and now we have a talker

Our precious is the observant one.

she wants to take in her surroundings and know before she talks. Before last Sunday she did not utter ONE word in during Sunday School or nursery time.  Last Sunday, the SS teacher came up to me and said that our precious talked NONSTOP.
our precious even went so far as to tell her what song she wanted to sing - Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.  SS teacher, trying to reel it back in and talk about God, asked, "Who made the stars?" our precious answered, "I did!"

Since then, she's been Ms. Social Butterfly.  She talks to the guests who come to our house.  She waves to anyone in the streets.   What a difference overnight.  She had so much going on in that little brain of hers.  She just had to let it out eventually.

But then again, she is my observant one.

Trying to remember...

A realization that my oldest can go into my closet and wear my clothes makes me stop to reflect on their growth.

Our jewel (9 years old)...
She's my straight shooter. She's not afraid to talk to anyone - young or old.  She's firm in her convictions. If she thinks she's right, she'll go to the death for it.  She completed her first swim season this year and just started her spring season.  She's improved like nobody's business!  However, her favorite part of swim was being coached by Coach Kathleen and meeting friends.  During meets, you'll see her chatting with friends on the side.  She values friendship over competition.  She's very good at public speaking and presenting her various pieces.  She loves swimming, reading, and riding her bike.  She loves being outdoors.  As a small add on, her favorite baby book was: The Wheels on the Bus.

Our precious (2 1/2 years old)...
She's my witty, reserved, observant one.  In new environments, she'll watch quietly and take it all in.  You may not know it, but she's got a LOT going on in her mind and when she's comfortable, her witty humor will coming shining through. You'll know it by the twinkle in her eye.  She is persistent often wanting to complete the task herself.  It may take her 15 minutes to get the buttons off her jacket off, but she won't let you help her.  "I do it, I do it!" She's not afraid to use her charm to get you though, so be warned.  Her cuteness is dangerous! She loves puzzles and dress up.  She loves playing with her big sister and singing "Let it go" from the Disney movie, Frozen.  She's not afraid to go after what she wants.  She loves the water!  The past 6 months, she had significantly increased her verbal skills. She may be following in her sister's swimming fins.  she loves coffee.  she'll steal it if you're not watching :> Her favorite books are: Goodnight moon and We're Going on a Bear Hunt.

Our little man (4 months)...
He's my guy.  Unfortunately, the last month, he's been battling eczema and we keep trying various things to get rid of it... from conventional medicine to homeopathic treatments to controlling mama's diet.  So far, we're still in the trial and error phase and nothing seems to be working :( however, he is one amazing smiler. he loves to laugh and smile.... and that makes us laugh and smile alongside him. he loves to kick and grab at toys in front of him.   he coos and watches with intent.

Post partum

I've been feeling guilty with not being productive and getting anything done this past week and even though it doesn't make sense (given the fact that i gave birth about a week ago), that's just how i feel.
i told our jewel that we'd take December off with the birth of our little man and we planned for it by working hard through the summer... but still. guilt becomes guilt.

It's been 8 days and today's the first day that I'm starting to feel like myself.... and since my mom's here...

i got veggie soup in the crock pot for dinner,
cleaned out the fridge,
the kids played outside in the first snow of the season,
came inside and got some hot chocolate (nicely frothed by my man)

did 4 loads of laundry,

made some snowmen ornaments with our jewel,
remembered to remind our jewel to practice her clarinet,
and ended the day with swim practice for our jewel.

we didn't get to the gingerbread cookies that i had planned but that'll just have to be saved for tomorrow... if i still have some energy.

ahhh.... now my brain can rest.

our precious turned 2 today!

our jewel said it so appropriately, "mom, time flies by so quickly! she was born. then she just turned 1 and now she's two!" no kidding!

we celebrated with some cupcakes from "house of cupcakes". our precious licked off every last bit of that icing. just thinking about it makes me cringe.

it's a blessing to have this precious one in our lives.  she's my fearless, reserved, fast learnin', bundle of joy. thank you Jesus!

random thoughts

a few random thoughts that are floating through my mind...

