Solomon - 2 weeks old

Solomon is two weeks old! I can't believe it. And despite some early breastfeeding challenges, he weighed in at 9 pounds 5 ounces at his two week check up. He's finally figured out this whole latching thing and nursing is going really well now. He sleeps all the time! I never could understand when people would say, oh newborns sleep all day and all night. My first two never slept that much. They were awake and alert for most of the day from day one! But Solomon does sleep a lot. I wonder if that is simply the difference between a 39 week baby and a 42 week baby. In any case, we have gotten a few good awake pictures in the last couple of weeks.

Ahhhhh sunshine!

Siblings!

 

Big Sister

Big Brother

"help me!"

 Brother Love

The Birth of Solomon River

Tuesday, January 13th started as any normal Tuesday. We got up early to take Keziah to preschool. On the way I was thinking of the chores I wanted to get done that day. I had spent the day before vacuuming the van and getting car seats rearranged and installed. And I had gotten the birth tub and all my birth supplies organized and ready to go. That night I had sent a text to my mom that I was officially ready for baby. We joked that I still likely had a couple of weeks. And that was fine with me because there were still so many things I wanted to do. The past month was a whirlwind of activity and "survival mode" kind of living. Besides all the holiday hustle, the kids had battled a long bout with hand, foot, and mouth disease, and Michael Paul had battled the flu for a long week. Everyone was finally on the mend and I was hoping for a couple of calm, uneventful weeks to emotionally and spiritually prepare for the new little one. Most days I had been so busy, I forgot I was pregnant, and I didn't feel as bonded to the baby as I wanted to be. As I drove home from dropping Keziah off, Reuel asked if we could play "Giddys" (horses) when we got home. I suddenly had this gut instinct that baby was going to come that night. Of course I quickly dismissed the thought: Yeah right! me? Go early? Ha! I will at least go to my due date, I said to myself. Still, I suddenly felt as if I should blow off chores and spend the day giving the kids lots of one-on-one time.

I spent the morning playing with Reuel and then picked up Keziah from school. She wanted to play paper dolls and I continued to resist the urge to mop my floors and instead played with the kids. I noticed some Braxton Hicks contractions and lower back pain on and off throughout the day, but didn't think much of it. I had been having the toning contractions for months anyway. The back pain was new but I attributed it to vacuuming the van and fighting car seats the day before. In retrospect, I believe I was probably having some early back labor.

At 2:45 the kids asked me to put their swinging bar up. As I pulled down on the bar to lock it in place, pain shot through my back. I looked at Michael Paul and said, maybe the pregnant lady shouldn't do this. As he got up to fix the bar for the kids, I walked into the kitchen and my water broke. Uh oh! I waddled into the bathroom and called my midwife, Sara. She was shocked I was calling her. She really wasn't expecting me to go for another couple of weeks. I told her how I strained myself on the kids' bar and I was afraid I caused my water to break and it was too early. She assured me my baby was healthy and would be perfectly fine to be born now, even if 39 weeks felt "early" to me. As we talked I started having some mild contractions. They were pretty close together, but very very mild and short, certainly not active labor. We made a plan for her to come over around 6:30 to check on me and the baby. In the mean time, I just needed to monitor my temperature and the color of my water for signs of infection, and to call her if I did start having stronger contractions.

Immediately my controlling nature started forming a plan. First I called my family and told them to get on the road. I decided to go ahead and spend the afternoon making ice cream with the kids, then having family movie night as we had originally planned. I didn't want them to suspect anything was going on. I figured I'd continue to have mild contractions and then after kids were tucked away in bed and sleeping soundly, I'd go into active labor and have the baby in the night before they woke up. It was a perfect plan. Ha! Well, Baby had a plan of his own.

From 3:00-5:00 things continued as planned. We made ice cream. I started dinner. Michael Paul got out his special 1860's pocket watch from his grandfather that he has used to time contractions for all three kids. They were consistently three minutes apart. But they were very short and mild, more like menstrual cramps. I knew from Keziah's birth that things could go on like that for hours and not really cause any progress. At 4 I became hyper sensitive to the noise and constant requests of the kids. The usual chaos of life with a 2 and 5 year old was somehow amplified far beyond my usual tolerance levels. I decided to start family movie night early and put the Lego Movie in for the kids.

