First real snow of the winter! Daddy helped get the deck steps and ramp ready for some fun sledding! And Clare started work on a snowman on the stump out front.
I love our beautiful trees and yard in the snow! And a neighbor we don't even know plowed our driveway for free! We are expecting ice tonight so we may still be snowed in tomorrow but the work to get out will be much less!
After years of promising, we finally have season passes to Busch Gardens! We went yesterday, Monday after Divine Mercy Sunday, for the first time. Daddy had to work, so it was just the kids and I.
To get the two littles in the van, we reminded them how they loved the Teacups at Christmas Town. Dominic was so excited that he kept telling me to drive faster and pass all the cars! Traveling is difficult because he is prone to motion sickness and the van AC is still having issues, with heat pouring out at the same time as the cold air. Gets pretty miserable in the summer. It was 80 degrees yesterday.
But, we made it all the way there with no vomit! No vomit, that is, until Sydney went to help Dominic out of the van and he threw up on her, her shoulder, down her leg, her shoes. Fortunately, he only got a tiny bit in her hair. Not a great start to the day. Of course, she is the only one who didn't pack extra clothes. But Maria did and was able to give Sydney a new shirt. Dominic always has a couple extra outfits. So, new clothes and lots of baby wipes, and we were on our way.
We had a great day. Emily was big enough for all the roller coasters, which she loved. Benjamin, on the other hand, does not like the rides so I was bummed for him. The great thing about Busch Gardens is that the little people rides are interspersed with the the roller coasters, so there wasn't much need to split up or people getting antsy waiting their turn for fun. I did have to keep reminding everyone that we had season passes and didn't have to do it all in one day.
I am so blessed to have these happy, helpful kids. Some people would probably think it is crazy to take nine kids to an amusement park. But we made it through with no tears until the very end when Liesl didn't want to leave and I reached a point of exhaustion! Eight hours on my feet was about my limit! My toes and legs are killing me today!
Next time we will be sure to take in a show or two, maybe do the river cruise, and plan the day a little more before getting in the park.
Some highlights:
I will have to work backwards because I'm pretty sure I can't remember what happened twelve months ago. Sigh. The year flew by. Wonder if that is a sign of old age or just of being too busy and stressed to feel like I'm living each moment. I want to make myself blogging promises for 2016, but I'm done with promises. I'm also done using the kids' middle names on the blog. Too confusing, and then when I post birthday cake photos, it's kind of pointless anyway. ;-)
December is our crazy month. It started well. A very talented friend, who has inspired me so much over the years, wrote a beautiful advent devotional book. I was feeling calm and ready, we were praying and preparing. Colette's birthday was planned and I was ready for it. She turned 14, which is just really old. St. Nicholas came and brought warm slippers and socks. So far, so good.
Then the cold from hell hit. Everyone coughing, eyes running, overall misery. I was diffusing anti-germ oils by day and sleep-inducing oils in the evening. While no one seemed to be getting better, Dominic was getting wilder, and wilder. Fortunately, I saw a post on a feingold forum about oils that feingold kids react to, and realized I was pumping citrus and mint and other things that I would never feed him into his air. Cut that out quickly and life got calmer.
Sweet Liesl turned three on the 13th. So bittersweet, just wanting to keep her my baby. She's a bit spoiled, I have to admit and we need to do some serious adjusting before she is running the house! But she's so smart and articulate. Her favorite movie to watch, because her sleep schedule is erratic, is the musical Cats that Sydney brought into the house. She sings one of the songs and is starting to imitate the dancing. She's still nursing, since there is no baby sibling to usurp her, and I'm pretty sure she has no intention of weaning. Again, bittersweet. I don't want to push her, but I do dream of full nights of sleep in my near future.
Maria's birthday follows two days after Liesl's. She turned a very old 16! We broke with the tradition of staying home for birthdays and went to Busch Gardens' Christmas Town (thanks to Granddad and Nana!) The weather was beautiful, in the sixties! I love Christmas Town, it just fills my heart. The excitement, the decorations, and having my babies together (minus Charlie) and realizing how good life is. The little boys wore capes all day. They held hands and announced that they were brothers (guess they just figured it out!). They shot down all the bad guy planes and cars on the different rides and saved all their friends. Everyone was so well behaved all day, even me and Court! Next year, he and I are getting the two day pass and sending the kids home so we can have another day to take in shows and eat German food!