1. precious learned the number 9. so jewel decided to quiz her. it went something like this:

jewel: what's 2+7?

precious: 9

jewel: what's 3+6?

precious: 9

jewel: what's 5+2?

precious: 9

jewel: no, you're wrong!

precious: hey! and then punched her in the nose!! hard!

i declare! don't mess with precious.

2. the other day, i was talking to our jewel about wwII.  after we talked about the facts of the war, she asks about the philosophy and doctrine of war. ie. why do christians kill people? aren't they supposed to love people like Jesus said? japan isn't a christian country but we are, right? 

oh boy! so i just did what every other good parent did. i said, "let's talk about it later". then i passed the buck to my man and asked him to follow up with it. 

3. first day of CC was yesterday. i felt so bad; i was so exhausted, that i fell asleep the last 10 minutes of it... when i was supposedly watching a few of the younger kids ( my 2 year old included).   

i'm still recovering today. i woke up extremely exhausted and even after a 3 hour nap, i'm still wiped out.  i can't wait until the kids go to bed so i can too.   currently they're playing outside with the neighborhood kids but i can't get myself to get off the chair to make dinner. 

4. i feel guilty. precious' birthday is tomorrow and i've planned nothing. and when i say nothing, i mean,  our jewel reminded me that it was her birthday tomorrow and that's what started my planning - oops! better ask my man to swing by the store and pick up a cake or something.  one redemptive plan - we're going to hit the beach for the day with my sister on saturday and do a casual bday celebratory lunch there with simple sammies and cupcakes. nothing big, but i think she'll enjoy it. just thinking about the day honestly wipes me out. but i really want to try this beach out; i've heard that there's a walkway that goes out pretty far into the beach so that will be nice for my man and hopefully we'll finally find a beach that we might remotely enjoy.  

i'm digressing but here's my hatred with beaches these days... so going to the beach looks something like this - first i take the stroller and all the beach junk to the spot. then i come back and attempt to roll my man to the spot. meanwhile, our jewel carries our precious besides me. however, sometimes, the sand is too hot, hard, etc.. and she can't carry precious very long. so then we switch plans and i push my man to the spot and then come back for precious.  by the time i get to the spot, i'm extremely exhausted, hot, and in a sour mood... esp since i'm preggo and haven't worked out in months. once we're on the spot, my man can't go into the water so he's extremely hot and the girls want to go in the water so i go back and forth between the beach spot (which is nowhere near the water) and the water.  so 1 1/2 hrs later, my man and i are grumpy, tired, and hot and we've had enough. we gather all our stuff and do the multiple trips to the boardwalk again.  

doesn't that sound like a miserable time at the beach?? so that's why we hate it.  a few times we've gone with our good friends and they help with all the gear and the wheelchair -- then i'm not so miserable.   

we'll see how saturday goes. having my sister with me and the supposedly long walkway should help a lot. we'll see.  i'm cautiously hopeful. 

that's it. my post-its are gone.

one poopy day

what a day of poop - literally. poop everywhere.

we have been using both disposables and cloth diapers - generally cloth at home unless we're anticipating a dirty diaper, then it's a disposable. but lately she poops whenever she's got a cloth diaper on. so, i'm in the bathroom trying to shed the poop before i pop it into the wash and it ends up all over the toilet. not to mention that i've got a screaming baby in the other room and an 8 year old who's irritated because i'm making her finish school. 

now here it is 8:30pm and i'm just now sitting down to start my lesson planning for teaching the kids tomorrow in CC. ugh.

it's that time of year

our jewel had her recital yesterday.

our jewel was a doll!

she wasn't scared of going up on stage and her favorite part was being able to wear makeup!

our precious enjoyed watching her big sister dance

over and out

i've been up since 4:30 but i am like a spring chicken - our precious gave me 7 hours of uninterrupted sleep last night - woo hoo!!!!

