Mistakes in Motherhood

As in the speed that time passes in my pregnancy seems to be directly linked to the space, or distance, of my husband.

The first 20 weeks flew by, the last two weeks have drug. Can you guess how long he’s been home?

This will not be the case for the remainder of the pregnancy though, I know for sure of three weeks he will be gone coming up. Plus summer is starting to wrap up, school will start next month and all three of my boys are attending. One starting kindergarten, one starting middle school, and one starting high school. At least for a few months, it will just be me and little one until the end of winter break, then it will be me and the little one and the new baby!

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want him gone, I want the pregnancy to fly by as fast as it has been ALL the time.

No Comments | In: A lot about nothing | tags: Bobby, Pregnancy, School. | #

For the last three nights I have been having dreams where I wake up angry at my husband. In my dreams he has been cheating, lying, smoking, and abusing my kids and I. When I wake up I have been retaining those feelings which I have to work at to let go because he is just the opposite of how he is when he’s his dream self. Thankfully he’s not here when I am working out my issues and by the time I talk to him the dreams are just a faded memory of a dream. And no, I am not mad at hubby for anything in reality.

The part that bothers me the most about these dreams though is not what is in them, but what isn’t. Despite being almost half way through my pregnancy… I have yet to have a single dream about my baby. I am thankful how active this little one is because I would have a hard time believing there was really a person there. I cannot picture what my life will be like when this little gift arrives. I wish I could just start getting used to the idea in my dreams, so that it would spread into my daydreams.

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We are home from vacation, and things are back to the way they should be. Our house desperately needs cleaned, laundry is at a healthy level. The princess is fighting with the littlest prince, she has learned to tattle in her little baby way. She points at something, glares at it, and then in gibberish tells me all about it. I have appointments galore, I need to make a trip to Costco and the regular grocery store, and Bobby is already planning his next business trip. Yes, life is how it should be.

No Comments | In: A lot about nothing | tags: Confessions, Domestic Diva, Family, Lame-o, Me, Vacations. | #

When the baby gets here we will need to do a transition of sorts. The seven of us will be living together in a four bedroom home and that means the baby will need to bunk up with someone when he/she is around 4-6 months old, before then, we have a co-sleeper in our room. By then we are hoping to have transitioned Sophia to a toddler bed, and then I can get the baby a lovely set of crib bedding to coordinate well enough in her room. However, I have never had a toddler sharing a room with a baby, so I am not sure if that will go over well. When we got Matthew’s bunk beds, which is kinda like a loft bed with a rolling shorter bed on wheels that can be moved, we toyed with the idea that they may eventually share the bed, with the “bottom bunk” in her room, and his loft bed in his room with a “play fort” of sorts underneath.

However, we may have to have Sophia and Matthew sharing a room for a year or so until the little one sleeps through a noisy sister in the room. I can imagine using so many different kinds of cute feminine kids beddingadorning the twin bed if she uses it, instead of transitioning to her toddler bed she inherited from Matthew. Excuse me while I hop up on this soap box, because I am about to sound like my mother.

Nothing grosses me out more than sleeping on a bed without a mattress pad. If you spend money on a mattress, get a quality mattress pad. Mattress pads are an inexpensive way to protect the bed from sweat, drool, and any other body fluids you encounter when you have kids (urine, vomit, etc). I don’t care how good you cleaned after Junior peed the bed, don’t expect that the next person is sleeping on a nasty mattress covered with only a thin layer of fabric, ewww. I will judge you if your beds lack mattress pads. And for kids, have several on hand. Matthew has three for his bunk beds, Sophia has two for her crib… both theirs are waterproof. I have one that I spent a fortune on, because it is waterproof and does not crinkle. We often have kids climbing into our bed at night, and that pad has paid for itself 20x over with how many times it has saved our bed. Austin and Christopher have one each, they were just cheapies, but they will tell you, I will get mad if I see a naked bed.

No Comments | In: This is how I roll | tags: A lot about nothing, Confessions, Domestic Diva, Family, House Stuff, Humor, Parenting, Silliness, Sponsored. | #

It is 6:45 and I have been up in a quiet house for 2 hours now. It was super hot last night so we opened at window, and some baby birdies outside my window decided I needed to be up before 5am. I shut the window, but the damage was done so I got up and showered, played around on Facebook, chatted with some friends, and did some laundry.