As I sat down to snuggle them, I realized I was in a pretty negative state of mind. I didn't feel ready for this baby. I had had no time to spiritually and emotionally prepare for this baby. Suddenly I began to have some major anxiety. What if the baby was too early? I thought of all the sickness that had surrounded me for a month. What if I had an infection? I began taking my temperature every 10 minutes out of paranoia. I knew I had to clear my head so I grabbed my stress away oil and rubbed some on my neck and head. The kids were quiet and happy that I was watching the movie with them, so I leaned back and closed my eyes and focused on my breathing. Suddenly all my positive affirmations began to come back to me and eventually my peace returned. Dinner was done at 4:30 so we fed the kids and I was able to eat as well.

5:00 rolled around and I started cleaning up the kitchen. At some point a contraction hit and for the first time I had to stop what I was doing and breathe through it. A few minutes later another one hit. Michael Paul walked in and said something. I didn't respond. He said, "that looks like a real contraction." When it passed I said, "I think we better call Sara back. I don't know if I want to wait until 6:30." The next contraction hit and a sing-songy moan escaped my mouth. Alright, it's for real now. I heard Michael Paul on the phone with Sara, "Jennifer says to come now." Then to me, "She's already on the road - she had a feeling she should just go ahead and come." I headed upstairs. According to his phone, that was 5:27.

Michael Paul and the kids followed me. I leaned against the bed as Michael Paul rushed around trying to get the birth tub set up. In between contractions I was barking orders to him. I'm sure I was not at all polite. But I knew things were happening fast and I was desperate to get in the water. The kids were incredibly calm. They were stroking my arm and rubbing my back. Occasionally Reuel would say, "it ok mommy." I actually found their presence comforting and was glad this was happening before bedtime. Another contraction hit and I suddenly felt nauseated and the thoughts of "I can't do this, I can't do this" flooded my brain. And I knew those were tell-tale signs of transition. Holy Cow! Am I in transition?! I got to the tub. My best guess is this was around 5:35.

Thank goodness for good water pressure! The tub was filling up fast. But we were struggling to get the temperature right. I kept telling Michael Paul, too hot, too cold. He was in the bathroom trying to adjust the water but we had 50 feet of hose for water to travel before I could tell if it was a good temperature. So that was frustrating. But still, contractions in the water were so much more tolerable. Water birth is definitely as awesome as everyone says it is! Finally I realized the water temperature was good enough and didn't matter because I had the urge to push.

I pushed once and reached down to feel the crown of baby's head. But I did not want to tear so I forced myself to stop pushing and breathe through this contraction and allow myself to stretch. I held my baby's head in place and massaged the 'ring of fire'. I knew I had to get Michael Paul's attention but I just could not speak in that moment. He was still in the bathroom trying to adjust the water and his back was to me. I'm sure he had no idea how close we were. When that contraction ended, I could only catch my breath and with the very next contraction I pushed the baby all the way out into my arms.

"Michael Paul!" "Michael Paul!" He turned around to see me sitting in the tub with baby in my arms. Somehow I had the presence of mind to look at the clock and note the time, 5:48. Almost immediately baby started crying and he was pinky-red from head to toe, so I knew he was perfectly fine. Michael Paul started frantically going through the birth supplies asking where the suction bulb was. "We don't have it," I said, "Sara brings that and we don't need it anyway. Look at him! He's breathing and crying just fine." I announced it was a boy (we hadn't found out the sex ahead of time). And Reuel immediately noticed, "he have penis like me!" The kids were standing by the tub just smiling and in awe.