We got a little break before the next birthday, but everyone was still sick. We had to postpone cookie day and birthday celebrations with my parents so we wouldn't get them sick. I tried hard to keep the balance between the logistics of shopping for so many people, birthday dinners and movies, and an environment of prayerful preparation and waiting for Christmas. I didn't do as well as I'd hoped. Maybe next year.
Then came the boy birthdays. Seth, my golden boy turned eight and Benjamin became my third adult child! In between birthdays, we got the tree up and slowly started decorating as we entered the fourth week of advent. We watched lots of Marvel movies, a couple of Christmas movies, and even Jurassic World.
After the birthdays, we finally got up to Grandmommy and Granddaddy's to celebrate all the birthdays and make cookies with Uncle Joe. It is always so fun to be with him!
Somewhere during the month, we decorated gingerbread houses, the middle kids auditioned for their Catholic Schoolhouse play that their big sister is directing, and we saw Sydney perform in The Snow Queen.
I need to upload more pictures and come back and load up this post with all the fun we had this month! My dinosaur of an iPhone won't let me upload pictures to Instagram and this blog app doesn't like Facebook.
Obviously, Christmas deserves its own post and I will work my way back through the year after that.
How Thomas climbs the steps three at a time, stretching his little legs until I'm sure he pull a muscle! And how he likes me to rub his feet when he is tired.
How he says peanut butter and jelly (jjellie) and table (tamel).
How we have to open his yellow bahs (granola bars) just right and assemble the pbj in the right order.
How he needs one sip of his pear juice, then has to put the cup on the table before we can water it down.
How he runs laps in the house for what seems like hours a day.
How he loves the snow and loves to come in, covered in snow, to give me a play by play of all the fun!
How he calls Star Wars "Lego Star Wars" because of the video game.
Or the time no one would do Just Dance with him, so they set up Jackson, the punching bag, on a chair to be his dance partner. Jackson even got more stars than Thomas once!
Here I am again, trying my hand at blogging. Every time I try, something goes wrong (knock on wood, but not really because that would be superstitious!). Either the app won't load, or I can't log in to get my pictures, or I'm just so distracted the moment I start. I'm so easily deterred and often paralyzed by perfectionism. Then a year has gone by and I haven't recorded the moments which are the whole point of this blog.
So, my new blog motto is "less than perfect". I'm just going to post, even if I can't get the pictures in the posts or I only get pictures because I can't think.
Here goes:
Right now, I'm sitting in Panera while half the kids are at their co-op clubs. The youngest three stayed home with their oldest sister, so I could drop the others and run. Timmy and Regina are part of a newsletter/yearbook club. I'm so happy they have some good teens to hang out with. Elizabeth, Clare, and Teresa have Little Flowers. It's a good group, but we run into the same problem of being slow to make friendships because we live too far to part of a lot of activities, and being a bunch of introverts, we are slow to get to know people. I dream of someday living five minutes from church.
There are still several inches of snow on the ground from the six we got earlier this week. It is our first snow and the kids have been having fun, even Aurelia. It is nice to have more helpers than those needing help when it comes to getting ready for the snow! Yesterday, they were sledding (barely) down our front yard. Apparently, Teresa made contact with a tree. Thomas came in and said Teresa hit her head with a tree. :-) (she was fine, of course, the hill is barely sloped). When they told him it was his turn, he said no, he could get hurt! There was a hint of judgement there, like how can you guys even suggest such a thing! :-)
I'm glad they are getting some snow fun in. I just wished we had been "snowed in" longer. Life is too busy these days to declare many snow days. I am ready to just move on to warm spring days if I have to go out anyway.
Time is up, so a few snow pictures to close:
Yes, that is a comb in Teresa's hair, but that story has to wait!
Earlier this summer, we were surprised and delighted to find out another baby was on the way. Being no spring chicken, I was doubtful that God would bless us again. But He did and we were thrilled, although I did have those moments of "what was I thinking? I am way too old for this!".
