We’re Back

We just got home from a week long trip to Utah where we were able to spend a lot of time with family. The trip was so fun, and it felt renewing to me to be surrounded by family.

We got in late last night (early this morning, technically). Grant had already come home a few days ago to get back to work, so I was alone with the kids. The flight went well. My kids stayed awake the whole time even though we started the flight right at their bedtime. Cecilia was the exception. She slept for about the first hour, and then she was pleasant on my lap until we hit a thunderstorm upon landing. We descended quickly, and I think her ears bothered her. There was nothing I could do to comfort her, no matter how I tried. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to stand up with her. I finally gave up all my comforting efforts and just let her sit in my lap and cry. She would calm herself for a moment and then shake her head and go back to crying. Poor thing. That lasted for about the last half hour of the trip. As soon as we were close to touching down, she snapped out of it and was calm.

(Before she woke up and was pleasant.)

She didn’t like the flash on the camera.

All the kids fell asleep in the car on the way home. It was probably 1:30 by the time they got to bed, and I didn’t get to bed until 2am. I think we were all grateful to be in our own beds again. The girls slept in so late!

It feels good to be surrounded by the familiarity of home. It feels good to have a reason to be grateful to be here. I was so glad to be able to go and be with family. My heart was so full as I watched my kids play and explore with their cousins. I can’t tell you how rare it is for us to be in a large family group. It was heavenly to let the kids run and enjoy their cousins. Times like these only strengthen my resolve to move us someplace near family where my kids will have cousins to play with. But until then, I am so overwhelmed with gratitude for the moments when we can join a group of family.

I trust the Lord, and I know we are here for a good reason. I know that we can become a stronger family as we rely on each other and have this time on our own. I’m grateful that my husband has found a job working with good people in an environment where he can grow. People on the airplane asked me where I was from. I knew what they meant, but it didn’t feel right to say I was from Chicago. I told them I have lived near Chicago for about a year and a half. I don’t feel like I’m from here yet. I’m still and Oregonian living in Illinois. This may not be my favorite situation, but there are good things about this place, the best of which being that we are together as a family. I want to enjoy it while we are here. I want to take advantage of all the things we can see and do around here.

Basically, this trip was really good for me. I feel like I’ve been pulled out of a rut, and I have renewed hope and appreciation. I hope I can hold onto it.

Current Ramblings

Sometimes I just don’t know where to start. Grant and I discussed this challenge with journaling/blogging. You just never know where to start and especially, where to stop. But time just keeps charging past, the kids keep growing (so quickly!), and I want to grasp at some of these fleeting memories that, though they seem so vivid now, I know will be cloudy in a year or two.

I’m already kicking myself for not blogging more when Curtis was a toddler. I think there are so many of his quirky little Curtis-isms that I should have written down, should have recorded somehow. But I doubt I’d remember them now. How did he get to be 3??? He used to be the baby, the little guy on my hip. Now, he sits at the dinner table as we all talk back and forth and hollers, “I’m trying to talk!!” He’s not one to fade into the shadows in a conversation; he demands to be heard.

The girls are excited to have entered spring break. Friday was their last day of school for a week. We’re headed to Utah soon to stay with my sister and enjoy some slightly warmer weather and visiting family. Grant and I are excited to take Eleanor to a session of General Conference while we are there.

Today was just a busy, hang around the house day. Eleanor woke up at 12:30 last night because her ear was plugged and hurting, and it took forever to get her back to sleep. She has had a bit of a cold this week, though not enough to keep her home from school. Sometimes I think I’ve gotten more strict (too strict?) about sending kids to school even when they don’t feel well because of this school’s attendance policy. Last year, they threatened Eleanor with summer school, and Grant had to go talk to the principal to get her out of it. I think it’s a bit unreasonable. I wish Eleanor would drink more water when we tell her she has to drink water to get better. I have a hard time getting kids to increase how much water they drink when sick. I don’t have the energy to chase them around with it all day, and I forget to keep checking on how much they have drunk.

So we kind of just hung around. Grant let me sleep in to recover from our rough night (bless him!), and after breakfast, he had to go help someone in the ward move. That took a big chunk of his day. While he was gone, the girls and I made packing lists for our trip while Cece napped. Phaedra was excited to start packing as soon as Cecilia was awake. I’m trying to gather things here and there over the next few days so it won’t be so much work the day before we leave. I worked on folding my piles and piles of laundry while Cecilia played around on the floor.

