Today is my baby’s first birthday.  Happy birthday sweet boy!  It’s amazing how quickly a year has flown by too – it seriously feels like he was just a newborn.   Noah has grown so much in his first year of life.  He is looking more and more like a little boy now, and I’m loving it.   Sadly we aren’t too celebratory today because everyone but Rich has some sort of cold/cough.  Fun times.  But I will be making a cake for tonight, and will get the obligatory pictures of him taking his first bites of birthday cake.  Gotta love traditions.  I have been planning a family party for him for this Saturday, but I just don’t know if it’s going to happen because of the illnesses floating around.  We’ll wait and see I suppose.

Grace coughed in my mouth 2 nights ago.  It was gross.  But now I’m finding it even more gross because I realize that she coughed little germs straight into my body and I feel like I’m getting a little bit of a sore throat.  Blech.  I’m going to go pop a couple echinacea capsules to see if I can beat whatever I’m coming down with so that I will be able to enjoy my weekend getaway…. I’m going to the Poconos with a bunch of women from church.  Can’t wait!

Saturday was a bitter sweet day for our family.  We were reunited with our children after a 5 day separation.  Rich and I were in Colorado Springs (gorgeous!) for a mission leaders conference and the kids stayed behind with two amazing families.  What a gift it was to get away for that long!  So, Saturday was a good day.  I missed our kids and was unbelievably excited to see them again.  We did lots and lots of snuggling… Grace has turned into quite a snuggler and I love it!  Saturday afternoon I had to make the decision to put our family cat, Mrs. Woolworth, to sleep.  It was a very sad decision… and it was painful.  She was part of our family from the very beginning.  We loved her dearly and miss her.  Grace cried.  She was so sweet and loving about it all.  The finality of it all hit her hard and she just wept.  Genuine mournful tears.  It broke my heart to have my girl feel such pain for the first time.  After our friend Sue came and picked her up for us (she works at a veterinarian office) Grace was sitting on the floor flipping through a book with constant tears streaming down her cheeks.  A real picture of raw pain.  Becca didn’t understand.   Today she was asking me when the cat was coming back.  Poor girl.  It was definitely for the best though.  I loved that cat.

Mrs. Woolworth

she was a sweet cat despite the "evil eyes" in this photo.Grace with Woolworth 2006

Woolworth allowing Becca to try to eat her fur. She was good with the kids.

Haha - Becca put her in Noah's jumperoo. She just laid there until I picked her up.

Woolworth being protective of Noah when he was a newborn.

I’m in the middle of painting my bedroom this amazing warm shade of brown.  It’s called gentle fawn…. I LOVE it.  I’m not done with it, but I’m hoping that by tomorrow night I will be.  We’ll see.  But seriously, I’m loving it.  And Rich picked Grace up at the bus stop – sort of,* and he saw the room with the new color and he loves it too.  Yippie!

*Rich was on his way to the bus stop when Grace walked in the house.  Thanks to neighbor Lindsay who rides the bus with Grace for walking her home.

I have been so busy recently – sorry for not posting anything since August.  I find that it’s hard to blog when I have a spare moment because those times are so far and few between.  That’s what it at least seems like.

So Grace is in school.  Yay for afternoon kindergarten!  She loves it and seems to be thriving.  I knew she would, but it was still hard to let go initially.  That first day when she got on the bus and the doors closed behind her…. I thought for sure I had just cut off my right arm.   The separation was so real and raw.  But, I had to suck it up because Becca was hysterically upset that Grace got to go on a bus and she didn’t.  Thankfully school started a week later for Becca.  Still no bus for her yet, but she’s happy to be going to school too.   Oh, and it was so easy for me to have Bec go to school.  She’s my little social butterfly and I’m not worried one bit about her confidence in that area.  I am however nervous about her being developmentally behind the other kids since she’s by far the youngest in the class.  Time will tell I suppose.

One bit of exciting news is that we are redoing our bedroom.  Yippie!   We took EVERYTHING out of our room… and all that was in our room is now in the hallway and Noah’s bedroom.  I can’t wait until I have my hallway back.  Anyway, Rich pulled up the carpet which the cat had decided to pee all over and sanded the floor.  After the 3rd coat of polyurethane I am beyond thrilled with how it looks!  Good job Rich!   So I decided that we might as well paint the room since it’s empty.  It’s something that I’ve wanted to do and it’s the perfect time.  I picked out a brown color.  It’s a lighter brown – but still definitely brown.  I am going to paint the inside of our closet an orang-y red color (called new penny) and then throw in some other vibrant colors with decor.  I can’t wait for the room to be done.  My goal is to have it all painted by Saturday.   Can’t wait!

