7 Quick Takes (vol. 28)

#1 - One month old today. How in the world has it been a month since Baby Q was born? What happened to February? I'm serious, folks; I'm missing a month of my life!

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#2 - So in three days, my APs will be here for three weeks! Very, very excited. They've never been to our new home or seen our new job or any of this. Blueberry has been counting down the days with me for the last few weeks. She keeps talking about "Nana Papa fly airplane. Come see me. See my toys. See my room." Oh yes, this is going to be fun!

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 #3 -What is there to say?

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#4 -  Philosophical question: If someone has a vision or dream they see as coming from God, but that vision/dream clashes with another person's vision/dream they see as coming from God, how do you figure out who's vision is correct? And how do you explain to someone that they are so focused on their vision that they are in danger of losing the foundation for that vision because they're spending so much time focused on the future that they are failing to see what is happening now?

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#5 - My birthday was this week. Didn't do much for it; we were working and, as I told Chris, the bad thing about birthdays when you get older is that if you really want something for your birthday, you tend to have to do it yourself! I didn't want much....

Chris bought me a video game for my birthday. Now, this may not sound like much of a present, but as he explained it to me before showing me the game, it's about the experience. I will admit, I am an on-again/off-again gamer. I enjoy my share of video games; certain ones. But I can easily go months without picking up anything. I've been in a definite no-gaming mode lately, so when he said he had got me a game for my birthday, I was a little suspect. But it shows how much he knows me. He was right. This game, called Journey, really is an experience. The music is beautiful; the art work is beautiful. Its relatively simplistic in play, and really not very long at all, but incredible to play. Nothing really scary, but there are moments when you're completely tense. And it truly has one of the best endings of any game. Ever. It was a good present. He done good.

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#6 - Story of another present I recently received from my husband. For Valentine's day, he did a great job planning ahead. I did not. We got to Valentine's day this year, and I was like, "Oh, it's Valentine's Day. Um....I love you. That's as good as it gets today!" I thought he hadn't done a whole lot either, until I got a box of roses in the mail.

He ordered me 24 roses from ProFlower--which we've used in the past and normally is fantastic quality/service. Well, the only problem with the order (and the roses were gorgeous) was that only 12 roses came. And a vase. So he called the company and they wound up refunding a large part of the money and apologizing for screwing up his order. And hey, I still got 12 roses out of the deal.

Well, ProFlower has a 7-day warranty on their flowers. i.e. They will last at least 7 days before beginning to die. By day 3, my roses were already beginning to look a little sad. Day 5 I emailed the company to complain. They offered me a full refund or they would send a replacement order. I decided I wanted the flowers. And I had them schedule them to arrive on my birthday.

Well, imagine my surprise when I got the new flower box on my birthday and opened it up and discovered not 12, but 24 replacement roses inside! So for less than the price of 12 roses, we got 36 out of the deal. And these 24 are absolutely gorgeous quality.

Very happy with my Valentine's/Birthday roses!

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#7 - Epic parenting moment. My daughter. 7:30am Friday morning. Having eaten birthday-cake pancakes for breakfast, she helped to lick out the bowl for the actual birthday cake (not mine, one of the girl's--Reese's peanut butter cake with peanut butter frosting. I've been told it tasted fabulous. I have no idea because I couldn't eat any of it!).

The question is was this an Epic Fail or Epic Win parenting moment?!

Old Year, New Year, and Other Randomness

Well, once again it has been several weeks since I've blogged and in that time I feel like I've run a marathon. Let's see if we can play catch up.

1. As of today, I am officially 36 weeks and 5 days pregnant pregnant. Which means I can legally (by the state of Arkansas) give birth at home with a midwife. Yay! Which is doubly good as I've had plenty of contractions the last week; although, its hard to tell if they are simply stress induced or actually going somewhere.


