Mr Wrong? Not so Much!

My husband and I have been married for almost 7 years and have been together for almost 11 years! It is amazing how I can still be suprised by things he says or does throughout the day. Just the other morning I sat straight up in bed and I thought, "Oh, my gosh, I married the wrong man!" I understand this is not a rare phenomenon, especially early in marriage (and even though it sometimes doesn't feel like it, 7 years is still pretty early in marriage). Some of us make the lifelong commitment while we are still young enough to use acne cream. To make matters even more ludicrous, an endorphin-infused "love high" impairs our ability to walk in a straight line, much less think rationally. In the early days after the honeymoon we thrive on the "opposties attract" phenomenon. I love eggs; he loves bacon; I love chic flicks; he loves old western films; I love to sleep in on Saturday; he loves to get up early. As time marches on, what intrigued us and was endearing about our mate begins to drive us nuts. Years down the road, all that bacon has given your prince a pot belly. He won't take you to a movie unless the starring role is plyed by John Wayne (i don't even think he is still alive), and your luscious Saturday morning sleep-in is rudely interrupted by the crackling whir of the weedeater outside your bedroom window. Charming. Maybe some of us could say we were not in our right mind when we got married. What were we thinking making a commitment to another human being at the age of twenty something. But I have been thinking... What was God thinking?! Doesn't he consider the folly of youth and it's hormone rushes? Probably. I also think God's goal is probably to make us complete and that part of His plan is to use-you guessed it-that charming spouse. I think I entered marriage looking like a piece of swiss cheese with lots of emotional holes to fill up, and God often gives our mate many round pieces to fill those holes. But the trick is having two people committed to seeing their relationship through the holey stage. So I am convinced that if we hang in there long enough and are both willing to grow, we find that marriage has gone form holey to whole-helping shape us into the people God created us to be. And with the passing years, we find we have become one in heart and mind. So, the answer to my question, Mr. Wrong? Not at all. My husband is the perfect match for me and I am thankful that he is willing to help me fill in all of my holes! I might be in a bit of trouble though if he ever decides to read my blog.

Thanksgiving in Iowa

This is my totally hot husband playing cards with the family, we did alot of that, as usual.

This is my cousin Dustin and our Uncle Al striking a pose...being goofy is what my family does best!
Kailey riding the Zebra that her cousin Brynn got for her 1st birthday. She was loving it!
Lauryn was practically sick the entire trip...poor baby finally had enough and just crashed and slept 51/2 hours out of the 7 hour trip.
Unfortunately(if you ask Chris) we were not able to stop by the Harley shop on the way home but I managed to get a picture from the van window as we drove by. (your welcome baby!)
Overall we had a great Thanksgiving. There is nothing like spending time with family, playing cards, and eating lots of good food! And we did that! I'm not sure that I have ever appreciated a minivan this much before or maybe it was just the DVD player that we had installed. It was an altogether different trip. On trips in the past Chris and I both (well maybe not Chris) ran out of silly songs and noises to entertain the babies but not this time...no, we were in minivan heaven. We packed every kid movie we owned and headed for the highway. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and happy shopping days.

What a night...

Ok, so last night was a rough night. For starters, I didn't get the house picked up by the time Chris got home which isn't a big deal to him but it bothers me. I like him to be able to come home from work and feel like he can rest and relax in a clean house. So that set dinner back about 30 minutes which typically wouldn't be a problem but we were supossed to be going to a piano recital. I started making dinner and realized that I was missing one ingredient. I thought about running over to one of my friends that live near by and asking them if they had what I needed but what I needed was a jalapeno pepper. I don't think most people keep those on hand. So,Chris got home and was going to run to the store to get the jalapeno pepper, well Kailey decided that she could peel herself away from mom for a few minutes and she wanted to go with him...yeah!!! They were headed out the door and Chris accidently shut Kailey's finger in the door. I won't go into detail but there was lots of blood and screaming and puking involved. Puking, you may ask? Kailey has a very weak stomach and any pain usually sets her off. SO after about an hour, she calmed down. Chris asked if he could pray for her and she agreed and then as soon as he was done praying she held her little hand up and said, "Dad, no owys" Oh to have the faith of a little child. She is so brave! I went back to making dinner and looked out of the corner of my eye to see Lauryn dumping over the trash can and put something in her mouth. I quick picked her up and went searching in her mouth for anything (and I do mean anything) that didn't belong there. I saw a partially sucked on cough drop in there but she clamped her jaws shut and swallowed it. Great. So I panicked and called poison control just to make sure she would be ok, cuz it is medicine and the package said to ask a doctor under the age of 5. They assured me that she would probably be fine but she may have some abdominal cramping, vomiting, or diareah. They said to give her some fluid and a piece of bread to help it pass or dissolve quicker. So we did and she was fine but then I found out later that night that usually when you call poison control they give your info and # to child protective services or SRS or somewhere and they call and ask a ton of question a few days later. I know I shouldn't be worried about that but it does make me a little paranoid. SO... that was only my evening from 6-7:30. You can only imagine how bedtime went. It wasn't pretty. But both girls are ok and we have plenty of Dora bandaids to make all of the owy's feel better. And believe it or not I actually got dinner done by 9pm. By that time Chris was so upset about shutting Kailey;s finger in the door he couldn't eat anything. The good news is that we had plenty of left overs for tonight! Oh the joys of being a mommy! I love it!!!

