Just my thoughts

It's already February. The first month of the year flew by in retrospect, but it definitely seemed to crawl by each day as I was living it. January is such a blah month. The holidays are over. The days are short, and it gets dark early. And in Washington, it is pretty much constant gray and drizzles/rain. We definitely moved here at the wrong time of the year. We had a few weeks of nice weather followed by what has now been 5 months of rain and clouds and just dreariness. I guess it's nice that it's not freezing outside, but it's not like you can enjoy it because of the rain.

But February is here now, and I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. The days are getting longer. It isn't dark until after 5/5:30. People are out burning brush and cleaning up their yards. I only have 5 weeks left of being pregnant. I know some people LOVE being pregnant. I love it up until about weeks 26-28, and then I'm just done. I can't get comfortable at night. I can't sleep on my back because it feels like I can't breath and feel light headed/dizzy. Belly sleeping is out for sure. When I lie on my left side, my left hip socket starts to tingle, and my leg falls asleep. I'm most comfortable on my right side, but I can hear my heart pounding in my ear when I lie on my right side. I have to shove small pillows under my belly and behind my back to hold me in a half side-lying position. Then she kicks. And kicks. And kicks some more. And she kicks me hard. It's like she's pushing out against my abdominal wall, but then she just keeps pushing. I just don't stretch that far. I'm always having to apply resistance to push her back in. I'm definitely counting down the weeks. While I know it's not ideal that I have to have a c-section a couple weeks early due to a vertical incision from my first c-section, I'm not complaining that I get to be done with pregnancy earlier than the norm.

For about a year, maybe longer, I have had a list of "chores" that the kids are supposed to do each morning when they wake up. I've had it written out in several different forms, the latest version using pictures to make it fool proof and easy. The are to look at it, complete the tasks, and cross it off as they do them. Then when they are complete they get a piece of candy. It's the same tasks every morning - make your bed, brush your teeth, get dressed, eat breakfast, put your breakfast stuff away, pick up your room, and lastly go poop. Sadly if I don't incentivise a certain kid to poop every day he/she holds it and ends up constipated or plugging the toilet. They know exactly what tasks they are supposed to do each morning, but almost every morning I find them goofing off, not doing what they are supposed to be doing, and having to yell and nag them to get it done. I sort of lost it Sunday morning and TV privileges have been taken away for the week until they can learn to be responsible without the nagging. We were pleasantly surprised by what a wonderful Sunday we had yesterday without any TV. We came home from church, Aaron and the kids played a board game while I prepped dinner, they went outside and made a fire to burn some big boxes, they played tag with daddy, we made a fire inside and everyone colored in front of the fire, we played another game, read some books, and just spent time together as a family. I know we won't keep the no TV rule forever, but I do believe we will now have TV free Sundays.

I've been doing a lot of research lately on homeschool curriculum and what I want to do next year. I went to an information meeting on Saturday for Classical Conversations (a worldwide homeschool co-op that meets once per week) to see if it might be a good fit. We are finally in a position that if I wanted to do it, we could actually afford it financially. But I think I've decided it wouldn't be a good fit. The program for the younger years is based on memory work, and I'm not so sure the boys would be crazy about that. My biggest hangup though is that it's a classical CHRISTIAN co-op and I know how a lot of other Christians feel about Mormons (If you aren't familiar, many other Christian faiths don't believe Mormons are Christian even though we very much are.). I asked if it would be a concern that we are LDS, and she mentioned that I wouldn't be allowed to hold any leadership positions or tutor/lead any classes. She also mentioned that in another community (not hers but another one in Olympia) there are a couple LDS families, and there were some hurt feelings this year. I guess they usually pay someone to watch the young kids (nursery age) and the LDS lady mentioned someone from church that might be interested in doing that. A couple other women didn't think this was a good idea since they viewed this as a leadership position and didn't want an LDS person holding this position. They thought they were emailing each other privately but really the emails went out to everyone in the community. I think I've decided that if I'm going to pay that much money ($1000+ for all 3 kids to do this for the year) that I want to feel like I belong and am wanted, instead of feeling like our presence offends people. So it looks like we'll be sticking with what we've been doing. I have a couple friends from church that also homeschool; I just need to be more proactive in organizing activities/things to do with them.