Other than the marked uptake in contractions, I've been doing pretty well except for the carpal tunnel that has been bothering me in both my wrists. And yes, the irony that I'm typing right now is not lost on me, but at three am, one has to do something when one can't sleep. And I just can't sleep tonight. I had a little bit of carpal tunnel last pregnancy, but the last few weeks have not been pleasant at all in that regards. Makes sleeping even trickier because you're not supposed to sleep on your back and yet if I sleep on my sides, it greatly exacerbates the pain in whichever arm is underneath. I'm finding wrapping my right wrist at night, which is the one that particularly is bothersome, is helpful in keeping the pain down, but as I said earlier, tonight sleep is just not with me at all.

I feel like I'm still struggling to be fully prepared for Baby Q to come along. All the pieces are slowly coming together, and really I do have the essentials. Almost. Still need to get a new infant car seat and holders for both the car and the van. But in general I don't feel like I've created a space for him yet, physically. That's my job currently; get that final layout in place. The mental prep is coming along, and in the last few days, I've found myself more and more ready to hold my little boy.

To think positively for myself though, I do have baby clothes that are washed (if sitting in a laundry basket waiting to be put away), diapers that are ready, my labor stuff is all ready, bills are all caught up, and I have frozen banana bread! So really, we're not doing that bad. And I have a list of meals to make and freeze (thank the Lord I had not actually managed to do any pre-freezing of meals before Christmas or they probably all would have been lost...more on that in #2).

2. We've had multiple random Christmases this year.

Several parties involving the cottage girls and Blueberry. Blue has really picked up on what "presents" are, which has been both good and bad because obviously if everyone is getting a present, she wants one! And she's still got some learning concerning some presents are for others and not her.

Then we had our little cottage gift exchange. We wanted to do this before Christmas (even though the girls technically don't get the bulk of their presents until January 7 because of donations still coming in) because as of December 28 we are officially down to 7 kids total (counting Blueberry). Our Panda Bear has gone home, we hope for good (not that we don't want her, but she actually has a decent home to go to, it is simply up to her to keep her behavior together so that she can stay there!). The girls all had presents for each other and we had presents for them, so we went ahead and squeezed in a mini Christmas exchange before Panda left. I spent several hours (OK, a lot of hours!) putting together a photo book of pictures from this year, individualized for each girl. It was a lot of fun, and from the general absorption that fell over the cottage when we let them open their gifts, I think the girls appreciated their books.

The next Christmas celebration was with my brother and sister-in-law.  That was a fun time. They arrived Friday the 28th, by which time all the girls except Butterfly had gone elsewhere for Christmas as they were shutting our cottage down for the holiday. We kept Butterfly until Monday for stability sake. Saturday we drove to Little Rock and enjoyed the zoo, delicious Indian food, and a general tour of our favorite places in Little Rock including the GF bakery.

Because whatever Blueberry does, Doggie must do to...

Blueberry and Butterfly were their usual hysterical selves, and that just added a fun element to the day. I swear I don't know what I'm going to do if/when Butterfly gets sent somewhere else. She and Blueberry have become so close, it's going to be a rough day for our little Blue to lose her friend/sister.

Sunday we enjoyed a Christmas service and then had our modest Christmas celebration that night.

Monday morning they left early and mid-afternoon my sister and her husband arrived! Just to keep the celebrating going, you know! Tuesday--Christmas day officially--we did our gift exchange with them. The day, however, was punctuated by steady rainfall in the morning, dropping temperatures, ice accumulation by evening, and finally snow. Around 8:30pm, just as we were settling in for a movie, the power went out. Completely. For the whole night. And the next day. For the whole campus.

 All bundled up for breakfast by candlelight.

 The front of our cottage. 

The following pictures come from around campus. Did I mention we live on a really beautiful piece of property? Cause we do. Just cold when we have no heat!

 These trees that line the main entrance-way are probably the worst part of the storm's aftermath. They've all been severely de-limbed, which is sad because they're normally a beautiful indicator of the passing of the seasons. 

