A morning with Mason.

Just a little post to give you a little chuckle over life with Mason this morning.

Lets start with when he second wakes up (the first time he wakes he gets in bed to nurse and sleep for another hour… or two… ):

“GOOD MORNING MOMMY! I love you, Buttcheeks!” Are you ready to get up and eat some breakfast and start your day? “Nooooo…. I stay Mommy cozy bed. I swee-sie (nurse) BOTH sides boobies all day!” No, why don’t we just get up, Mommy has to go potty and eat. The baby needs food. “No, no baby need food.” Then he jumps out of bed, runs to the bathroom. “I go tee-tee potty first! No Mommy tee-tee potty! MINE POTTY!”

Cry It Out–We don’t do it.

This isn’t meant to judge any of you who do practice the Cry It Out (CIO) method, it’s to give you a look into why we do not. And don’t worry – this will be long.

It’ 11 pm and a little boy is laying in dark room whimpering.

He looks to be about 6 or 7 and you can see him shifting about in his bed and you can tell that he’s about to wake up. The whimpering gets louder and the boy wakes up. It’s dark and he is alone and scared in his room. He wants his mother or father but he has no way of getting them. He can’t leave his bed so he can’t walk to them. The whimpering is slowly turning into soft crying. He just wants someone to come and tell him that it’s ok, it was just a dream, he isn’t alone. He wants someone to come and give him something to eat to take care of these hunger pangs that were bad enough to wake him up. He wants someone to come soothe this pain he is feeling through his whole body.

His crying gets louder and louder, progressing to wails and screams. Still nobody comes to him. All he wants is someone to come to him and make it better.

Downstairs his mother looks up to the ceiling with a weary look and then turns to her husband, “He’s at it again.” Her husband sighs, looks up at the ceiling, looks at the clock, and then turns back to the TV and turns it up. “Well, he’ll stop in a little bit, if you go and get him now you’ll just be spoiling him and he’ll never learn to comfort himself.”

The baking of Pollywog #5

14 weeks, 20 weeks, 26 weeks, 30 weeks

I feel like I announced Baby #5 and then just sort of left you all hanging. I mean, I'm in the final stretch of this pregnancy and this is only the second mention of it on the blog. And to think, I was actually worried when I announced the pregnancy on the blog that all of my posts would turn into pregnancy posts.

So, here is what you have missed in the baking of Pollywog #5:

You can do a lot of changing in 10 years.

Ten years ago I had just had Zach. I didn’t put much thought at all into parenting stuff, and I didn’t put any thought at all into labor. I didn’t put thought into breastfeeding or circumcision or vaccinations or co-sleeping or, well, anything. I had just been trying to get through my junior year of high school and praying that he stayed in until I was done with the school year and that, please Lord, my water wouldn’t break while I was at school.

After he was born we did breastfeeding and bed sharing. Zach was such a sweet and easy baby and he made my first year as a mom such a breeze. I never put thought into if were going to be breastfeeding or not. I was raised seeing my mom breastfeed my younger siblings and my aunt breastfeed my cousins; it’s what moms did, so, I did. He was exclusively breastfed until I returned to school in the fall, and continued breastfeeding until he was about one. My favorite time of the day was coming home from school and nursing him. It wasn’t until years and years later that someone pointed out how odd it was for a 17 year old high school student to go into breastfeeding so unquestionably and continue doing it for a year. He also continued to sleep in my bed until right before Ryan was born.

Four months away.

I've had breaks from the blog before - generally brought on by not having internet for a weeks or a month. However, I do believe, actually I know, that this is honestly the first time that I have ever been away from the blog for roughly four months.

It isn't like I woke up one morning and decided, "Hey, I don't want to blog. I have nothing to write about." No, it's more like I woke up one morning, days before the boys got out of school, and I no longer had internet (or cable, but I can honestly make due without that most of the time). It was supposed to be a short break, I was promised a week, maybe two. Somehow that week or two has turned into four months. FOUR MONTHS. I die a little each time I think about that. The problem is, for some reason, the company that we go through is expecting us to pay a bit over $500 to get it back on and even paying a little on it at a time (and a few big amounts) we still haven't been able to pay it all down to get it back on. And of course that isn't even the only big huge bulk thing we're paying on. We're also working on paying down the labor/delivery cost for our doctor, paying him for the regular visits, and all of the testing that for some reason our insurance is paying zero to zilch on. Lets just say that right now internet is not the priority.

(No matter how much I wish it was.)

