The Dog Days of Pregnancy

I got my weekly email notification today. You're 26 weeks pregnant! Only 14 more weeks to go! Whaaaaat!?FOURTEEN!? Apparently BabyCenter expects that along with knowing what fruit or vegetable your baby currently most closely resembles, you're also very excited to know exactly how many more days you can expect to have heartburn and a backache for. This is the point where it really just starts to feel like I have been pregnant FOREVER. Those first 20 weeks felt nice and quick. I think that is mostly because I spent about 12 of them in a sleep or nausea induced coma, brightened only by the happiness that quelling the occasional food craving brought me. The last 6 weeks weren't terrible either. There were plenty of holiday activities to distract me, and last week I came down with a rotten flu that cost me roughly 3 pounds of baby weight (and a stern talking to from my practitioner on avoiding illnesses with my compromised immune system)with all that behind us, now. it. is just. winter. and I still have 14 weeks to go. I could start preparing now,washing, sorting, buying diapers etc. but I would be done in a month and then seriously be ready and still have 10 weeks left to do nothing but stare at all the baby things. I think it's time to start knitting. That's how I kept my sanity when I was expecting Alaina. Except now I have Alaina...and Evan...and they are SO busy that I couldn't even finish my Christmas knitting project. I assume it's silly to expect that I could finish a baby blanket in the next 14 weeks, no matter how V E R Y looooong they might seem. So what to do when you're not newly pregnant, but not really close to having a new baby either? In the words of Dori (possibly the most profound theologian of our time) "Just keep swimming." and just keep swimming I will, with as little impatience as possible. That is until next week when I get the "Only 13 more weeks to go!" email and start my frustrated preggo rant again. :)

Sticky counters, kids, and dads...

It was brought to my attention by a friend yesterday that I appear to be so "put together". Naturally, I nearly spit out my Cherry 7up when she told me this as I stood in the middle of my kitchen still in my sweats,attempting to make dinner on counter tops that were so cluttered I could barely work, dodging rouge Nerf gun darts, with a puppy barking incessantly, and 2 toddlers making various demands and complaints, while simultaneously communicating with her, my husband and another friend. No, I'm not THAT put together! 

Ever heard that saying "Act like a duck"?

Apparently, I do. I certainly don't make an effort to, but obviously my feathers seem neatly arranged while I paddle frantically to stay above water. I hope this is a validating post for many of you, because the truth is June Cleaver does not exist in real life. Kids are messy, men are messy, dogs and cats are messy, cooking is messy, *I* am messy. Real life is messy. If my house looks clean in pictures, that's because I took a picture of the only clean part, if my daughter's hair looks perfect, that's because I took a picture of it before I let her move a muscle, if my makeup looks great....hahaha....no. I can't even pretend I have time for that. 

I have recently come to the conclusion that even the people whom I think are excellent house keepers, neat freaks, or organizational prodigies are real people too. I have a lovely Aunt who I think keeps a perfect house, who's children seem to have nothing (and I mean NOTHING) out of place in their rooms. This woman keeps a date book (it's really a binder) on PAPER that is as chic as it is functional, and I'm pretty sure that my uncle is the epitome of perfectionist heaven. If he ever left his dirty socks on the floor in his life (or owned dirty socks for that matter) I would be shocked. Sounds too good to be true right? I bet it is. Am I certain that my aunt is 10 times the woman that I could ever hope to be? Absolutely. BUT...she has dirty dishes, and laundry, and kids, and animals, and maybe (although I still doubt it) a dirty husband too. I bet she goes to bed some nights without the crumbs wiped off her pristine counter tops. And why? Because she, like us all, is a human, wife, and mother, and also wears about 100 other hats during her busy work day. Nothing, no one, is perfect 100% of the time. Most of us aren't perfect 95% of the time. I don't think it's something to feel guilty or overwhelmed about either. We all have different priorities, but be REAL. Embrace the mess, know that these days are long but the years are short. The crumbs will wait until tomorrow...but that little person  learning to take those first few steps won't. Above you can see what leaving my toilets 'til tomorrow got me, and I'll leave you with some scary pictures of our current not-so-put-together (very real)  state. 'Til next time

is it loud in here?

After a much too long estrangement, I finally decided to visit my poor lonely blog today. Not much had changed as you might expect. The same old posts were still here to greet me, the pictures hadn't faded, and my tired old template was still looking springy and fun. - Deep breath - time for a facelift. I had more trouble than I'd like to admit changing backgrounds and headers, and while I'm giving up the blog decorating for the day, I can't say I'm done for sure. I took a few minutes this afternoon to read through my not-so-numerous past posts as a way of maybe taking stock of what has changed since I started the blog. The answer: everything and nothing. In the last year we have had a job change, location change, family vehicle change(which will undoubtedly be changing again due to our growing family) 2 new dogs, and the list goes on and on. Looking back, some of those changes have suited us better than others. Looking ahead to 2014, there are still many to come. What hasn't changed? We are undeniably blessed with a healthy family, steady job, solid marriage,and a house full of beautiful children. I don't make New Year's resolutions. I've always sort of felt that if you see something that needs changing, you just do it. Time of year shouldn't matter much when it comes to self improvement. For this reason I pretty much always have a crazy long list of goals(ironically, I am choosing to list them during the first week of January :). They work out about half the time. Some are big goals, some are pretty minor, but all are equally important to me. This year I added teaching German to my 2 older children as part of our homeschool curriculum. If you'd ask me now, I'd say it's going pretty well. They seem to be picking it up pretty quickly thanks to a little app called "Duolingo" (as a byproduct, I'm learning quite a bit myself) Other goals on my list are to seriously simplify our lifestyle from our eating habits, to the things we own. As blessed as I think we are, we just have WAY. TOO. MUCH. Last but not least on my goal list is to cut down on the horrific screeching noise level in our house. There has to be a way...I'm welcoming comments or suggestions from other moms of many on what you do to keep a reasonable volume in your house when the winter energy overload seems to be audibly spilling out of your kids. With any luck I'll be back a little more often this year to keep you posted on my New Year's resolutions that aren't...