On Moving....

Moving next Thursday.

 I hate packing. 

Trying to do it while pregnant (please read this as hormonal),

 with 3 young kids to run here and there and by myself this week has helped me to hit the wall. This is not something I enjoy. 

In fact, I may hate it as much as going to the dentist to have cavities filled. 

It's kind of been a perfect storm though as well. 

Moving alone is not causing me to stress to my max. Nope. 

It's all the interruptions my day has and trying to balance trying to keep doing it all. 

It's the 17 month old who gets into everything and drags it out of the boxes that are nearly filled but not quite enough to tape shut yet. 

It's the 3.5 year old who keeps messing up the few toys I've left out and drags them all over my being packed/messy front room. 

It's trying to keep it all together, when I'm the only one doing so.

It's trying to keep it all together, when inside I'm falling apart from trying to keep it all together. Have I mentioned how much I hate moving? 

I need a moving buddy. 

Someone to hold my hand, hold the kids off, hold the boxes and the tape and the permanent marker, and tell me we got this. 

That we're almost done. 

That there are only a few boxes more, so let's push through together. 

All is not lost, all is just stressed.

I'll keep holding on if you will.

This too shall pass. ;)

And just because, here's a song about moving on that I love.

Sunday Best

Today I talked Aftyn and Bronwyn into bearing their testimonies at church. In sacrament meeting!

I asked them while we were sitting in our seats what they wanted to say. They both gave me an idea and with lots of reassurance that I would be right there to help them, we walked up to the pulpit after the current bearer spoke and Aftyn took a breath and with some hints from me and a couple reminders of what she told me she wanted to say, she finished.

It was so sweet and touching! The things she bore testimony of, that Jesus was real, that He loved her and she loved him, were so amazing to my heart because she said it all so sincerely and with a serious tone to her voice.

Bronwyn got up and was so sweet, and as Bronwyn-nie as possible, bore her testimony and said that she loved Jesus and she loved mommy. With a big proud grin on her face.

I sure love my girls. I'm grateful for their sweet spirits and testimonies. It's amazing to see how big their testimonies are at 3 and 5, almost 4 and 6. I am impressed and maybe only a little worried that I am doing my best job with them, as most mothers do worry.

And lest you think my children are perfect, they both struggled for the rest of the day with listening, being kind, and not hitting or being mean to each other. And that's a normal day around here. Because after all, they are 3 and 5, almost 4 and 6. ;)  But the one perfect moment of the day was a good thing to hold onto.

Glutened

Ever heard the term "glutened"? 

Maybe if you are a member of the elite group I belong to, the gluten sensitive club.

All last night and even up until 30 minutes ago, my stomach was killing me.

It only occurred to me while speaking to my husband on the phone that this feeling

was oddly familiar. And then I remembered.

When I first began having signs of gluten sensitivity, the lining of my stomach would

become exacerbated by gluten, feeling like the top of my stomach was on FIRE.

Not to be confused with the feeling of heartburn.

Oh no. No. This feeling is all around the top of your stomach. It burns, it aches,

it really, really hurts. Generally, it feels like you want to curl into a ball on the couch

and stay there until the horrible feeling goes away.

Yeah, thankfully I haven't felt this feeling in about 6 months or so I'd say. Maybe longer.

What's the best way to deal with it, you might ask?

My solution is: do not eat. Drink lots of water but do not add to the fire in your stomach.

Your stomach needs to reset itself and the best way to do that is with nothing added.

You're welcome.

Sleeplessness

Okay, well, it happened again so I figure I may as well document it.

When I am pregnant, and awoken in the night by something, I cannot go back to sleep.

It is horrible. It happened last night again.

I was awoken from a deep sleep around 3 am, and couldn't go back to sleep until nearly 6.

My mind was spinning with all the things I needed to do for my day, baby names,

needing to pack, anything and everything was open for conversation in my poor, overly

tired brain.  Finally, just when I was giving up on the very idea of sleep, I started to

get groggy. What the heck?!?!