The Mason Sleep Journals–Nights 1&2

Remember when I said that my goal was to get Mason sleeping through the night, without nursing and in his own bed before he turned two? Yeah… that never happened. I started working on it, but then he decided to cut in all of those pesky eye teeth and, well, it ended up not happening. On his birthday we decided that it was time. It’s time to try this for real – no excuses – and get him out of our bed. Step one is getting him to sleep through the night without nursing. I figure if we take care of that first we’ll have better luck getting him to sleep in a room (or bed) without me.

Patterns are scary when you have 4 kids.

Maybe I should clarify that and say that patterns are scary when you already have four kids, and you don’t want any more, and you notice patterns that go the same with your previous times of having kids.
(I’m not overthinking this at all, am I?)

THE PATTERN:

1. Someone gets potty trained. When I got close to having Ryan the little boy that my mom watched – Jared (also Zach’s best friend) was getting potty trained. Even though Zach was only about 18 months at the time, he too started potty training then. (Though he still wasn’t fully potty trained – daytime – until he was 2.) Then with Bella, Ryan started potty training at about the same time I got pregnant with her and made it out of diapers and pull ups about a month before she was born. Bella first started potty training a few months before I got pregnant with Mason and was fully potty trained right before I had him. Mason has recently started showing a real interest in the potty and has gone to the bathroom several times in the potty.

“… the light in my world …”

For the past almost ten years I have been holding onto a little scrap of paper. And I do mean little. It’s about 1/2 an inch tall and maybe two inches long. About 9 years ago I took the little scrap and taped it into the back of a rather pitiful scrapbook that I had to make for my senior year of high school. Since the scrap was from high school it seemed like a fitting place for it.

When I feel like maybe I’m failing as a wife, or maybe failing as a mom, or just kind of sucking at life in general, I look at the scrap of paper. After all of this time I have it memorized like a favorite part of a poem. I even have the writing memorized. That little scrap is one of my most treasured things.

It’s sort of amazing.

(image source)

I went into church today and I was not at peace. I mean there is a slew of things going on in my life and family right now that I am just not even a little at peace with. Not to say that I am always a calm and at peace person, but I try put faith in God that He will get us through the bad times in life and that he will always see us through. Generally – the majority of the time actually – I can do this.

It’s the day for hearts full of chocolates.

But not like REAL bloody, gooey hearts stuffed with chocolate. And not real looking hearts stuffed full of chocolate.
*though admit it, that sounds cool*

Today is a day full of these odd shaped things that look nothing like hearts to be full of chocolate. And flowers. Because it’s more romantic to pay a ton on flowers out of season. That’s true love, yo. And all of the other traps and frivolities that prove how much you love the person you are sending them to.

If you aren’t picking up on my subtleties, John and I don’t really do Valentine’s Day. Mainly because we are cheap and broke. Also because John’s grandparents taught him that you should prove how much you love and respect your partner everyday, not just one single day that the rest of the world gives you the OK to be a sap on. His grandfather always told him it was better to go all out on days for no reason, other than something that day made you remember just how much you love and respect that person.

I won’t lie, the first few years this sort of bugged me. I was like “Dude! Your grandfather ruined the most romantic, loving day of the year! Everyone else gets all this special treatment, and special gifts, and goes and does special things! I’m lucky to get a dang card!!” It didn’t matter that I am not exactly a romantic, card wanting, flower loving, chocolate eating kind of female. It didn’t matter that I actually don’t even like most chocolate. I wanted my something special just like how everyone else around me was getting their something special. It was my due as his girlfriend and then wife. Everyone and everything said so. I was told over and over that if he really loved me he would get me all of these special things to prove it on Valentine’s Day.

Dear Person.

You and I, we have a problem. You frustrate me. You annoy me. You make me want to scream and cuss and wish horrible curses and illness on you. You make me this angry being who I normally am not.

Before this year I’ve always rocked this scene. Or well, I always did fairly well. However, this year we’ve had lots of changes and shifts in responsibilities and focuses, and I’ll admit, this area has taken a hit. I make sure most things get done; but sometimes some things slip by me, or I think John took care of it, or he thinks I did, and in the end neither of us did. I am by no means perfect and I know, deep down, that you aren’t the evil monster you currently are in my head. You do what you have to do and what you are told do. The fact that I don’t agree with some of it isn’t entirely your fault.

Newsflash–Sometimes you want a little quiet.

This morning my head is killing me and I’m having this overwhelming feeling that I just don’t like people. This isn’t by any stretch a first time thing. The amount that I like other people is generally directly effected by how I feel.