 
Joy and Adam left early the next morning, and we were left to fend for ourselves. Fortunately, we were still a closed cottage at that point, so we didn't have to worry about anyone other than us. So we kind of piddled around all day. Went and played outside at one point. Finally got the power back on at 7:30pm. Light! Heat! Beautiful!

 Blueberry's inspecting the snow.

Snowman

I went to sleep around 11:30pm, and woke up an hour later on Wednesday 12:30am when the power went back out again. Only this time it stayed off for the next three days. We went back on duty on Wednesday. For some reason, some of the cottages and a few of the buildings on campus had power (different grid line or something?), so we wound up bunking in at the high school girls cottage for three days. It wasn't so bad, but having four adults (plus the HPs over there had their adult daughter staying with them) and 14 kids ages 2 to 17 in one house was quite interesting.

We played quite a few games (the girls all really got into Pit), discovered that Blueberry and Butterfly are terrible roommates as they create double havoc at night time when they want to (they slept on the floor in the same room we were sleeping in, just on opposite sides of the bed). Got some gift cards to go to Chic Fil-et one day as that was actually open and we just needed to get the girls out, hit a basketball game, watched some movies, and generally tried to encourage good attitudes, avoiding trouble, and calm.

The most depressing moment was coming over to our cottage on Saturday with the girls and cleaning out the fridges of the last items that were going bad and we just had run out of ways to keep. We did manage to salvage quite a bit, but still, there was an awful lot of dumping that occurred. Having all the help from the girls was great though. We literally lined them all up with garbage bags and filled up the bags which they took outside or elsewhere as needed. Made the whole job go a lot faster. And they apparently thought the whole thing rather fun.

Saturday afternoon, as were were facing the news that the rest of Hot Springs was not scheduled to be reconnected with power until Tuesday, one of the directors finally got on the phone with the mayor (who happens to go to church with him), and we suddenly had power across the whole campus again Saturday evening! Thank the Lord for being the children's home :) 

The girls were hysterical upon coming home. Very happy to be here. In the meantime, we were going off duty that night, so we spent several crazy hours packing up our stuff, settling the girls back into their rooms, scrubbing and restocking the fridges with what we had salvaged, trying to get our paperwork together, and get seven children to bed before our Relief Houseparents came over at 9:30pm.

Oh, and just to make matters worse, it was our last passdown with these particular RHPs before they are scheduled to take over new duties as the HPs in the high school boys cottage! Very sad as it means upheaval for the girls (particularly Butterfly) just as we will be off a lot ourselves whenever Baby Q decides to make his appearance.

We're trying to be scheduled with one set of RHPs as much as possible so as to minimize the change for the girls, but the set who are coming in primarily are actually only temporary RHPs until we get some more RHPs hired. It's just going to be a few months with a lot of change I'm afraid. Plus, on an entirely selfish note, we absolutely loved our old RHPs and are very sad to lose them (even though the situation will be a great one for them!). At least they're still on campus and not gone-gone, but still...

Any ways, back to my original topic in this point. Multiple Christmases. Our final Christmas is tomorrow (Monday) and then the girls are back to school on Tuesday. Blueberry got some of her presents at Christmas, and we have some other presents for her to open with the girls on Monday (it didn't seem right for her to be the only kid sitting there not opening presents. It's going to be a tricky balance as she gets older, but we'll figure it out).

3. Christmas break has been a lot of fun--once we got our power. Just very busy. Lots of appointments, and I've been playing catch up on getting ready for the baby. But we've played games and watched movies and made Peanut Butter Balls (very important!) and gone out shopping, which has all been good. Had some other plans that the storm kind of took out, but I think we've done all right.

New Years Eve we were off duty, and admittedly, we crashed hard for those three days (although I did manage to get the bills paid!). The days prior to that were all the ones of dealing with no power, and that was truly exhausting. Not to mention that my contractions at that point were coming hard enough and frequently enough to make me question whether Baby Q was trying to make his entrance in truly dramatic fashion in the middle of a power outage! Fortunately he apparently does not have a flair for the dramatic and settled back down again--mostly. Our New Years celebration consisted of putting Blueberry to bed, watching a few movies, paying those silly bills, and going outside at midnight to give the girls hugs and wish them a happy new year. I know--we're boring.

