Favorite Things

The longer I am in our new home, the more favorite things I have about it.  

Some of them are:

• The view from our bedroom
• The size of our bedroom... and the fact we have our own bathroom
• Our front door -- especially with our pumpkins on the stoop
• The view from our street as we drive down the hill to downtown
• The fact our laundry room has a linoleum floor -- not a dirty, spidery, concrete floor (like our old place)
• Tracey Ann's sweet little room with her big girl bed and a FULL closet to hang her little clothes
• The twins' sweet little room... that still needs to be set up, but we at least know which room is theirs and their two little sets of outfits from friends are hanging in their closet
• Our backyard shed
• Our fireplace... which we haven't used yet, but we know it works and we're excited to use it when we can
• Our HUGE bathtub in our master bath -- it is amazing!!

Preggers II -- Twins: 26 Weeks

 

How far along?  26 weeks

How I am feeling?  Pretty well, but very prone to heartburn... and, of course, physically tired each day.

How big are babies?  The size of heads of lettuce... between 1.5 to 2.5 pounds and 13.6 to 14.8 inches long

Sleep:  I sleep pretty well as long as I take heartburn tablets before bed... and as long as Tracey Ann and Hubby sleep through the nights

Boy/Girl, Boy/Boy, Girl/Girl Predictions: Maybe boy/girl?

Babies Nicknames:  Babies, or Twins

 

Weight Gain/Loss:  Let's just say, from here on out, there is weight gain... and we're done with this question

Best moment this week:  Taking time Saturday and Sunday to get outside with Hubby and Tracey Ann to a Halloween pumpkin patch and around fall foliage.  We dressed her in her little Honeybee outfit and chose pumpkins.  It was so much fun, but chasing her around is getting harder and harder.

Food cravings:  I'm not sure... I guess just food in general.

Missing:  The speed needed to keep up with Tracey Ann

 

Movements:  Yes, I love them

Labor Signs:  No, thankfully.

 

Comparison:  Here I am carrying Tracey Ann at 26 weeks

 

26 Weeks with the twins -- apparently we need more light in this room if we're going to keep taking pictures here...

General Attitude: Feeling very grateful for all our blessings, including these two little babies growing

 What I am looking forward to this week:  Just being home with Hubby... we still have our crazy schedules, but starting next week Hubby will be off hunting, at conferences, and then hunting again, so I am cherishing this last week of our being home together.

Milestones: I have officially had many strangers ask me "How much longer?" about my pregnancy... because it looks like I'm nearing the end... and, of course, I tell them, "Three months."

Halloween Comparison

Last year Tracey Ann was 9 months old around Halloween, and we took her to a pumpkin patch, sat her down, and took some cute pictures.

Halloween 2014 

This year, Tracey Ann is 21 months and we took her out around some beautiful foliage, and to a pumpkin patch which has some fun activities for kids, and we could hardly keep up with her.  She is the absolute joy of our lives.

More pictures to come, but these begin to offer a comparison of the two years...

Fully Appreciated

I have never fully appreciated my dishwasher before.  In fact, I think I've made a habit of under-valuing this modern, first-world appliance.

When I was single, I lived for a few years without a dishwasher, which was no big deal, and I adopted a philosophy at that time, that I would rather do without a dishwasher than laundry appliances.  In fairness to me, I adopted this philosophy in my mid-twenties and I really did mean it at the time, which meant, I foolishly thought this remained my philosophy for the past few years.  No dishwasher?  No biggie -- as long as I have laundry appliances.

This week I learned that I have been under-valuing the wonderful contraption known as a dishwasher.

The amount of dishes we generate as a family is so much more than I realized until I have had to do without a dishwasher for the past two weeks.  We moved in and didn't realize our dishwasher wasn't working until we had been here a few days... and then, I ran the (full) broken dishwasher four separate times thinking that the problem was me... I just didn't know how to work the thing before Hubby and I finally realized it was broken.

After washing dishes by hand (and switching to paper plates) for the past ten days, we finally had a working dishwasher last night, and I couldn't BELIEVE how MANY dishes fit into the dish washer -- after I have been washing sink-full after sink-full since we moved in.

Oh, Sweet Dishwasher, I have not appreciated you.

I still love my laundry appliances, and definitely appreciate not having to go to a laundromat... but, Oh, Sweet Dishwasher, I apologize for my apathy up until this point.

Motherhood and Guilt

Motherhood is full of many many personal decisions, and I think every woman needs to take everything in her life, and her child's life into consideration and then make the best choice for her family. (period).

Having said that, I don't buy into some of these mother pride campaigns on facebook -- like there is no right way to feed a baby to support women who don't breastfeed, or Cesarean birth is birth too.  Why do these women need the approval of social media for their decisions as mothers?  Frankly, if they do not feel confident in the decisions they made on their own, maybe they didn't make the best choice for their family.  If they did make the best choice for their family, that's all the approval they should need.