Today’s headache is effecting the cuteness of Mason. As in the bigger he makes my headache the less cute that I am finding him. So sometimes my toddler annoys me and I admit it. Sue me. It’s not all his fault, he’s teething and the poor dude is miserable. Right now he’s laying naked on the floor and crying. He’s naked because when I tried to put a diaper on him he screamed and kicked me in the chin (not purposely in the chin mind you, he sort of flailed his legs about and my chin was there). I figured a diaper wasn’t worth the meltdown it was causing. He’s crying because I told him no he couldn’t eat my food, that he needed to go get his own.

Dear 2014,

I am totally planning to own you, just so you know.

I’m going to lose these last 10-15 pounds. And I am going to get my hot body back.

I’m going to get Mason moved into that bed that is not my bed and sleeping through the night. I’m going to do those two things and not force weaning on Mason to get them done.

I’m going to sell stuff this year. Just watch me; you won’t be able to stop me. I’m not entirely sure what yet, but trust me, I’ll figure it out.

Oh and when August hits I’m going to make dang sure Bella is ready for school. Her speech won’t hold her back. We’re working our butts off to get her academically up to par, so there’s no way I’m going to let her speech delay hold her back.

Do you know how I’m going to do all of this, 2014?
Hope.

I have hope and I’m going to let this hope carry me through the year.

When things go crappy, because you know that they will, I’ll hold on to that hope and keep it with me. No matter how bad things get this year I won’t let you take away my hope that things will always get better. You can’t hold me back or stop me. (Queue the cheesy Queen music) I will let my faith in God, my hope in a better future, and friends get me through the rough parts. I know going in to this year what some of these rough parts will be, and knowing is part of the reason I can have hope.

HOPE.
Hope is way bigger than you 2014, remember that when you try to break me.

Give a mom a webcam.

Each month I make a new scrapbook page all about the things that I love about the month. And, well, I need a new photo of just me for the page. Those are the rules.

I didn’t light a candle at 7 PM.

Tuesday was one of the hardest days of the year for me  - Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness day. It’s the day that people all over the world use to recognize their grief and love for the babies that they have lost. This covers miscarriages, infant loss, and stillbirths. And one thing that people do is at 7 PM (their own time) all over the world they light a candle so that it is a wave of light.

But I didn’t light a candle.

It’s not that I’ve never had a loss. I have. But I still didn’t light a candle at 7 PM.

Let him sleep.

I’m not going to lie, or feel any guilt or shame in admitting this:

Mason still sleeps in my bed. Not only does he still sleep in my bed, he’s almost 18 months old and he still doesn’t even pretend to sleep through the night.

I don’t mind. I feel deep down that as long as he wakes to nurse at night, and as long as he feels he needs me, that we are doing the right thing and that he is exactly where he belongs. The few times that he has slept through the night (in his pack-n-play right next to my bed) I never sleep well. I’m up all night checking on him or waiting for him to wake up.

I know bed sharing and co-sleeping isn’t for everyone, but it’s always been the way our kiddos have slept as babies before they would start sleeping through the night. And up until Mason it wasn’t any big deal. With the big boys it was just me and them, and then with Bella, and Mason at first, it was us and them. I’m pretty sure John enjoys snuggly baby loves more than me – this is probably because they aren’t trying to latch on to him when they snuggle him.

To my sons.

This week there has been a lot of hoopla over the whole Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke performance on the MTV VMAs. Most of it was directed to Miley since she’s been a public figure since she was a child and in most of our eyes, she is still that child. A few days later people woke up a little and remembered, oh yeah, there was a grown-*** man on that stage with her whose only outrage after the fact was that her performance completely eclipsed his in the press. There was a blog post almost immediately after the performance from a mom to her daughter about not following in Miley’s footsteps. My first thought after reading it was “Well, what about me? What am I supposed to tell my three sons about living in a world where there will be girls like that?!” Then there was this blog post from a man to his son about Robin Thicke, and I felt better.

Seven ten to seven fifteen.

Who would have ever thought that a five minute window would become so precious to me? Since giving up smoking I have realized that there isn’t really much you can do in five minutes to justify being alone for those few minutes. I used to have several kid-free five minute breaks during the day… and that didn’t even count the lovely 60 – 90 minute quiet time I got while children napped. I used to spend nap time outside, with a book, and would just sit and read and smoke. Ah… those were the good days.

2013 Book Challenge–I finally hit 50 books!

In celebration of finally, finally, finally making it to 50 books on my 2013 Reading Challenge (my goal is to read 100) I thought I’d share a little post about books! I’m going to say a little bit about each of my favorite books I’ve read so far. Enjoy!

the only order those are in is alphabetical

Our life in black and white.

If you know anything about me and my photo editing preferences you know this – I’m not a fan of making my photos black and white. I can love to death someone else’s black and white photos, but when it comes to my own, eh… not so much.

Then last night while I was laying in bed, it came to me.