4. New Years Resolutions. Well, I have some. Kind of. More my list of items to develop and focus on this year, rather than a bunch of specific resolutions. I think the first quarter of the year is best to be simply titled--Adjust to Changes with Grace for Myself, My Family, and My "Other" Family! If we get through that, we'll be doing good!

5. Blueberry news. She is doing well; although, she still has a cough that just won't clear up. Mind you, I think that's the news for half of us right now. She has officially transferred to a "big girl bed." Mainly, we took the railing off her crib and converted it to the toddler version.That's been an adventure as she definitely likes the freedom of getting out of bed!

The primary issue is that with her potty training, she will get out of bed (before falling asleep) to go potty. Which is fine, except on nights when she just doesn't want to go to sleep and suddenly she has the bladder of, well, a Blueberry! Potty training itself is going really well. She's got the whole process down herself, other than she gets stuck turning the water off sometimes and has been known to climb on the bathroom counter to get to my lotion to put some lotion on her nose because "it hurts." Which it probably does she's been blowing it so much, but she's not to be using my lotion! She's actually napping without diapers at all now, only the occasional accident. Night time she's still in diapers, but really, I think she's doing well!

May you have a blessed Epiphany!

Thanksgiving, Zoos, and Other Randomness

Two of our girls were home all day today and yesterday with sickness: one with the flu and the other with pneumonia of all things. I swear we've gone through more boxes of tissues and bottles of cough medicine in the last few weeks than I would have thought possible. Amazingly enough (say a prayer, knock on wood), other than a slight stuffiness and a few tired days, I've been the one person in the house to not wind up with a cough, major cold, strep, or anything else nasty that's been making its way through the cottage the last few weeks.

In that vein, Thanksgiving week wound up being a bit unexpected for us. We were planning to have three or four of our girls here with us (the rest were with family and/or visits with host families), but they wound up closing our cottage down for a few days and putting our girls in another cottage (less holiday pay the company has to worry about...). As it was, we wound up with Butterfly staying with us in the evenings (for stability purposes for her) but no girls otherwise! We did have two of the girls who were left over to play games on Thanksgiving day itself, but otherwise it was just the 3.5 of us.

It was nice as it actually gave us some extra days off to recover (and decorate for Christmas!). Our Thanksgiving meal we actually shared with a bunch of other people on campus who were here (other houseparents, residents, some relatives, etc), which gave us a sort of family feel. With the new director and some new staff on campus, I'm finding more and more the feeling of family being established here on campus--something I'm very grateful for.

Saturday we took Mama Bear with us to Little Rock and went to the zoo. That was a blast. We hadn't been in quite awhile, and Blueberry has grown up so much since the last time we went. She had a grand time with all the animals and has talked about it daily since then (the scary, loud monkeys; the tiger go "rawr"; "I saw cheetah/lizard/snake/turtle/fishie"; and of course "Giraffe poopies.").

 Scary Crazy Monkey

 My Russian Princess

 The notorious Giraffe

Her first "train" ride. Also went on a carousel for the first time!

She also enjoyed decorating for Christmas that night (busy day for her!) and took great pleasure in showing Butterfly all the decorations (and showing her how too look with her eyes and not with her hands...those two crack me up).

In other Blueberry news, she informed me last night that she wanted to sleep on the futon that is in her room and until now has been working as a temporary training bed for her. While she slept in "beds" on the floor in England and quite enjoyed it, when we got back here, she was clear about wanting to mostly still sleep in her crib. Since we have the futon (and have stuck a swimming noodle down the open side of it to prevent her from rolling out--great idea, thank you Pinterest!), we would offer her the choice of crib or bed, but she generally stuck with her crib as her choice. Last night was the first time she wanted the futon at night. She slept all night on it and then at nap time today she asked for it again. I think my baby just transitioned herself to a "big girl bed!"