I wasn't bleeding at all and so we all just sat tight and enjoyed the moment. Michael Paul called Sara and his first words were, "it's a boy!" She laughed and said she knew she wasn't going to make it. A couple minutes later Sara arrived. They helped me out of the tub and into bed. At 6:14 I delivered my placenta. All the postpartum stuff was real easy this time. No tearing meant no stitches. Yay! And I only lost about 350 cc's of blood (I lost 800 with the first two). It was so weird because I didn't feel like anything had happened. I didn't even feel exhausted or hungry. After all, I had just eaten dinner an hour before. Sara made the comment that she didn't think my body had figured out that I had given birth. Everything pretty much went back to normal almost immediately.

Michael Paul cut the cord with the special knife he bought for the occasion. Then we all celebrated with the ice cream we had made that afternoon. We made some phone calls, which of course were very amusing. Mom: "hi, we're on the road. how are things going?" Me: "Oh fine, the baby's here." Mom: "WHAT!"

We finally got the camera out and got some pictures. And Solomon got his newborn exam. 8 pounds, 12 ounces. 19.5 inches long. And absolutely perfect!

Cutting the cord

8 lbs 12 oz

So in summary:
2:45 pm: water breaks.
5:00 pm: active labor starts.
5:48 pm: two pushes and baby is born into my arms.

As we cuddled in bed that night, Michael Paul made the observation, "Well, we've had three wonderful home births. The first, our midwife caught the baby. Our second, I caught the baby. And our third, you did it all on your own! That's pretty cool!"

While I certainly would never plan on having an unassisted birth, I have to admit, catching my own baby was an experience that is simply beyond words. And for our little family of four to become a family of five, just the five of us in that room - in that moment - there are no words for such a treasure  - just a treasure to store up in my heart for all time.

End of Summer and a New School Year

As I promised in my kitchen post, we did make it up to our kids for having a lousy summer by packing in a ton of summer fun in August. With our kitchen complete, we headed to the park, the pool, and in general tried to give the kids a lot of our undivided attention. 

A recent trip to the park:

The big thing we ended up doing was taking our kids on a train ride on the Great Smoky Mountain Railroad! Every summer they have a special dinosaur themed train ride (based off the PBS show Dinosaur Train) that is just perfect for kids. 

Trains and Dinosaurs! What kid wouldn't love that?!

Grandaddy, who never turns down a train ride, even came up to ride with us!

The train took us to a dinosaur themed adventure area where there were bouncy castles and all kinds of dinosaur themed fun.

There was "dino golf," crafts, a fossil dig, a nature trail, and of course the star of the show, Buddy, was there.

We all had a blast!

All in all, August was a great end to summer!

A New School Year

Every fall I read posts and see pictures of everyone's kids starting school. My mom and sister, both teachers, start talking school all the time. And for the past four years I've felt a little left out of that wonderful 'back to school' spirit. Maybe I'm just a huge dork, but I always loved back to school time. I loved fresh school supplies and the anticipation of learning new things. I loved the idea of life becoming very scheduled again! And because I went into teaching, I continued to catch the spirit even after I graduated college. But the last four years I've been hunkered down in the stay-at-home-mom zone with two small children and I missed out on that 'back-to-school' feeling.

Well, this year I caught a bit of it. Keziah moved on to the next level in her dance school. This year she is learning tap as well as ballet. And the start of dance again was a very much anticipated and exciting day.

First day of dance: 

And something new for us this year is pre-school! The kids are going to pre-school one half-day a week. We had several reasons for taking this step. One is just so I have a few hours each week to get some much needed things done. I have a lot to do on my "nesting" list before baby #3 joins us and some things you just can't get done with small children around! (You moms know exactly what I mean). Did I mention that neither of my kids nap anymore! And Reuel is an early bird up with the sun, and Keziah is a night owl who is never asleep before 9:30! So, yeah, I have no breaks during my day to get things done. 

First day of Preschool:

The other big reason for preschool is to give us some feed-back about the schooling decision. Keziah will be in kindergarten next year! And really she's never been in anything super structured other than her short dance class each week. We haven't decided how we are going to "do school" next year. At this point we are in the praying, researching, exploring options phase and we are trying to be open minded to where God would lead. We haven't ruled anything out as of yet and I'm hoping some feed-back from  both Keziah and her teacher about how she does this year will help us in that decision. Her teacher has been teaching 4 year-olds for 20 years! And while there is quite a bit of play in her day, there is also a lot of structure and learning in a kindergarten-readiness curriculum. 