The kids' pictures were taken at JCPenny in November.

Christmas and New Years

About a week before Christmas we got a dusting of snow. The kids didn't care that it was barely any snow. They had a blast playing it it.

In order to try to maintain some sort of Christmas tradition, I wanted the kids to only have their Santa stocking on Christmas morning (the one I put together). The Coomers have had a long standing tradition of doing stockings on Christmas Eve, but after Aaron's grandma died, they decided to send the stockings home with each family and let them make their own new traditions with them. As a bit of history, the way the stockings worked was people were supposed to find free or very cheap items to stuff into the stockings. Everyone got a stocking. The problem was it started to get out of hand with each person having a stocking and an overflow bag. Most people loved the tradition but some (like me and another family member with a large family) didn't enjoy all the cheap junk and random stuff that we had to cart home and figure out what to do with. So Deb had these stockings and still wants to carry on the tradition of doing stockings for everyone in her family. We decided to have the kids open them Christmas Eve morning before we headed out to Uncle Tom and Aunt Sally's for the Coomer Christmas Eve party.

Christmas morning they woke up to all the presents under the tree and their Santa stockings waiting to be opened. They were allowed to open their stockings first thing and they even opened their Santa gifts with just us. They had to wait for Uncle Mike and Aunt Lanae to get up before we dug into the rest of the presents. They were very patient though I'm sure it was torture having to wait to open all their presents. I even enforced a one person at a time rule so it didn't turn into chaos.

Later in the day I busted out the big box of presents from Papa Mark and Grandma Cyndi and Uncle Billy, Aunt Angie, Kenny, and Kyle. I kept their gifts separate from all the Christmas morning gifts in an effort to help the kids realize who each gift was from. Plus it spanned it out over the day a bit more. They really did get spoiled this Christmas with the amount of toys they received.

On Saturday afternoon, we decided to go to a really good burger joint between us and Great Grandpa. He and Charlene met us there, and then we went to a friend's of his that lives on a farm. He has cows, chickens, pigeons, goats, bees, and even peacocks roaming around on his farm. The kids loved running around and seeing all the animals. He had two black and white shepherd dogs, a black and white cat, and even a black and white cow that looked like an Oreo (black front, white middle, black behind).

We had the annual Coomer New Year's Eve party at our house since we didn't want to travel several hours up north with kids that late at night. The kids went with Grandma to the dollar store to get decorations for the party. We used the Netflix countdown to do a 10pm New Years Eve Countdown with the kids, so we could get them to bed earlier than midnight. Of course Sarah ended the year by giving everyone high fives and then bumping into Grandma, violently ricocheting off of her, and getting a rug-burn type scrape under her chin from the side of the couch. What a way to end the year!

On New Year's Day we went out to the Hand on Children's Museum in Olympia. We were way impressed with all the neat exhibits and stuff to play with. We ended up purchasing a year membership so we can go back as much as we want.

Picture update

This was an old post I started and forgot about. It's just a bunch of pictures from our November and December. I'll try to get up more soon from Christmas and New Years.

The fire station at the entrance to our little lake community decorates a sleigh and has Santa come around collecting food donations. It was pretty fun. The power went out that night too.

No power so the kids camped out in the living room in front of the fire. I think only Sarah fell asleep here, and we moved her to her bed. The boys abandoned ship and went to their beds.

Brotherly love!

She fell asleep while I was doing school work with the boys. I guess she got tired of waiting.

Aaron had a birthday at the end of November.

We went to a Japanese restaurant for Aaron's birthday dinner. His grandpa and his girlfriend Charlene came as well as Aunt Christie, Uncle Butch, Trevor, and Derek (they stayed at our place since Derek had a soccer game down south).

Black Friday shopping. It was only like 9 in the morning, and I had already spent way too much money.

Life in Washington

Oh, man, I let myself get behind. I like to try to blog about the goings on in our lives at least once a month, and I haven't posted anything for nearly 2. In a way I have maintained this blog as a way to journal about our family. It's a way of keeping a history of our little family. So bear with me as I run through all the things we've been doing since we moved to Washington in September.