I am also planning on posting some recent pictures soon.  They are still on my camera and I don’t have time at the moment to download them.  But there are pics from first days of school for both girls, our day trip to Dutch Wonderland, and our fun day at the zoo and aquarium – we went to both places yesterday.  So fun!

My husband is sick.  Tomorrow will be one week since he started to not feel well.  I’m not sure what he’s sick with, but it’s beginning to seem more serious to me with each passing day because he isn’t getting better.  In fact, I think he’s getting worse.  This is pretty tough for him and for our family in general.  I’m taking him to the doctor today and  I hope it’s something that can be treated.  Please pray.  Thanks.

In less than a week I have lost 4 – 4 1/2 pounds.  Seriously????  Not that I’m at all complaining, but it just frustrates me sometimes how my body works.  I stopped nursing officially last Friday.  Once I stop nursing I can finally begin to lose the baby weight…  it’s been a long 9 1/2 months with still looking like I had a baby not that long ago.  I’m thankful to finally begin to fit into my clothes again.  Maybe by Thanksgiving I will have the “old” me back again. 

A good friend said today that having a baby is one of the last selfish things that you do.  Her point was that parenting in itself is a very selfless way of life.  Most people have a baby because they want a baby – and well, once that little bundle of joy arrives your life is never quite the same.  Being at your newborn’s beck and call day and night.  Those babies are dependent on mommy and daddy… and as they grow, and mature, they are still dependent on the parents.  I have seen mom’s and dad’s of grown children serve their children without a second thought.  It amazes me every time.  I don’t think I’m in that place quite yet.  I wonder if I ever will be…  I love my three children with all my heart and yet I’m stll quite the selfish woman.  In fact, having the kids has shown me how selfish I am.  I will always be thankful for that.  I don’t want to be a selfish person, and yet at the same time I can’t seem to be able to give up myself completely to them either.   I don’t want to lose who I am as an individual.  I don’t think this is a wrong way of thinking, but I also don’t think that those parents who do give themselves entirely to their children are wrong either.  There is something to be learned from them.  And I’m still learning what that something is.

I just can’t seem to get myself organized.  It’s beyond frustrating for me, for Rich, and for anyone else I’m sure who has to deal with me on some sort of intimate level.  I think I really need to just discipline myself better in getting things done… maybe I should develop a love for lists.  Ah, the dreaded to-do list… see?  I automatically make lists a negative thing.  sheesh!  Well, what if I make a list for what I’d like to get done in a day and then maybe set a timer for how long I think it should take to get said task done?  Maybe it would help me from getting distracted?  I don’t know… but I do think it’s worth experimenting with.  I’m such a go-with-the-flow kind of person and trying to get myself on a set schedule is really really hard because it’s just not natural for me.  siGh.  Does any of this sound familiar?  Because I’m sure that I’ve probably blogged about getting organized before.  Will it ever just be something I do or am?  I keep telling myself that once all the extra junk we have is gone that maintaining the house will be a lot easier to do.  I sure do hope so!

When we moved into our house a little over a year ago we had pretty much gotten rid of half our stuff.  We realized that we didn’t get rid of enough stuff and ever since have been trying to down size.  Now about 3 days or so after we moved in I started feeling sick and found out that I was pregnant…  the house never got unpacked properly because I was sick for about 20 weeks, and things that should have been donated to a thrift store or thrown out never made it out of the basement…. and lots of it is still there.  I CANNOT stand clutter, yet I have a very cluttered house (in my opinion).  So this morning i went down into the dungeon of stuff and packed up and brought up a decent amount to get rid of.  It’s all sitting on my grass in the backyard right now so that I have absolutely no choice but to pack it up in the van today and drive it to the thrift store TODAY.  It feels good to finally make a dent in the chaos that has been slowly taking over my house.  When Rich gets home later I think I’m going to ask him to do a bit more organizing downstairs for me… there were just one to many spiders that I came across down there this morning and I think I’d much rather do something else in the main part of the house where spiders are less common.