our jewel has a field trip today and some dear friends of ours offered to take her so i've got the whole day to myself - well and with precious. i've got great plans to finally organize our office!

random tidbits

just randomly thinking back to the birth of baby #2. it was odd to think that i was stone silent during the entire time. with #1 i was ms. chatter box. but with #2, you couldn't get me to talk for anything.  i think it was the prospect of the c-section that left me speechless. i don't think my man has ever seen me that silent. i think it scared him. isn't that odd? that silence can scare a man?

today i learned that our jewel's ballet teacher isn't going to be there anymore. i really liked him as a teacher and now i'm bummed. i don't think i would have switched her over to this school had i known he was going to be gone only after 3 weeks of us being there :(

do you ever look around your house and see all the projects you want to finish but know it'll probably never get done? ie. the island in our kitchen that we had upcycled and topped off with a wine rack. pretty cool concept if we could just finish it. or what about my wing back chairs that i seem to re-upholster/ slip cover everywhere we go... it's time for another change but that's probably not going to happen either.  and lastly, my kitchen table that we painted two years ago.. it needs to be stripped of the paint and re-stained. yes, i knew i was going to do this when i first painted it, but i wanted to paint it anyways....

kiddo tidbits:
- our jewel: she's an amazing big sister.  honestly, she has got to be the best helper this side of town! she's doing remarkably well in school and i've been really impressed with how much she can handle on her own.  this week we finally met our neighbor next door and it turns out they have an 8 year old daughter (only child) and so they had their first playdate yesterday. it's so awesome to be able to just pop over next door and they seem to be getting along splendidly. could this be her new kindred spirit?

- our precious: i can't believe how big she's getting. i've got to bump her up as she's outgrown her infant carseat at almost 5 months. her eczema seems to be subsiding. yeah!
but she's STILL not sleeping through the night!!!  me thinks she's not getting enough to eat while nursing as she seems to take a full feeding each time she wakes up in the middle of the night. the problem is that she hates the bottle and she's very hit or miss with the rice porridge... so it's been a doozy trying to supplement.  i'm really at my wit's end. last night i was so tired, i fell asleep at 8:45pm. however, i was as tired as ever when i got out of bed this morning at 7am because our precious eat every other hour!!! i was thinking back to the last few months and i realized that since she's been born, i have not slept more than 4 hours in a row.  it's taking it's toll on my body and my memory is worse than ever. 

Merry Christmas 2011!

end of the week recap

a typical homeschooling day. i disliked this stuff in school yet our jewel loves it.

they melt my heart!

my girls

this one just cracks me up! our precious gives us this look all the time and we're trying to come up with a funny name for it... but nothing yet.  our jewel is lovin' on our precious like crazy. it's wonderful to observe.

Celebrating Labor Day before labor

Happy Labor Day!  In addition to it being a day to celebrate the hard work of our country's workforce, it is also the day before i go to the hospital for the birth of our precious one.

I'm ready for the jokes to begin...

challenge: can you give me a labor joke that i haven't heard before -- that will make me laugh?

unfortunately, i have been so busy homeschooling and getting ready for our homeschooling group (that starts in about a week) that i have barely had time to get ready for our precious one.  i still haven't installed my base for the carseat, we just got the stroller the other day, and i PRAISE God someone gifted us a bottle of baby wash because i forgot to get some.  we put up the pack-n-play last night and i'm doing a load of baby laundry as we speak.  what a rough start. this is NOT my personality.  so i don't feel quite prepared for this precious gift to come tomorrow, so i guess we'll be winging it.  i figure i have a few days while i'm in the hospital for my man to pick up those last few urgent things that i can't seem to remember.

i laugh whenever i hear someone else's views of my running.  here's a post someone put up after talking to me.

what not to do

my man was saying how he wanted to look during the c section but when i asked the doctor about it, she said their policy was no.

