From the Mouth of Babes

Jack:  Our house smells like England

Lucy:  (with a mouthful of cookie and hands behind her back)  Daddy?  Can I have a cookie?

Chad:  Yes

Lucy: (showing hands full of cookies)  Thanks daddy!

Me:  Marian are you excited to hold the babies?

Marian:  Nope!

Me:  Why not?

Marian:  I don't want to touch something that just came out of your body!   Will they wash the babies before I have to hold them?

Lucy: (stuck in her crib) Jack I wake!  Can you get me out of my crib?  Jack?  Jack?  I watch Octonauts (Jack's favorite show) with you!

Lucy:  Mommy, I not having such a good day.

Jack:  How many more days till I can play "Plants vs. Zombies?"  (That game on Chad's i-phone is the ultimate button to push to get Jack to mind. If he ever loses it for a few days he can think of nothing else till he can play it again!)

Lucy:  NO SCRIPTURES!!!!!  (We've been trying to do family scripture study in the morning but Lucy is NOT a fan.

Reflections on Bedrest

My good attitude has been waning the past couple of days.  I don't know if it's the excessive heartburn that keeps me up all night or the fact that I feel like an inflatable toy that gets pumped up a little more each week...or the stir craziness that has finally settled in after 13.5 weeks.  Either way I'm more prone to complaining than I was before.  That said I REALLY hope we make it another 3 weeks to get these babies to our goal date of Dec 12th, so I really need to stop my complaining and just be grateful things have gone as well as they have.

Last week (pre- complaining phase) I sent my mom an email with an update on how we're all doing and this is what I told her:

As a family we have learned so much these past few months.  Lucy is still being a champ with all this bed rest craziness and is learning to be much more independent.  She wants to dress herself and has strong feelings about what she wears every day.  She can put on her pants, socks and shoes by herself and gets the right shoe on the right foot about 50% of the time.   She LOVES getting her hair done and last Saturday demanded to have curlers in her hair like Marian and she stood perfectly still while I put them in.  If there is anything she wants but can't reach she gets our big IKEA stool and carries it to wherever she needs to go...the fridge, utensil drawer, bathroom sink etc...  She will even push a kitchen chair up to her high chair so she can climb in.  

Chad is being super dad/husband and taking this all in stride NEVER complaining.  He has brilliantly gone to all paper goods for dishes and that helps a ton.  I have learned a lot about humility and gratitude through all of this. I think I have done a pretty good job at expressing my gratitude to all my "Angels" but not as good to Chad.  Why is it that we are hardest on the people we love the most? I have been guilty of getting frustrated with Chad for not doing things the way I think they should be done on the weekends and have not always been very grateful for all he is doing.   I think that because he never complains,  I sometimes forget how hard this is for him.   But thankfully I am learning and we are learning together how to deal with hard things.  This experience really has been a blessing in our marriage because in different ways, we have both had to make big sacrifices for each other and for our family.  In so so SO many ways I think this long bed rest is such good preparation for having twins come into our family.  Chad has learned to take on more kid/house responsibility,  I have learned to let go of the almost total control of house/kid management that I have had for the past 7 years, and we are all, kids included, so much more appreciative and aware of what has to be done to keep our house running.  Most importantly I think we have all felt united in our desire to have these babies arrive safe and healthy.  Although family life is far from perfect, the love we feel in our home seems a little sweeter.  The kids are a little kinder, and little moments during Family Home Evening, or family prayer, or even when we are having chocolate shakes together...those moments seem to mean more than they did before.  It has been a special time that's for sure.

Although I am glad that I don't have much more than three weeks to go, I am grateful for this experience and grateful for all the things we have learned.  That said...I don't know that I'm getting much out of all the heartburn.  Really, it is the worst!