We are over on the other side of the state right now, we drove over for my grandparents 60th wedding anniversary at my parent’s cabin in Idaho. We came back into town to see friends, and will go back on the weekend for a family reunion before returning home early next week. We packed for the 90 degree Eastern WA weather, and ended up freezing our butts off in the cold Idaho-in-the-woods weather.

It is nice being in the same state as my sister and parents. It was even nicer that my other sister could come over from Montana and we could spend the weekends together. When we go home, I know we will all be sad, but it is nice to know we are only 300 miles from “home”.

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Since moving to Olympia, we have been missing chicken wings. We got spoiled in Colorado being only 4 minutes from a Wing Stop, and 6 minutes from a Wild Wings. Here, such places just do not exist. We have a Hooters in Tacoma, about 30 minutes away, so we decided to hit Tacoma to get wings, then head to the zoo. We had never taken the kids to Hooters, and the reaction of my 12 and 14 year old sons’ was hilarious! The 14 yr old said he wants to do his birthday dinner there next year. lol

Our trip to the zoo was horrid, traffic was a nightmare and when we got down there, there was no parking within miles of the zoo, reason being there was some festival down there. So we scrapped our plans and hit the mall instead to browse in the Apple Store. This evolved into a maternity shopping spree, two new bears from Build a Bear, and tons of window shopping. We also took the kids to Cabela’s for the first time when we got into town. As disappointed as I was that we had to skip the zoo, we ended up having a ton of fun yesterday and now know when we go back to the zoo next time, to get there when it opens and to go on a week day.

No Comments | In: A lot about nothing | tags: Family, Ramblings. | #

If you are on my Facebook, then this is old news, but I have not mentioned it here yet.

While Bobby was in Wisconsin, I got a pretty big shock.

See that little line? *Squint* Now do you?

This is my test from April 15th, I followed it up with a blood test which was also positive. I was in total shock. Seems like we were not as careful as we could have been the day before he went to Wisconsin.

Shock has faded, and now I am excited. Bobby is happy too, even though we has decided we were done.

On May 7th, I was able to see my little bean for the first time. His/her heart was flickering away and it was the most beautiful little blob I had seen since Sophia’s first scans.

A couple weeks later I got to see him/her again.

We decided we would have another home birth, and interviewed a couple midwives. I found one I love and had my initial appointment at the end of May. The appointment was pretty uneventful, it included vitals, a ton of paperwork and history, information on prenatal testing, and a ton of routine blood work.

I was so sick this pregnancy, much like my pregnancy with Sophia, except this time it started around 3 weeks, then started easing up around 11 weeks, and now is mostly gone, where with Sophia it eased up a bit, but was never gone. Also, unlike Sophia’s pregnancy, I have been able to eat, so I have gained around 5 lbs already, where with her I lost a bunch of weight, however, I also started this pregnancy about 45 pounds lighter than I did with her pregnancy, and Matthew’s pregnancy (where I also lost some weight in the beginning). This is making me guess we are going to have another little girl, but I have been wrong before.

We also decided we are not going to find out the sex of this baby at 20 weeks, as long as this baby cooperates and decides not to be obvious at my 20 week ultrasound. It was funny, I was kind of playing with the idea thinking it would be fun, when Bobby called me and said “I just thought of something crazy, but what if we don’t find out the gender?” Since then it has been settled and I am feeling a lot more at ease about not knowing and am excitedly buying little yellow and white baby items for the first few weeks. It will be so neat to be able to discover on our own what we are having as a family. With Christopher the midwife told us he was a boy at birth, with Matthew and Sophie I was told by the ultrasound tech.

Yesterday I entered the second trimester, such a relief.

1 Comment | In: This is how I roll | tags: Announcements, Me, Pregnancy. | #

A frequent question I get is “where is Bobby now?” There is a good reason for that, since we moved and since he’s been home from Iraq, he’s been feeling the pressure of too much work for not enough people. Starting in April, he began a rotation of roughly 3 weeks gone for every week home. In April he was in Wisconsin, May was Louisiana, June was Germany, and now Oklahoma. Once we got used to the routine, it has been easier, but at first it was hard to have him back from Iraq and home for over a month, just to have him gone all the time.