Motherhood Decisions of Which I am Proud:

• I am proud that I breastfed Tracey Ann for over a year (fifteen months)
• I was very comfortable that Tracey Ann stopped breastfeeding when she did and I feel no guilt about her not nursing until 18- or 24 months
• I am proud that I did not have any anesthesia for Tracey Ann's labor and delivery
• I am proud that we use clothe diapers some times -- we don't use them exclusively, but we do use clothe diapers when we can
• I am proud that my daughter is happy and healthy

One reason I can confidently and fully admit how proud I am of those decisions I made as a mother is because every day I make decisions that I feel so guilt about as a mother -- and I'm not waging any facebook campaign to make myself feel better about them, I'm simply living with the guilt and trying to do better tomorrow.

Motherhood Decisions for Which I Regularly Feel Guilty:

• Our daughter has her pacifier in her mouth too often 
• The television is on in our home too often
• Our dog does not get as much exercise as he should
• Now that its getting cold I'm realizing that our daughter doesn't have any pants long enough reach down to her ankles -- she basically wears skirts with capris underneath until I can get to Once Upon a Child to buy her some longer pants
• Since I've had the added project of packing, moving, and unpacking, Tracey Ann has been allowed and encourage to watch way too many cartoons and spend time playing on the ipad
• The larger I grow and the more physically uncomfortable I become in my pregnancy, the shorter my temper in almost every situation
• We've been in our new home for two weeks and Tracey Ann's clothes still are not unpacked and in drawers in her room
• Tracey Ann eats way too much mac and cheese
• I'm working outside the home and Tracey Ann spends time with a nanny
• Tracey Ann is with baby-sitters one night a week when I'm teaching at the local college because Hubby, inevitably has work responsibilities those same nights I am teaching

The truth is, every mother, if she is a good mother, feels guilty about decisions she has made, or circumstances she cannot control.  I don't think the way to be a better mother is to find other mothers who feel guilty and form a group about how we shouldn't feel guilty.  I think the best a mother can do is make the best choices she can, every day and try her best to do better tomorrow.

Getting Ready...

Tracey Ann is getting ready for life as a big sister by practicing sharing her water with Elmo... as you can see, Elmo wasn't quite ready to take the bottle, so she had to physically open his mouth for him and insert the bottle to encourage him to cooperate.

Oh, Lord, please help protect these twins from their well-meaning big sister.

What Makes a Home?

As I've made an effort to organize boxes and boxes of belongings and unpack some, thus far, I've found myself wondering what make a home... and, specifically, what will make this house our home.

What I'm discovering, little by little, is that, in our incredibly blessed life of abundance, home is made by the superfluous, sentimental additions to each room.  Within a few days, Hubby and I had located most of the belongings that we needed to survive as a family in this new space... but that didn't mean we were home.  If anything, we were camping, or on vacation, living out of boxes and suitcase -- and yes, we had what we needed, but we were not home.

For me, home is made, not by the items required to live our daily lives, but the items that are extra and unnecessary to our daily lives.

Last night I found the box that contained the manicure set that I keep in my bedside table, and what a sigh of relief I exhaled.  I use that manicure set all the time, FINALLY it will be where it belongs, in the drawer next to my side of the bed.  The manicure set is helping to make this place home.

Last night, I hung white Christmas lights in our bedroom, probably an incredibly immature habit I developed in college -- but I think one strand of Christmas lights -- either white or colored is the perfect amount of relaxing light to have illuminating my bedroom in the hours before bedtime.  When I was younger, I would always have a strand of colored lights, but since getting married, I like white lights -- I think they are more romantic.  These lights are helping to make this place home.

Tracey Ann has sort of been in-between two bedrooms for the past week.  We chose her bedroom and moved clothes and furniture into that room.  Then, we began the process of moving her to a big girl bed... and the bed was set up in another room.  She has now been sleeping at night, and for nap-time in her big girl bed for over a week, and so Hubby and I had to decide which room would be Tracey Ann's -- the one with all of her clothes, or the one with her big girl bed.  Yesterday a decision was made, and last night I made big strides toward making the "big girl bed" room HER room, and the room with the crib, the twins' room.  Knowing that I'm creating specific rooms for my children is helping to make this place a home.

As I am unpacking, I am definitely learning how many meaningless belongings my little family has... but I am also learning that some belongings are anything but meaningless, and they really do help to make a house a home.

There is a reason many women, myself included, devote their lives to the position of Homemaker -- a house does not become a home simply when a family moves in.  A house becomes a home first by loved ones who fill the space, and then, in time, each person in the family feeling safe, secure and loved in that space.