Reuel's 2 year-old class is mostly play! And although he finds it a little hard to say goodbye to mommy, he is loving it as well!

I even got to buy school supplies for them! No notebooks or folders yet, but I did thoroughly enjoy perusing the school supply section grabbing glue sticks, water color paints, and things. Happy Back-to-School!

"Mommy's New KitKit"

"Mommy's new kitkit" is Reuel's favorite phrase at the moment. Translation: "mommy's new kitchen" for those of you who don't speak toddler. We spent our summer completely remodeling our kitchen. And while I am super pleased and excited about it now that it is practically done, I can't say I would recommend doing something this big with two toddlers and pregnant and a hubby who works full time and doing almost all the work yourselves! All our relationships suffered. We were all stressed out most of the time and no one was feeling any grace for anyone else. So we all behaved rather poorly toward each other. It really needed to be done so our lives can return to the grace-filled-chaos that is our family norm! So that is my only negative to share and now I will move on to the fun stuff.

First off, WHY? Why a kitchen and why now? Well for starters I really do spend half my day in the kitchen. I love to cook from scratch. I'm passionate about REAL food. I love to experiment with things. I've found the kitchen to be a perfect place to combine all my talents and passions and creativity. It's math. It's health. It's art. And seeing as how we have to eat something, it's also practical. Only ... it wasn't practical. My old kitchen was anything but practical. There was no. storage. at. all. I kept half the things that should have been in my kitchen in the basement. The layout made no sense. There was no prep space next to my stove. The fridge stuck out away from cabinets in a corner across from the only drawer large enough for silverware so that the drawer only opened 5 inches before hitting the fridge. My particle board cabinets from the 70s were falling apart. Several shelves were missing and the ones surviving bowed terribly. And the sheer inefficiency of the lay out was maddening. Like "here is a 36 inch wall - lets put a 20- inch cabinet here" Seriously. You would think whoever built the house and put in a 10x10 kitchen would at least realize with a small kitchen you should maximize all the space you've got. But no, no they didn't. Cosmetically, it wasn't too bad. The previous owners had painted the cabinets and made some quick and easy updates to make it more sell-able. And I'm not really the type to care too much about cosmetic stuff. But the dysfunction of it all drove me insane! Anywho, I've pretty much been designing this kitchen for three years. Because anytime I was in it my thoughts would become, "Seriously?! there should seriously be a 36 inch cabinet here" and "Really?! the stove should really be here and the fridge there". Of course I thought it would be years down the road before we saved enough to do it. But then thanks to a generous gift from my parents we figured out we really could pull off my dream kitchen now. Especially if we did everything ourselves and made some wise and frugal decisions along the way. And so we took the plunge ... not knowing I was about to become pregnant. But there was no way I was backing out now!

DEMO TIME! Demo was every bit as fun as it looks on HGTV! I highly recommend for stress relief. We had to tear out one wall to take out a pocket door and put studs in so I would have something to hang my microwave on. This is where my fridge use to be. But we moved it so had to prep the wall behind for cabinets and stove and microwave. It also made electrical work easier. 

My dad came up and did a lot of electrical work for us. I even have outlets inside my cabinets! One I wanted for a charging station for phones, ipads, and things. The other is for a warming light that I will use in the winter next to my keifer to keep my fermenting going. The best part about designing a kitchen is all the little unique details I was able to throw in to make things work for me.

"Oh no what happened to mommy's kitchen!"

I finally got some cabinets! In the end we only paid professionals for cabinets and counter tops. Two things we really couldn't do ourselves.

Michael Paul taught himself to lay tile. YouTube can teach you anything these days!

He did the floors and I learned enough from him to do the back splash.