Thankful Hearts Give Thanks

I am so thankful for my beautiful baby girls! They are such a blessing to me everyday! I was doing my devotions this morning, reading in the Psalms. God must think that we need to be reminded to be thankful and to give thanks because the Book of Psalms is full of verses that remind us to have a thankful heart. The scriptures are quite clear that a thankful heart is a happy heart. I read a quote today that I really like. It is from Louis Bromfield, "Oh, Lord, I thnak you for the privelage and gift of living in a world with beauty and excitement and variety. I thank you for the gift of loving and being loved...I thank you for the delights of music and children, of other men's thoughts and conversation and their books to read by the fireside or in bed with the rain falling on the roof or the snow blowing past outside the window." It's probably because Thanksgiving is just a few days away but I am overwhelmed with thankfulness today! God is so good. A fellow blogger writes 3 things everyday on her blog that she is thankful for. How cool is that. That is a challenge for me. I want to learn to become a thankful person in all seasons of life!

A Weighty Subject

I just layed the girls down for their afternoon nap and I, like everyday, immediately went to the food pantry to see what I could find to satisfy my craving. Oh, the things we do to save a calorie! Not long ago I thought rice cakes were the answer to all of my snacking dilemmas. Even though they tasted like butter-flavored styrofoam, I scarfed them down thinking they would keep me out of the potato chip bag and on the straight and narrow with the scales. If you're like me, you reached for the chips anyway after eating the entire bag of rice cakes. So, it was kind of pointless. Now with the advances in technology, we expect more from our low-cal snacks. There are a few good ones out there but they are pretty rare. I think nutrition bars are among the worst taste bud offenders. No matter how many promises the packaging makes- "new and improved", "candy bar taste"- most still taste like a chocolate-covered multivitamin. They kind of leave me feeling like Tom Hanks in the movie Big when he bites into a cracker at a party, only to discover it was topped with fish eggs. Gagging he wipes his traumatized tongue with a napkin.
Pointless post, I know, but it distracted me long enough to stay away from the food pantry! So... now I guess I should go finish my laundry and cleaning and get ready for our trip to Iowa.

My mom came to visit

My mom is a very busy woman who lives in southern Iowa but was able to sneak down for the weekend and spend it with us. We had a great time. It had been several months since we had seen her last. She was pretty suprisedhow Lauryn had changed into a different looking baby. Kailey bonded very quickly with Grama Cindy or as Kailey says "Bama Ceedy" I am amazed at how much my mom has gone through in her life and is still going through but remains so faithful and so positive. I hated to see her go but I think the girls wore her out! We tried to go shopping and got a little accomplished but the majority of the time was spent chasing Kailey around and begging her to sit in the stroller, because that's what big girls do when they go shopping. She's no dummy, she knew better and wasn't falling for our bribery. But I really wanted to shop! Oh well, I guess that's what the day after Thanksgiving is for, right?! We'll see how that goes.