She’s getting awfully close to crawling. She has known for a long time how to push with her legs, getting up on her knees. She hasn’t figured out the arms yet. Sometimes she pushes herself up with her arms, and her legs keep going, so she pushes herself forward into a face-plant. Mostly, she moves backwards. I’m not sure how this happens. All I know is that I find her backed up underneath things: the couch, the chair, her bouncer seat, the coffee table. She hardly stays on the blanket I lay on the floor for her anymore. I’m going to have to vacuum more often and get really vigilant about the tiny toys in this house!

The kids had some time outside. Phaedra set a trap the other day for a fairy, and looking out the window, she was sure she had caught something. So all three big kids went outside to check it out and to play and build fairy houses. It snowed twice this week (boo!), but it didn’t stick for long either time. Now that the snow is gone but nothing green has had a chance to grow, it looks like fall again (especially since we never raked the leaves last fall—don’t look at me, I had a baby). Things outside look rather drab. But I suppose I prefer drab over white.

It’s so nice to be able to send the kids outside. I’m looking forward to bubbles, sidewalk chalk, and bikes in the driveway. I can’t wait for this spring to warm up. It’s time for trips to the park and time on the playground.

Grant signed the two of us up for the fitness center at his work. I got to go work out on Thursday. It was amazing!! I felt so renewed/rejuvenated/energized! I thought it would be way harder to get back to it (hadn’t been running since July of 2013) than it was. I took it easy, but it really just felt great! I did the stationary bike for a while, ran just over a mile on the treadmill, and then I swam some laps in the pool. My, how I have missed swimming! This is going to be such a good thing. I can’t wait to get back! And I’m looking at races I can do here around Chicago. I want to sign up for at least one 5K or 10K this year.

Book club is going well. We chose some great titles for this year, and I still have quite a few regulars who come, along with a few new faces this year. I’m so glad I recognized that a book club is something I need for my sanity and initiated one right when I moved here. There are some ladies I KNOW I wouldn’t have gotten to know very well if it weren’t for book club, and I am so grateful for that. Each time we get together, I am so grateful to these ladies for supporting me in having this book club.

This post is getting pretty random! Sorry for the stream of consciousness, but I guess that’s what you get when I blog so sporadically.

I still miss Oregon immensely, but I haven’t had any heavy homesickness for a while. It helps that we’re pulling out of winter! Snow is definitely a trigger for me. I know I grew up with snow, and I know I knew I was moving to a place with snow, but it just doesn’t change the fact that I don’t like snow. It almost makes me feel claustrophobic.

I was sad just this week, watching Curtis play outside in the snow. He was having such a good time. I wished I could be out there with him and play with him. But I watched from the windows. I didn’t want to take Cece out in the cold since she has been pretty sniffly this week. I felt so torn between my sweet little baby and my adorable, fun-loving 3-year-old who both wanted my attention. I had to remind myself that this is only a season. Cecilia will grow so that I won’t worry about her being to sniffly or too baby to be out in the snow. I won’t always have to choose between the two. So I sat with my baby and watched Curtis try to use his small snow shovel to throw snow at the window to get me to react as if he had just thrown snow on me.

I’m trying to embrace the things I like about living here. I’m trying to look around at all the new things we can see and do and discover. I’m trying to make sure that we take advantage of these cool experiences while we are here. We had a lot of fun and did a lot of things in Oregon, but there are many times I look back and think, “I should have taken advantage of that.” I’m not just talking about places to see; I’m also talking about time I could have spent connecting with friends, sharing burdens, doing service. I’m trying not to put off too many of the things we want to do. I want to enjoy what I can of this place while we’re here, and wherever life takes us after this will be a new place to enjoy (and if it takes us somewhere we’ve been before, we can enjoy some of the things I missed out on before).

Well, that was a whole lot of randomness. Grant is speaking in church tomorrow (he was asked late last night). He has finished writing his talk, so I suppose I’ll sign off.

Life is good.

It is oh, so busy and quickly passing by, but it is good.

6 Months Old

This darling girl is six months old today, and it was a warm, beautiful, sunny day. Hooray for spring!

All About Cecilia

I want to try to do an update about each of my kids, because it has been so long since I’ve found the time to do it. I’ll start with Cecilia since she is the youngest and is changing the fastest.