The Ugly...with Beautiful Marian

I have an update to my post about the Good the Bad and the Ugly of Bed Rest .  Another "Ugly" aspect of it is that at this very minute I am missing Marian's very first dance recital.  Oh it is absolutely breaking my heart.  Especially because it is one of those things where I think it probably wouldn't do any harm to go...but do I really want to risk it blah blah blah!!!    Marian was so excited to get make up on, hair curled and seemed completely fine to have me watch video footage of it that my sister-in-law Alicia is recording so at least she's happy.  Chad can't even go because get this...the man has
  kidney stones!
That's right!  Poor guy.  He spent most of last night in the ER because he was absolutely dying from pain.  He is feeling a little better today but is pretty much out of it because of his pain medications.  Basically we are a bunch of dead-beat invalid parents over here.  In fact last night while Chad was writhing in pain in bed (before heading to the ER) and I was getting ready for bed in the bathroom, women from the Relief Society came by with food leftover from a ward activity.  It was almost 10pm, I didn't hear the doorbell ring and I guess Chad didn't either...but Jack did.  Apparently he opened the door, let them in and brought them into the kitchen so they could put the food in the fridge.  The kitchen was a disaster- Chad hadn't felt well right after dinner so there was still food left out, and the like.  I never even knew they were here till after they'd gone and Jack came up and told me they had come by.  So pretty much those women probably think that our 7 year old son is running things around here...which is pretty true.  Jack does SO MUCH to help out it is almost sad...yet wonderful at the same time.  Among other things, he gets Lucy in and out of her crib, cleans the kitchen, sweeps, takes out the trash and sets out the trash cans on garbage day without being asked.  He's such a little man.

Anyway, I digress.  In an attempt to hold back my misery of missing out on Marian's recital we had a little photo shoot so she could show me all of her "poses".

 

 

 

 

 

Admit it, you are dying of her cuteness too!  After our photo shoot we played a few quick rounds of our favorite card game BLINK while we waited for her ride.  Then Marian put on her coat, boots (it has been snowing all day) and walked out the door with Aunt Alicia and I cried and cried while I tried to drown my sorrows in a glass of milk and Little Debbie Swiss rolls that someone had brought over with dinner.  They were pretty terrible...but helped a little bit.

Blast!

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/55179583-79/store-joe-lake-opening.html.csp

I guess good things come to those who wait.

Numbers

1- number of Christmas gifts I have left on my shopping list!  I feel like a ticking time bomb and want to have that done before the babies come.

8- number of AMAZON packages the UPS guy has dropped off on our porch in the past 3 days...more to come.

46- my diameter in inches.  Go ahead, grab your tape measure and check it out.  It's about as comfortable as you might imagine

12- number of weeks I have been on bed rest

5.5 - number of seasons of Lost I have watched while on bed rest  (can I just say that I LOVE Sawyer?)

5- number of scrapbooks I have finished

4:30 AM- the approx. time Lucy gets out of her bed EVERY night and becomes something like a terrorist with un-relenting demands and pig-tails

3- number of cribs I think we need to keep everyone enclosed

0- number of times baby boy has turned head down.   C-sections are not SO bad right?  RIGHT?

2-number of cavities Marian had.  That number is misleading...these cavities were HUGE!!!  It is a pure miracle and blessing that she actually let the dentist do his thing.  In Boston our dentist was lucky if he could get Marian to even open her mouth!  The fact that our new dentist offers laughing gas and head phones to watch the movie playing up on the ceiling probably helped quite a bit.

135- the top number of my blood pressure ( I can't remember the bottom number).  That is still in the normal range but it has come up since my last appointment and so my Dr. is on the watch for Toxemia (I had that when I was pregnant with Jack).  Not fun.  I will hope for this number to stay where it is!

5- number of weeks...at most until the babies are born

1,000- approximate number of people who have helped or served me and my family in some way over the past 12 weeks

5- the number of children Chad and I are about to be responsible for.  Whenever I rattle off all our kids names with potential baby names ( Jack, Marian, Lucy, _________, and ____________) instead of thinking about whether or not I like the sound of the names together, I get distracted by the amount of names I just rattled off!

2- the number of sweet new babies I am going to be able to hold in just a few weeks!

From the Mouth of Babes

Jack:  It is SO hard having parents

Mary:  If you guys eat all your dinner we can have ice cream cones for dessert
Marian:  Can we have ice cream on them too?

Lucy:  So pretty (when she saw my newly highlighted hair)
           Thank you Nicole for bringing your salon to my kitchen table!

Lucy:  Ta-la!  (I think she meant Ta- da!)

Happy Halloween!

Let the sugar craziness begin!