We told the kids earlier than usual because I knew there was a chance that we might not get to meet this sweet baby in this life. I wanted to celebrate her life as long or a short as it would be. I explained to them that were no guarantees. But as the weeks went by I started to feel more confident. I was eyeing cute fall maternity clothes and wondering if it was too soon to buy more swaddle blankets. :-)
Then two weeks ago, after some fun, active days, I started to show some signs that there could be a problem. On August 18, I went in to a 3D/4D ultrasound place to get a peek and, hopefully, reassured. I even paid up front for a "heartbeat bear" so I could always have her heartbeat with us, just in case. I was ten weeks along and the sweet woman who owns the place started looking with such enthusiasm only to realize that, although I should have been ten weeks, the baby measured eight weeks. She couldn't find a heartbeat but remained optimistic, saying my dates were probably off and it was just too soon to find the heartbeat with her machine. Of course, I knew better, but agreed with her and said I'd get checked out by my midwife. They gave me a refund for the heartbeat bear. :-(
Three weeks earlier, a lovely woman, who was really just an acquaintance, died suddenly along with her twenty-week old unborn baby. The whole community was stunned and devastated. You don't need to know someone well to be deeply grieved by such a tragic loss. I was in church that weekend, feeling the weight of many things and just a deep sadness. I begged God to pour His mercy down on me. In that moment, I felt a calming peace, and then... a name, Mercy. Mercy Faustina. Too soon to know if this baby was a boy or girl, but I felt the name was whispered to me there in that moment. I laughed to myself, thinking Court will never go for it but he couldn't argue with God. ;-)
I walked out of the sonogram place with my head swimming with thoughts. Hoping that she was still alive, angry that God had taken her, resigned to the fact that I was just too old, scolding myself for carrying toddlers and doing too much, scolding myself for being mad at God when I had ten healthy children, and on and on. Should I schedule with the OB? Should I pay for an $800 "medical" ultrasound to see what was happening and why? Or should I just wait?
I didn't have to wait long, by evening I knew I had lost her and was starting to miscarry. I had dear, dear friends who had walked this road ahead of me to walk beside me through the anxiety and fear and sadness. Even in the hardest times, God continued to shower me with His mercy and grace.
Mercy Faustina has a little place under the maple tree, lovingly prepared by her daddy and sisters. Clare prepared her box and wrote a beautiful poem. We said goodbye and prayed for her intercession, longing for the day we will be united in Heaven.
Wednesday evening, dinner has been over for an hour and a half, but the kids ran back outside after eating to savor the last moments of a lovely day. So now, we are trying to get the "dinner chores" done. Teenage girls are taking turns doing dishes and holding baby while listening to the music from the play that Katherine is in this fall. Timmy has the dogs outside, and the other five are sword fighting with foam swords, jumping on furniture and making an incredible amount of noise.
I need to hurry them along so we can pray the Rosary. We are reading Stories from Shakespeare and tonight we will read Teresa's picks of Hamlet and As You Like It. It is a sweet book that does a good job condensing the stories while including some of the language of the originals.
The house is a wreck still since my washer flooded the laundry room, hall, bathroom, and downstairs storage room. Everything is crowded into the dining room and main area in the basement. At least my washer is fixed so I don't have to go back to the laundromat. Expensive, and those day time "talk" shows are horrible! But it was already crowded in here so it's bordering on claustrophobic now. Trying hard to remain peaceful.
Katherine has a Clep test tomorrow, so hopefully it will be an early evening. We stayed up way too late last night watching the very cheesy Robin Hood series that Katherine discovered. The night before that, my brother Joe was hear and the big guys watched Star Trek with him.
My mom has surgery tomorrow, so if you are seeing this tonight please pray.
My sweet girl is nine months and almost a week. I have been totally remiss is journaling her little life. I can't go back, but I can stop today and make some notes:
four teeth, fast little crawler, she hangs on to furniture or the exersaucer, but isn't cruising yet although she does lots of squats and is very steady. Won't be long.
Happy, happy girl who plays happily, takes good naps (usually in Timmy's arms) but nurses all night in my arms! Her occasional fussy times are solved by siblings singing, or in a pinch listening to Danny Kaye sing. Timmy sings a song from Mulan, something about making a man out of you. Lol! But it comforts her. :-)
Clare is responsible for dressing the baby every morning. She loves picking the perfect outfit. It's more fun the days we put disposable diapers on because her little pants fit better. But she is allergic to the disposable so she mostly lives in cloth. They all pitch in to change her even in cloth diapers.
She thinks Thomas is the funniest thing, even when he gets a little too loving and has her in a choke hold. (Not really, but close!)
She isn't eating yet. Unless you count books. Yes, I'm just too lazy. Maybe after the wedding.
Still can't get over her. Really. I may get close to it around 3am, but even then I thank God for his generosity.
Posted with Blogsy