so last night (a week before the scheduled date), we did the next best thing - we logged onto youtube :)

NOTE: this is NOT for the squeamish!!!

i had the BEST belly laugh watching my man watch the video! seriously, i can't remember the last time i laughed this hard - it left me in tears!!!! he's definitely not squeamish but this video got him good.  

update and The ultimate smoothie and food soapbox

Yesterday's doctor appointment indicated that our precious is still on the small side. the paranoid, pessimistic side had me jumping to all sorts of conclusions. but then i starting thinking w/ my brain, rather than my hormones.

we live in a culture where somehow big means good. have you seen the slurpee sizes these days? or the super sized meals at the fast food joints? look at our animals. i was at a farm several weeks ago w/ some friends and i commented that the cows looked really thin. my friend just looked at me and said - well of course they look like that - they're grass fed cows! they're SUPPOSED to look like that.  so when did we start thinking that beefing them up with all that hormone induced corn was a good thing???

so while our precious might be small, i was thinking about what i ate this time around, versus what i ate 7 years ago with our jewel.  i've learned a lot in those 7 years and our food lifestyle is quite different now.  most of our meets and dairy come from farms.  our intake our supplements and vitamins are far superior now then they were then.  even the grains that we eat now are of a superior quality.

take for instance our morning kefir smoothie:

1-2C of kefir (homemade. raw. fermented milk).
1 TBL organic flaxseed
3 TBL coconut (fresh; NOT bagged)
fruit
raw egg yolks (i usually do about 1 per person, but i really should up it to 2 per person). i ONLY use farm eggs. i would NOT use store bought eggs (even if those eggs were organic)... but that's just me.
drops of Cell Food (minerals) for each person

this is very different from what i did 7 years ago where i think i might not have even made smoothies then.

so here are some of the things that i'm doing differently this time around:

1. farm foods. can NOT stress this enough.
2. get high quality supplements - not all cod liver oil is the same.  we get our cod liver oil from Blue Ice.  we get ours from the farm but AMAZON also has it. please note our jewel has been taking cod liver oil since she was one.  and even she had a hard time adjusting to this brand. i switched to this one because it is far superior (fermented oil is much better for you) to the one we were using before. fermented oil is much much fishier.  we get the peppermint flavor and just being honest, it's not enough to disguise the fish.  Also, for the longest time, we just did the cod liver oil. but i've learned that if you couple this with the X Factor (which is really just vitamin K2), the health benefits rise dramatically. so my man and i also take vitamin K2.  our jewel gets it from the farm butter i buy.

3. which leads me to good quality butter.  i grew up without butter in our diet. and honestly, i still do not care for the taste of butter. i know, i know... even my man finds that utterly surprising that someone could NOT like the taste of butter. but i get myself to try and eat it and incorporate it into our foods whenever possible. OK - but this is NOT just any old butter. this is RAW FARM BUTTER.  good quality farm butter has something that Weston Price referred to as the X Factor (aka Vitamin K2). i make this fudge recipe that incorporates this butter and i have our jewel eat this fudge as a chaser after she takes her cod liver oil. 
4. i'm still eating sugar but it's significantly less than what i used to do: i've substituted coconut sugar and raw honey a lot more into our foods. but don't get me wrong, if you send me a batch of neiman marcus chocolate chip cookies, i will gratefully eat them :) ha ha ha
5. i incorporate a lot more homemade fermented foods: kombucha, kefir, yogurt, sauerkraut, etc.
6. the other major change is the quality of chicken stock. i use the free range, grass fed chickens i get from the farm and make good quality chicken stock the Nourishing Traditions way. 

note, these changes came gradually. it's so hard to go cold turkey for me so i just did what our family could handle. little by little.  over the last 7 years. i'm still learning. i know i still have lots more to change but we do what we can and i'm grateful for what i've learned so far.  i think we're on our way and ultimately, we do our due diligence, trusting that God's sovereign over it all.