Germany was quite an experience. He stayed in an amazing apartment that had a view of castle ruins from his balcony.

He was supposed to be there three weeks, but they ended up not using him like they planned so they sent him home early, however the sneak didn’t tell me and secretly booked his trip home, and walked in the front door giving me the shock of my life. He said my expression was priceless and it was probably the first time he has ever seen me speechless. I thought it was one of the kids walking in so I didn’t think much of hearing the door open, but when I looked up and saw him I could not even register it that he could possibly be home already. The reunion was short lived though, he arrived home on Thursday afternoon, and by Sunday morning (on Father’s day) he was back on an airplane to Oklahoma for a little over a week.

No Comments | In: A lot about nothing | tags: Bobby, Lame-o. | #

A week after my last post we started the moving process, a trip that took us several days and was a whirlwind of activity. We arrived in Spokane on March 4th, on the 5th Bobby, Sophia and I headed over to Olympia to look at houses and we signed for the first one we looked at. The house itself is not perfect, I would have loved there to be a bigger basement bedroom, more storage, a larger kitchen, and of course, more storage. However, the location is as perfect as you can get and the yard is HUGE. Overall there were a lot more pros about the property than cons. By the time we were done with that we decided to bed down for the night here in town, and Saturday we went back to Spokane. On Monday we loaded back up all the kids and headed back to Olympia and our stuff was delivered the next day. Other than a few small things, everything arrived in perfect condition and I was super impressed with the moving experience. Everyone was so kind and professional.

It is almost 4 months later and we still have not settled in completely. We have to organize the garage and have about a dozen boxes out there we have not touched. We have only hung a couple pictures and still have to build some shelves in the storage room. We have a good excuse, but more about that in another post.

When I said the location here is perfect, I mean it. I love the schools, I love how close we are to a neighborhood park that is just gorgeous, and huge. We are a couple blocks from a 22 mile trail that runs miles through the county, and will soon be expanding to be 48 miles long. We are minutes from walking to lakes, ponds, streams, etc. On our back deck, we can sit outside and listen to a chorus of frogs at night. I have never been happier in any other city. The plan is to keep renting here until we sell our home in Colorado and then consider buying, but I have no desire to do that for another 5 years or so.

Ok, more updates to come, I am going to break them up by major events instead of backdating them to when they happened.

No Comments | In: People, Places & Things | tags: House Stuff, Moving, Updates. | #

What is eas-birth-mas? Doesn’t everyone celebrate it?? Well, since you asked (or didn’t), eas-birth-mas is a family celebration we decided we would have when Bobby got back in the states, to celebrate all the holidays dad missed. We had planned on making it eas-thank-birth-mas, but with us moving in a few days, I decided to put off turkey day for after we were settled in.

We started the day by distracting the kids with box-forts we helped them make. When I got my new washer and dryer, we asked them to leave the appliance boxes for the kids.



Bobby cut doors and windows in the boxes for the kids (while Austin posed for photo-ops) and then we let them decorate them or continue to cut them how the pleased. They ended up creating a tunnel and joining the two boxes.

While they were playing with the boxes, I wrote directions on sticky notes at each child’s level. For Austin and Chris I had a list of small chores that had a new hint at the end of it.

Christopher found his video game in the freezer when his last note asked him to see how much bread we had in the freezer, where Austin’s Blu-Ray was found in the dishwasher after the final clue told him to see if the dishes in the dishwasher needed started.

Matthew’s last clue simply said “tub” and Sophia’s only clue had a picture of a cat and she found her gifts in the scratching post.

For dinner we had dessert first, ice cream cake, and Sophie made a big mess.

She was so messy in fact, a bath was the only solution.

We also sold Bobby’s VW bug today too, so that was great news, since we can’t take it to WA with us, and the person who sold it will take good care of it I am sure.

1 Comment | In: A lot about nothing, This is how I roll | tags: Austin, Bobby, Christopher, Family, Holidays, Matthew, Me, Silliness, Sophia. | #