And he added some "wow factor" with this threshold leading to our family room:

Here I am with a bucket of grout. This is the only picture that proves I actually did something. But I did a lot, folks. A LOT! (but not as much as Michael Paul) Ok Ok. Credit is due. Here are all the things Michael Paul did either completely by himself or with a little help from me (help being I just stand there and hand him tools): He did all the heavy duty demo which included layers and layers of flooring (seriously it was linoleum on top of linoleum on top of plywood on top of linoleum on top of linoleum on top of plywood on top of sub floor - we went down to sub floor), built a wall and dry walled it, redid all the plumbing including rerouting for my new fridge, tiled the floor, installed all the appliances and faucet, patched and sanded walls, built new door frames and window casings and baseboards, and added lots of details to give it a "wow" factor, and I'm sure other stuff that I am forgetting. Not to mention making about 513 trips to Home Depot and putting up with a not so friendly boss (that would be me). I did all the planning, the buying, the phone calls, some demo, some painting, the backsplash, lots and lots and lots of cleaning, and lots of assisting. My dad did all the electrical stuff and helped Michael Paul on some odds and ends and helped me glue the backsplash. And my mom painted and was a huge help in entertaining the kids so we could work!

The Finished Product!

If you're looking for advice:

(And if you are actually still reading this lengthy post, you might be)

Besides my "don't do it" advice I started this post with, I can actually share a lot of helpful hints if you are just crazy enough to "try this at home"

How to maximize space in a tiny kitchen:

1. Run your cabinets all the way to the ceiling and invest in a stepstool. Then keep the things you use least on top

2. Run cabinets as wide as space will allow.

3. Get cabinets with no center stile. You can store really wide things easily.

4. Plan plan plan and know what you want before you order cabinets. I actually wrote down every kitchen item I own, then figured out the best way to store it, then designed my kitchen around my needs. Example: I have a really skinny cabinet that stores my toaster, my mini food processor, and my hand mixer. It's perfect for those three items and uses 7 inches of space without wasting any. There is no wasted space in my kitchen and yet none of my cabinets look crowded.

5. A countertop depth fridge is truly an awesome invention! Your kitchen will look bigger without a big fridge sticking out.

6. An over the stove microwave is also an awesome invention. Clear up counter space.

How to get a high-end kitchen on a tiny budget:

1. Pick out your appliances and then wait for them to go on sale. I had all mine picked out for months and then bought them memorial day weekend during a huge sale. I saved $1000 that way. Then they just sat in my family room in boxes for a month until we could install them. Annoying but saved us a lot!

2. Stock cabinets are your friend! They have come a long way. And they will cost 1/3 as much as custom at least! We are very satisfied with ours. Another bonus: no wait time because they are already built.

3. Granite has come way down in price. It really is more affordable now so don't be afraid to look at the things you thought would be out of your budget. 

4. Be flexible. You might love the tile that is $3.50 a square foot. But that other one that looks similar is only $1.00 a square foot. In the end you will love it just as much!

5. Obviously, do as much as you can yourself. Don't be afraid to learn a new skill. You can pretty much learn anything off the internet for free these days.

6. Be very thankful for your small kitchen. It's smallness is what makes upgrading so affordable. And if you maximize your space, you won't even notice how small it is anymore.

And finally, take care of your loved ones. And when your huge project is finally over, apologize to your family for being so stressed out and rude to them, take your kids on fun outings, give your husband a long healing hug, and when he says, "I think I can dry wall this whole family room myself," kick him in the shins.

In case you haven't heard ...

I'm pretty sure everyone who actually follows me here knows, but on the off chance some dear reader is out of the loop, I thought I would make it official here in blog land...

Yep that little pooch is baby number three!

This was quite the surprise and took some getting use to. But here we are getting ready to do the baby thing all over again. I'm about 14 weeks and feeling pretty good now. As for my due date, well "due date, shmue date" is what I like to say. Officially on paper it is January 17th. Which is really interesting because Keziah's official due date was December 17 (she came the 28th) and Reuel's official due date was February 17 (he came  March 2nd). So clearly I have a thing about winter babies being due on 17's. Not that we planned any of our children really. Also, clearly, my babies like to cook until they are well done! So lets just go ahead and assume this baby will come on February 1st!