Creepy Crawlers

Why is it that we mommies can set our babies in front of a hundred brightly colored, squeaking toys-totaling about a thousand dollars in the best that Toys "R" Us offers, only to find the little rugrats scarfing down common household pests the moment we turn our backs? Yes, this happened to me today! I'm telling ya, come be a fly on my wall and you will have some prime entertainment! I should have known better, but Lauryn and I had a "talk" so I thought things would be different today...I told her, "now sweetie, with every privelage comes responsibility, so I know you won't dissapoint me today by using your crawling skills to find things to put in your mouth that don't belong there-right?" She just looked at me and laughed with drool running down her chin, I took that as a yes maam. Not so! A few minutes later I checked on her her and she was still sitting there playing so nicely, until I got a little closer and I thought to myself what is that black string hanging out of her mouth. She could tell that I was going in after whatever it was and she quickly shut her jaws like a steel trap. Any guesses as to what I pulled out of my innocent little 10 months old mouth. A beautiful, helpless, now mutilated cricket. Yummy!! I've decided that I'll make a million with my own line of bug-flavored baby food. Ok...tell me what you think, should I go with Peas, Carrots, and Roly-Poly's or Summer Squash with Silverfish? Maybe if we give them what they really want, they'll stop going for whats off limits. I guess I am that way to sometimes. I think they call it discontentment; wondering if life offers more than what I'm experiencing; Always longing for something outside the "toy box". I know at those times I just need to listen and let God fill those voids!

Creativity?!?!

This morning my 2 1/2 year old daughter had a bad case of what I call "toddler PMS". Kailey's sensitivity alarm was set to go off at the touch of a feather. She loodged a series of complaints, each accompanied by wailing, flailing, and falling into a heap on the floor. Her cheerios were floating on the wrong side in her cereal bowl; I had mistakenly screwed Cliffords head onto Barney's sippy-cup body. And heaven forbid, I had committed the unpardonable sin of cutting her toast lengthwise rather than diagonally. I knew we had a long day ahead of us. So I decided it was time for some art therapy. It's amazing the difference a little crayon and paper make. Things immediately looked up and before long I was enjoying the peaceful ambiance of music coming from my CD player as I hauled out more sanity saving supplies; stickers, glue, and markers. It was all coming out of the closet to rescue my morning. I needed some quiet time to make phonecalls, and I was on my way to professional productivity! Three calls later I returned to Kailey. She had made a beautiful body of "water" a.k.a. Glue Lake, on my kitchen table. She has also covred every square inch of her kids table with red marker and, while tracing her hands several times, also had clearly experienced an epiphany. Hey? Why just trace my hands when I can color them in solid? Why do toddlers always think that if a little is good than alot must be better. Of course my husband tends to be that way to, especially when he is trying to cook with new spices! Anyway, even after soaking in the tub and a good scrub down her fingernails still remain a lovely shade of frakenstein green. I had a friend give me a magnet a while back that said "Cleaning house while the kids are young is like shoveling snow while it's snowing." I think secretly we are all hoping that our little Picassos will be the next Norman(or Norma, in my case) Rockwell. How else can we find some sense of of purpose in the thousands of hours we spend cleaning up after creative childhood endeavors? I also heard once that Steven Speilberg was very hard to get to sleep as a baby. Can I hear an amen from the masses of bedtime-routine-exhausted mommies out there? Later when Steven was a teen, his mother let him fill her pressure cooker with a dozen cans of cherries in heavy syrup to create a special effect for one of his early home movies. His mom said she found cherry bits in her kitchen for the next eight years. And the rest is movie making history! So the next time we wade through piles of coloring books, buckets of crayons, and globs of glittered glue, let remember that God may have a creative genius cooking there. And it may only be another 20 or so years until we find out for sure! So in the meantime I decided that i am going to envision myself at the Oscars or Pulitzer Prize dinner in a sequined evening dress, hearing my grown up child tell the world, " I owe this night to my mom, who taught me how to make something great out of my messes." Until that night I will continue to pray for patience and continue to invest in a well organized craft closet!

JAMES 1:4 "But let patience have her perfect work."

What's that, Why?!?!?!