I need some tips. How do I help this to stop??  It tends to get better near the end of

pregnancy when I'm so tired that I can easily slip back into sleep, but it's not usually

so bad at this point. Perhaps I should just be patient and wait it out because my tired phase will

be here in about 12 weeks and that isn't all that far off. I don't have this insomnia that often,

only about once every 2-3 weeks probably.  Anyhow, I guess I needed to document this and

also ask for any tips that anyone might have. Thanks!

The Curse/Blessing of Adding To Your Family

I have experienced an amazing phenomenon 

almost every time we even think about adding 

another child to our family. 

Care to hear?

I call it the "what are you thinking" phenomenon.  

1.The thought to have another child enters your mind.

2. As you are still contemplating this thought and probably leaning toward the affirmative,
   the children you are currently parenting suddenly go into "horrible child mode".

3. You think, "what are we thinking?", along with "Heavenly Father knows what He's doing,
   this is just a bad day. Every day will not always be this bad. Have faith."

4. You get pregnant. Things seem to be okay, children AREN'T acting in every horrible way
   possible, so you decide it was just a fluke.

5. There will be several days throughout  your pregnancy that at least one of your children acts
   in a way that seems very unlike them. Or one of your children suddenly hits a VERY difficult
   patch in their development. Don't worry, this is just your proving ground. Proving to yourself
   that you can handle difficult situations even while juggling being pregnant and parenting
   other children.

6. You give birth! You learn that all that horribleness while pregnant was just to prepare you for
   the challenges of adding a whole new person for you to care for while caring for the other littles
    in your charge.  Welcome to juggling life while having little time for yourself.

Repeat every single time you think to add to your family. I'd say that's about right.  ;)

Today was one of those days. 

Sigh. 

Mirren and Bronwyn were tag-teaming it today. 

What were we thinking? 

Things That Need To Be Recorded

Mirren finally started walking FULL TIME this weekend! Woohoo!! She is so happy and excited to finally have the confidence to be doing this. I feel like I'm seeing the happy little girl I've been missing since she started teething 4 months ago. Although, she is also getting all her molars in right now so I'm not sure how that whole happiness thing is suddenly working again. I guess she is just really excited to be a big walking girl!

We're finding out in 2.5 weeks what we're having, so now is the time to get your guesses in! Boy or girl??  Your vote is wanted!

We are also moving in 4.5 weeks. This past weekend I officially boxed up some more things. Yuck. :P

We're having our own ham this Easter weekend here at home! I'm so excited because I've never made my own Easter dinner, so this will be a first and you all know how much I love doing (most) of my own firsts. I want it to be fairly healthy-ish, so I've got to figure out what to do besides a salad. Maybe some smashed cheesy cauliflower instead of mashed potatoes? We shall see.

The weather here in Idaho Falls is beautiful lately, except for the random windy day on Saturday. Beautiful mild temperatures. I think we could actually call it Spring!! :)

I may add more as I think of it, but this feels like all I've got right now. Have a happy week!!

I've Got a Loverly Bunch of . . . . . . . Marbles

**POST EDIT:  Ha ha ha!! Sorry if you read this and my thoughts were not well strung together thanks to overworking on sewing easter dresses and distractions from children. I hope to have fixed it now.**

Yesterday morning around 4 am, shortly after giving Mirren the binky she lost while sleeping, I laid in bed trying to go back to sleep. (For some reason, when pregnant, if I get awoken I have the darndest time going back to sleep. I really hate it. That's another blog post entirely).

As I lay there, I had a thought pop into my mind about what I needed to blog about because I never had written about it. It's something we've been doing for over a year and I have found it an incredibly effective tool in getting the help I need around the house and motivating my kids to want to help without me having to get grumpy about it.

I originally got the idea from my sister Alyson, who shares lots of her good parenting ideas with me. Luckily she does the trial and error of what works and what doesn't for me!  She has been doing this with her kids for about 3 years I think with great success.

