twitter and other randomness.

So, I'm new to twitter.

Its odd.   I don't really get it, lol, but I'm now there anyways.   (Fourmonkeys4me).


And other randomness.

Uh, I don't really have any. lol

The hubs and the big kids should be home soon though.  I havent seen Big N in a week!!! I've missed him so much, but uh, I do kinda dread them all being home again. The noise volume is going to increase, a lot.  :O

But, I'm still totally stoked to have all of my babies under one roof again <3

The littlest monkey says he needs some attention now, so I better go!

The world of technology.

Do your special needs kids use any type of tablet? Or maybe an ipod/iphone?  We have just recently discovered the world of A4CWSN (Apps for Children with Special Needs).  After finding this group on facebook (A4CWSN), we robbed peter and bought an ipod for the kids.  It's so incredible how far technology has come.
My six year old has Autism.  He has difficulty processing things, and paying attention.  Yet, he can sit on that darn ipod for hours at a time.

I'm interested in getting him an ipad (and hey, perhaps we may be fortunate enough to get one from a4cwsn, but maybe we won't!)   So I'd love to start fundraising for him.  Being in a new city, it's difficult.  I don't really know a lot of people here.  I mean, I *know* the neighbours, but we aren't friends, and I *know* a couple of moms at the school, but we don't talk outside of school.  I have my friend A, that I posted about earlier, and one other person I would call a friend here, but that's about it, which makes things limiting.

So I'm putting this out to the world.  If you needed to fund raise, and you didn't know anyone?  What would you do? How would you go about doing it?  

Sweet beautiful sleep

So last night, the hubs and I had our first night out in quite some time.  We recently moved cities, and we've had a lot going on, between hospital stays, meltdowns, and all the other wonderful things life tosses at us, it just hasn't happened.  Hubs parents take the two middle kids quite often, but baby monkey hasn't slept over anywhere except home or the hospital, lol.

Anyways! I made a friend! (yay!) lol, we'll call her A.  A is amazing.  Anyways, she called me yesterday morning, and offered to take the kiddies for a sleep over! Silly woman, sent her own kids off for the weekend and was offering to take mine!  I jumped. LOL  Actually, no. I thought about it for a couple of hours and decided, we're in the same city, 20 minutes from her house, if anything happened we could go pick up whoever needed to be picked up.

So, I used scene points and got tickets to go see a movie (Crazy, Stupid, Love) and we dropped off 3 of the monkeys (the other one is with the hubs parents!) and off we went.  The movie was okay, I was actually expecting a little better considering the cast, but it was still decent.  A was so sweet and sent me a couple of txts to let me know how the monkeys were doing, and even included a picture of baby monkey sleeping for me <3

Anyways, we came home, and I slept.  All. Night. Long.   Without a baby monkey on top of me, or waking me, without any of the bigger monkeys waking up, without interruption.  Sweet bliss.
Oh sleep, how I have missed you <3.

I called A this morning around 10am, and the troops were still doing well and bless this woman, do you know what she said to me? " Go back to sleep!"  OMG!  ANGEL!  So, I did.  For another hour.
Then because I'm still nursing, I thought my chest might explode. So I went to pick up the monkeys. lol

It's funny, I'm always so hesitant to send my monkeys off somewhere.  But, it always works out, and we're all better for it.

Now we're home, two of the monkey's are napping, and I'm thinking I should go nap with them while the chance is there :)

Thank you A.  You're awesome and amazing.

Four Monkeys 4 me

Hi!  I'm monkey mama ;)

I have four beautiful monkey boys.  Big M is 6 1/2.  He has autism. Big N is 4 1/2, he's a neurotypical child. Little N just turned 3, and he has tons of allergies (to make it simple lol), and Little M is 1, as far as we know right now his diagnosis is severe GERD (reflux) that causes life threatening episodes.

We live in Ontario, Canada.  And we have a roller coaster life :)  Welcome!