Anyone with children who can talk or are learning how to talk probably knows where I am going with the title of this post. Kailey is pointing to everything, everywhere asking what's that and why? How many times can you tell your child-that is a whatever and just because that's how God made it?! Seriously, I am starting to feel like a broken record! I guess it's just because she is an inquisitive, brilliant, child who is just so eager to learn and take everything in! I guess she really does take after her mother! Ha! We had our small group tonight, which we are loving! The other couples in our group are great! Tonight our topic kind of turned into a stay at home mom ventiing session. I was so glad to know that I was not the only mother out there that felt like a horrible mom sometimes and that it doesn't always seem like roses and a walk in the park. Thanks Emily and Marietta for being real!

In Sickness and in Health

Ok, so my prediction was right...trip to the doctor, 2 trips to the pharmacy and then home. A very uneventful day that has me completely exhausted. The girls are in bed, The Bachelor is over(im sure some of you are laughing but yes, I am addicted to it), Chris is sleeping in his recliner and my flannel sheets are calling my name, so please forgive me, but I cannot think of a single thing to write about. I'm calling it a night!

There's no place like home

We went out of town this weekend, kind of unexpectedly, but it was fun. The girls still were not feeling the best so that made it a little rough but we managed. The whole trip there and back Kailey cried and kept saying, I wanna go home, I wanna go home. So tonight when we got home she ran in the house and layed down on the floor like she was hugging it and said, home momma, home. She was so excited to be home. It made me feel horrible for taking her out of town when she didn't feel good but it also made me feel good to know that home is a safe and happy place for her! It does always feel good to get home from a trip! Especially when the house is clean and picked up-which mine was not! SO, I need to go pick up and get ready for Monday, which will probably consist of a trip to the doctor, then to the pharmacy and then home again! Have a happy Monday! Oh, and remember, if your peeking, then leave me a comment!!!

Here and Gone

I look forward all week long for Friday to get here and now it's basically over. Today just flew by. I watch 2 adorable little boys once a week and today was that day. As soon as they left I tried to pick up the house, catch up on laundry and of course check my blog to see if anyone left me any comments. Thanks so much to those of you who did! As soon as Chris got home we ran out the door to get the van picked up from the shop. It broke down again and this time the news wasn't so good. The transmission is shot. What do ya do?! After that we ran a few errands, grabbed a bite to eat and it was already 8:15. Kailey and Lauryn both have nasty head colds that are making them a little grumpy so we got home and put them in bed. While I was rocking Kailey she pointed to her tummy and said it hurt and then she puked...all over me and the floor. She is back on one of her meds that really messes with her tummy. Poor baby, I just want to cry everytime I think about all of the medication that is in her system. But she has such good spirits and she is so sweet. So, as you can see, nothing real exciting and I am just praying that Chris and I still get to go out tomorrow night. Have a great weekend everyone!

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Happy Thursday

Today was a great day! Kailey is finally getting interested in her potty chair! We are so stoked about it! Fewer diapers...that is a good thing. Now, lets see, how many more months until Lauryn gets the hang of it? We're probably looking at about 16-18 more months! Lauryn is such a little skunk. She is learning what the word "NO" means. Whenever we tell her no, she turns and looks at us and just laughs and of course, continues on with whatever it is she is not supposed to be doing. She has quite the little personality. Chris called me from work today and told me that he had a babysitter lined up for Saturday night and that we were going out!!!!! I completely thought he was joking, but it' s really happenning! I can't tell you how long it's been since we have gone on a real date(without the girls). So, kudos to Chris for the planning and a HUGE thank you to Corey and Marietta for watching our munchkins! Hope everyone had a great day!

BABIES AND DISILLUSIONMENT

Have you ever noticed how on all the commercials for baby products that the babies are either sleeping peacefully or smiling? Before I had my first child I remember older, wiser women saying, "Enjoy the time that you have to yourself before that baby comes!" Well at the time I wasn't thrilled to hear that. I was so excited to hold my little precious bundle of joy. Every baby product commercial threw me into lala land and all I could think of was my studly husband peeking in on the little one in the middle of the night in our designer Ralph Lauren nursery while I'm sawing logs in the room next door. But my daydreams became fuzzy real quick after our little bundle of joy really arrived and the longing for just a few hours of shut eye set in. Of course we do experience precious moments with our children that we will forever hold dear. But there are those days where they can wreak havoc. Needless to say, today was one of those days! But as I was praying today, the Lord reminded me of my priorities. These are short, priceless days that I have with my girls and beneath all of the exhaustion is a heart overflowing with gratitude for the gift of our children.