So here's the idea. We all need our kids to help keep our houses clean, whether it's from their own messes, the laundry, the dishes, the bathrooms, etc. Whatever you feel your children are capable of cleaning, here is their reward system! Using marbles as a way to mark how many jobs your child has accomplished, you put them into a jar/container until that child earns enough to earn a reward. What that reward is is up to you. Like my sister told me, rewards are not meant to be stingy things. This is something your child has worked long and hard to earn, so make it something worth all the work!!

 You store your childrens individual marbles in a container of some sort. Jar, rubbermaid container, whatever works for you. It needs to be a smallish/medium sized container.  I found my plastic container with lid at the dollar store. My sister also recommended letting my kids pick out stickers to decorate their work jars so they would each have their own unique container. I got my stickers at the dollar store too. They had a really good variety there and my kids loved picking out their own.  We went home and they decorated their own unique container. I forgot. I also bought my marbles and a big jar to hold them at the dollar store. Seriously, we're talking under $10 to get this thing set up. If you have jars and marbles already, it's even less. Within that first day, my kids were SO excited to start earning marbles! They were asking all the time, "what can we do to earn marbles?". It may help to make a list at first of what jobs there are for your kids to do, and how many marbles they will get for each job. I personally just have a pretty standard list of things my kids can help with at this point. My sister, whose kids are older, tries to keep a running list of unique jobs for each day and how many marbles they are worth for her kids and her kids pick which jobs they want. I'd say either way works, depending on the needs of your house and the abilities of your kids. We found after filling our containers the first time that we needed 95 marbles to fill ours. That sounds like a lot. And it is. But if your kids are working all the time and you are reminding them all the time to be earning, it should only take about 2 months to fill those jars, and lots of time to watch their marble jars grow and grow! By the way, I think my sisters jars are closer to 150 until they are full. So, every family's containers will probably be varying sizes. Just find what works for you!

  Some important things to think about:  I don't reward my kids for cleaning up things they messed up aka they got out all their toys and now need to clean them up. They made the mess, they need to clean it up. I give marbles for EXTRA jobs that they do, and that's just the rule at my house, jobs such as make their beds, empty the dishwasher, wash the mirrors in the bathroom, bring down sorted loads of dirty laundry to the laundry room, etc. Every house will have differences, according to whatever works in your house. I reward my kids with 2 marbles for every load of dirty laundry they bring downstairs to the laundry room. That might only be worth 1 marble at your house because it's not a big job, but my kids have to load it up off the floor (where I sort my dirty laundry) and haul it downstairs to the laundry room and I consider it enough of an effort that it's worth 2 marbles. I also give 2 marbles to them for emptying the dryer and taking the clean laundry to the couch to be folded. It's nice for me to not have to take out every load of clean laundry and my kids like to empty the dryer. I think it sometimes depends on how much a particular chore bugs you. Ha ha!!

One last tip: my kids and I started having some lax issues with kids feeling no motivation to earn marbles and I wasn't sure how to get them going again with it on their own. And then I realized I could kill 2 birds with one stone. I was sick of the tv being on too much, for my taste, at my house. It was PBS, but still, too too much. So I decided my kids had to earn so many marbles to even watch any movies or tv at my house, at all. It's different for each kid, dependent on their age and of course only for the big kids. Mirren will be joining in when she's 2.  This REALLY works for us! Most weeks the tv isn't even on until Thursday or Friday, woohoo!! AND my kids get a good number of marbles every week without really worrying about earning marbles, they are just thinking about getting tv time. Sure we have had 1 or 2 weeks where Aftyn says she just doesn't care about earning marbles but Bronwyn is a superstar and earns them as usual. So Bronwyn watches a movie and Aftyn has to go read books in her room. It happens and nobody fusses about it. Aftyn knows the rules and so does Bronwyn.

We love the marble reward system in our house!! I cannot say it enough. If you try it, don't give up on it if it doesn't work right away. Tweak it in the way that works for your family! My kids love knowing that they get a weekly reward of having tv/movie time AND knowing they are working toward a bigger reward and I love all the help that my kids give me in keeping our house clean and running! It's a win/win!!