She is 5 and a half months old now. She started rolling over this month. She first rolled from back to front. She can roll from front to back now, but she hasn’t figured out how to get anywhere doing it. Instead of barrel-rolling to get somewhere, she mostly flip-flops back and forth in relatively the same spot. She does get around some, though. I’ve left her on a blanket to come back a minute later and find her just off the edge of it. When she sees something she wants she knows how to push with her legs as if she is crawling, but she doesn’t get her arms involved (so she doesn’t get very far).

First day rolling over.

At her check up this month, she weighed 12lbs, 13oz, and she was 25 inches long.

She’s a very alert, very expressive baby. She coos and jabbers and squeals quite a bit. She even growls; in fact, that was one of her first sounds besides crying. She must have liked the sounds we made when we played with her and decided to learn to make them herself. She isn’t as talkative when we are out and about because she likes to take everything in. She doesn’t mind being handed off to other people, but she knows her mommy and daddy really well and comforts for them more easily. Sometimes when Mommy and Daddy aren’t available, she’ll go to sleep when Eleanor walks her around the house. She isn’t quite as at ease when Phaedra and Curtis hold her, but she sure loves them and smiles for them when they talk to her.

Cece started out hating the car and was probably one of our most determined kids in length of screaming protest about being in the car, but she has gotten better about it. Now she has even been known to sleep in the car sometimes.

Cecilia is our little narwhal baby. I say that because, when you first hear that there is a whale that has a horn like a unicorn, it’s pretty hard to believe until you see real pictures or videos of it. Grant and I have had plenty of friends say their babies slept through the night early on, but it was pretty hard to believe any baby would just start sleeping through the night on their own. It was never our experience with the first three. But then we had Cecilia. I think she started sleeping through the night somewhere around 6 weeks old. Our little narwhal.

And for the majority of her 5 months of life, she has slept through the night ever since she started. Now that she’s getting more ready for solid food, she’s been waking a time or two in the night to eat. I started introducing rice cereal last week, but she had an eczema flare up which caused the doctor to recommend I wait another week or two before trying solids again, mostly just to eliminate one of the many variables that could have caused it. So we’re likely to have her waking a few times here and there until I can give her something that will keep her tummy filled longer.

She still has her sweet, baby blue eyes. I keep expecting to see them change any day, but maybe they won’t. What a surprise it would be if we end up having two blue-eyed kids! I even checked my old pictures of Curtis and Eleanor, and at this age, their eyes were substantially darker, if not completely brown.

Cece can find and grab her feet when she wants to. She’s also really close to being able to sit up on her own. When I put her in her bouncer seat, she puts her elbows back and props herself up to try to sit up. She’s actually quite past the stage for being in the bouncer seat. I’m just struggling with giving it up. I’m not sure how I’ll take a shower (and sometimes eat breakfast) without it. Cece loves to sit and rock herself forward and back. She’ll even sit on your lap and lean forward and then quickly push herself back to bonk against Mommy or Daddy’s chest. She’ll do this over and over.

Throughout her short life, she has tried various ways of sucking fingers/thumb to try to comfort herself here and there. She has usually not found it very satisfying. For a while, she was determined to make an OK sign with her fingers, smash it down and try to suck the finger and thumb. That only seemed to frustrate her. Just when I was thinking she would never suck any fingers, she settled on her first two fingers at the same time. Those seem to satisfy her the most, but she still only does it out of desperation. So far, it doesn’t look like she’ll be a dedicated sucker like Phaedra (thumb) or Curtis (2 middle fingers). Considering how we’re STILL struggling with Phaedra and the thumb (she stopped for a while, but then she started up again once school started), I don’t mind if Cecilia doesn’t get too addicted to fingers.

She has a great sense of humor and loves it when we play with her. We all love her so much and are happy she’s part of our family. Even Curtis, who might get a little frustrated at times that Mommy isn’t always quick to help him, is very protective of her. When people we know ask to hold the baby, Curtis is very adamant that they aren’t allowed to keep her, and he will tell them so.

Below is a set of my favorite pictures from the last month, the most recent first. Too many pictures by anyone’s standards except for a Grandma’s (or Grandpa’s) who might be missing having the chance to see her.

She’s pretty tolerant – even when Phaedra dresses her up.

 

First time in the snow.

After she flapped her arms and flipped snowflakes onto her face.

Snow angel!

She made a snow angel.

To Be Honest

If we’re being completely honest, this is what happened just after the previous video. Curtis loves his sister. His love also has limits.