We are now debating the merits of selling the futon and buying a toddler bed for the room. At some point we're going to need the crib again as a crib (it can actually be converted into a toddler bed), but the question is do we go ahead and do it now and keep the crib as a crib or do we wait a few months and deal with it as time requires. Ah the questions that come with having a baby!

 Baby Q continues to do well and is very lively. Freaked some of the girls out the other night as we were watching a movie and all of the sudden one of them realized she could actually see my stomach moving on its own. Highly entertaining.

Slowly all the pieces come together in preparation for his arrival. The biggest question for awhile was where were we even going to have him! I've been planning for a home birth from the beginning with him, but as we live on company property, we figured we needed to run it by the director for his okay. Well, he's okay with it conceptually, but the lawyer is not okay with it in terms of insurance companies and other craziness. So the long and short of it was that I suddenly found myself planning for a home birth but not being able to give birth at home!  In an overly dramatic, pregnant, hormonal moment I told Chris that I'd just go across the street to the gas station and give birth there....

Well my midwife actually came to the rescue... She works with two other midwives (there's always at least two of them at each birth) and the longest-practicing of the three happens to be the owner of two fully-furnished houses (she got married just a few years ago to a man who owned his own house--they're both in their early 60s, and I guess they just kind of switch between houses every week). So she is going to let us "borrow" one of her houses to give birth in...and it only happens to be about a 5-10 minute drive down the road. And being a midwife she's really excited about the prospect as she's never actually had a baby born in her own house before! Phew.

Journal: England Trip 2012 - Part V

The day dawned misty but not soppy wet, which was fortunate as this was the day we were to go on the one hike I knew I was (or should be!) capable of doing. There is a little mountain overlooking Keswick that is called Latrigg.

This particular mountain holds a lot of associations for me. It was the first mountain I ever climbed at about the age of three. My grandparents, both now deceased, frequently climbed this mountain if they just wanted a short evening walk. And the ashes of both grandparents are here on this mountain.

There are two paths up Latrigg. One is from the base, in Keswick. The other, which is the one we opted for given the short climbing legs of Blueberry and the limitations placed on myself by Baby Q, is to start about halfway up the fell, leaving the car at a convenient little parking spot. It makes for about a mile and a half hike up and then back again. Really known as one of the easiest fells to climb up in the Lake District, it still holds beautiful views overlooking Keswick, Derwentwater, and various other mountains including another favorite--Skiddaw.

Despite the low-hanging clouds, we really didn't get rained on, and the clouds obligingly lifted as we climbed, allowing us to enjoy the views, embellished with ever shifting clouds. Overnight, seemingly, some of the trees had started to turn, so we got glimpses of fall color here and there throughout the day as well.

How a person can claim to be an artist of any sort and not respond to the beauty of the Lake District is beyond me. The natural beauty oozes creativity, and even the man-made towns and hamlets and villages and boats call out to be used--to explore mystery and humanity and God. Perhaps it is just that I'm a Romantic at heart, but I fail to see how even the stubbornest post-modern could be unmoved by the sights of the Lake District.

Blueberry did really well climbing up the whole way by herself and only needing to be carried for about the last 5 minutes on the way down. She enjoyed getting to know more sheep and discovered strange, round pellets littering the way that once we were informed her what they were, she pointed out constantly for the rest of the hike as "sheep poopies." We also introduced her to a couple of slugs we happened to find as we climbed.

 Walking up

 Nana and Papa

 We made it!

 Christopher and Blueberry brave the sheep

An obliging pose

 Blueberry and Me

 She's getting good at these camera poses

 Daddy and Blueberry

 Sheep Poopies!

 Taking a break; enjoying the view

 Daring the sheep by herself

"You shall not pass!"