Michael Paul wants a girl. Let's just say Reuel is more than enough boy for one family! ;) Keziah goes back and forth and Reuel wants a girl (although I'm not too sure how much he 'gets what's going on') and he probably wants a girl because he thinks his big sister is awesome. As for me, well, I still see myself as a "girls mom" but I would be fine with either.

In other news, we've been working all summer on a kitchen remodel. And hopefully we will wrap that up this week. And yes I promise to post about it with pictures and everything. And due to that we haven't exactly done a lot of exciting things this summer or taken many pictures. But thankfully the kids are really into the camera lately and take turns posing and taking pictures of each other. So we do have some real gems lately like this:

And posing in princess atire:

(You get a glimpse of my old kitchen here! It doesn't look like that at all any more!)

And modeling our sunglasses:

technically this one is a selfie (and a pretty good one):

more sunglasses:

and Reuel wanted to take a picture of mommy of course. He's really good at cropping out my head. But I have a close up belly shot thanks to him.

The kids have had a pretty lousy summer thanks to our kitchen remodel. We've been working so hard every day we haven't managed to take them to the pool or the zoo or really anywhere other than the park a few times. They've been forced to entertain themselves around the house most days. But we do hope to make it up to them in August. We have some fun things planned. And yes I will try to blog about those too. ;)

 All my teacher friends (including my mom and sister) start back to school next week and there is a general sense that summer is over. But for us with this kitchen project finally behind us, it feels like summer is just beginning!

Star Wars

The time has come.

It was a slow building. We planted the seeds early. You could say we took this PSA about introducing your children to Star Wars seriously. 

From birth, there have always been a few Star Wars toys intermingling with the kids' toys. A Princess Leia action figure has guarded my kitchen from the window since before the kids were born. Reuel dressed up as Darth Vader for Halloween this year, even though he technically didn't know who he was. Then while Michael Paul and Reuel were out running some errands last fall, they went to a bookstore and, much to their surprise and delight, discovered it had been infiltrated with the Dark Side. So they hung out for a while.

Then he got a Darth Vader lego for Christmas. Then there was the costume party we went to in January dressed as Star Wars characters. And Keziah's obsession with Disney princesses suddenly had her asking a lot of questions about this Princess Leia we talked about a lot. She began to study the Star Wars section in her Lego magazines. She started to learn the characters. And then it happened ....

"Daddy, I want to watch the Star Wars movie with Princess Leia"

dun dun, da da da dun dun ....

He cautiously put the movie in Tuesday evening after dinner with low expectations figuring she would get bored after a few minutes. She sat perfectly still. I doubt she blinked. Her eyes glued to the television, her daddy beaming with pride, it was truly an epic moment. She cried when it was bed time and we had to turn the movie off. Yeah we didn't really think it through and started it too late in the evening but we also didn't really think she would love it that much. She woke up the next morning, shot out of bed and ran to wake Micahel Paul up, "lets finish Star Wars, wake up wake up, we have to finish Star Wars."

On Wednesday we watched the rest of episode IV. On Thursday she begged to watch the next one, so we watched episode V. On Friday we watched episode VI. And then we watched V again because that is her favorite.

On Saturday Michael Paul was organizing our basement with all the boxes he recently got from his parents containing the remainder of his childhood treasures. So when he got to the box of Star Wars stuff, he pulled some out for Keziah.

On Sunday she requested to have a "Star Wars day" after church. So we did. And her daddy did not disappoint!

He emptied a rather large box of Star Wars toys for them to play with

Then we built Star Wars legos. These were age 7+ legos and she did really well! He was very proud of how little he had to help her.

She dressed up as Princess Leia and called Reuel 'Skywalker' most of the afternoon. And we concluded the evening by dancing to the soundtrack (which was being played on record of course!)

a few additional noteworthy points (for any curious fan that might be reading this):

-we did skip the Rancor scene as we thought that might be a little much for a 4 year old but found no other editing was necessary. 

-I have been instructed by Michael Paul to only allow them to watch the videos (original release) and not the DVD's so that they will not grow up thinking Greedo shot first and not be exposed to the other such nonsense that Lucas added later. (just in case you were curious!)