I've been growing. I'm 22 weeks pregnant at this point. I'm feeling her kick more and more. On Sunday I actually felt her kick from the outside, and Aaron even thinks he has felt her move. I am feeling big but know I have so much more growing to go. I have been very tired this pregnancy. I get heart burn pretty much every evening so tums has been my friend. I had a few weeks of really bad headaches but thankfully that has passed. I am starting to go into oh-crap-we-got-rid-of-all-our-baby-stuff mode and want to just buy everything now. Aaron keeps telling me to wait.

Aaron's cousin Logan left on a Mission to Nevada. We went up to their house in Monroe for his farewell talk and a lunch at his house. The kids have already written to him, and they just got a letter back yesterday. They were pretty excited.

The kids get to do more fun things with Daddy since he works from home. The weather seems to have finally turned (rainy and cold most of the time), but it was beautiful when we first got here.

Out on the boat with Daddy and Grandpa.

The view of the lake after hiking up behind the house.

I haven't made the hike up behind the house because it is so steep. The kids love going out with Aaron trail blazing through the woods.

Just goofing off with Daddy and his phone taking selfies.

We all went to a corn maze.

And to the cider mill. The kids had their faces painted and had a blast playing in/on the bounce house and bounce slide.

Spiderman Eli.

She is so shy that she looked miserable the whole time she had her face painted. She refuses to speak too. But believe it or not she was pretty excited about this butterfly.

We celebrated Halloween. We carved pumpkins, went to the ward trunk or treat party and fall carnival, went to a party at the kids' gymnastic's center, and went trick or treating in the rain.

Again with the looking miserable while getting her face painted. I asked her if she was happy and she said she was. haha

Noah bobbing for donuts on a string.

Sarah got all powdery after bobbing for her donut.

One night she's in the most glittery, girly costume ever and the next she wants to be Spidergirl.

Pure joy! Trick or treating is fun rain or shine when you're a kid.

Sarah as Rainbow Dash, Noah as Kylo Ren, and Eli as a storm trooper.

It's a girl! We gave each of the kids a little gift bag to open with a baby item inside. Does Sarah look excited or what? While it was an exciting day finding out that we're having another little girl it was also a very scary day. The doctor came in and told us she believed there was something wrong with her heart. I left in tears since they had us believing there was something seriously wrong with out baby's heart. They were talking major atrial septal defect and an enlarged pulmonary artery. We drove all the way up to Renton the Monday after the ultrasound to have an echocardiogram of her heart. After looking at her heart the doctor believes everything is normal. There is only one concern that we have to have checked out when I'm closer to 30 weeks pregnant. They don't think it's a problem but some of the images made it look like some of the veins are connected to the wrong side of the heart (but some of the images looked normal). Her heart was just too little to tell. It was a very long weekend after learning that something might be wrong. Aaron and I were immediately thinking the worst since we'd gone through hell and back with Eli. There were lots of prayers said and tears shed. But I can say I have never left a doctor's appointment feeling so relieved and happy. We are just very grateful and optimistic that everything will be fine.

Aaron's cousin Raleigh works for Amazon our of Tokyo. He was in Seattle for a couple weeks at Amazon head quarters, so we got to spend some time with him. We decided to take him to the beach house. It was a lot of fun catching up and just hanging out.

No beach house trip is complete without doing a puzzle.

The other day while I was cleaning up the floor in the homeschool room I found some pieces of blonde hair that looked like they'd been cut. I may have overreacted slightly and yelled a little about Sarah cutting her hair. Sarah just cried and through the tears explained she didn't like her hair getting in her face. I was able to calm myself down, and we sat down and looked at pictures of short hair together on the computer. She decided that she did in fact want short hair even if that meant we couldn't do cute pony tails and braids. We picked out a picture and took it to the salon. She was super excited and of course looks cute as a button. Though I loved her long hair, I think the short her suits her and her personality (girly yet spunky).

And last but not least, we had some sunshine this past weekend after about a week of grey skies and rain. We went to the Nisqually Wildlife Refuge and walked down their board walk. Deb and I only went about a half mile and then we walked back to do some shopping. If I get walking too much I start having Braxton-Hicks contractions and it gets uncomfortable. Aaron took the kids the rest of the way down the boardwalk which was actually a pretty long hike. He said it was absolutely gorgeous and totally worth it.