Well......I am miserably behind in my blogging attempts. Not for lack of anything worthy to write about.....only due to lack of energy and time. And well.....maybe if I hadn't ingeniously chunked a toy in the general direction of the keyboard and expertly blown off about 5 keys..the space bar being the the hardest one nailed....I might could've brought myself to write a little earlier this week. ButIfounditextremelyfrustratingtryingtotypeoutemailsthatlookedlikethis. Not to mention trying to actually blog with this nuisance. Emails aggravated me so much that I finally just quit writing them. I figured they could wait. Oh yes....lest I forget in years to come....my toy pitching was not due to any amount of pent up rage....just sheer laziness on my part in actually requiring my butt to get out of the bed and place the toy gently in the basket as apparently should've been done. Note to self......toy basket needs to be on floor and not on computer desk from now on. Should I miss again in my lazy state, that shows no signs of waning, the computer will stand a substantially better chance at not being harmed when bad aim does occur. Though I might add that 6 toys did hit the basket with the expert aim of a professional toy pitcher before the baby rain maker decided to go astray and wipe out the keyboard. Buy anyway....we now have an ergonomically designed wireless keyboard and mouse. Ummmmm...........can we just say that was not my idea. And when they do go missing...which is inevitable.....I shall not be the one taking the blame. It is pretty cool though. And it took Grant all of 3 minutes to have the old mouse completely taken apart and the pieces lined up. Our little mechanical genius at work on anything and everything that we have approved for play. I must say...the destruction of it was not exactly what I had in mind but he seemed to learn something new as he processed the parts and pieces and filed them somewhere far away in his head.....with the thousands of other things he has seen fit to disassemble in his insatiably curious state.
What they do when I'm not watching
So, more on the ever changing body. How is it that this can be my 8th and I still find myself daydreaming and wondering about who this new tiny person is and will be and noticing all of the different things about my body, like it is my 1st baby all over again? I have been asked so many times in the last few days how I cope with the morning sickness...which is more night sickness for me....and the absolute incapacitating exhaustion while still managing a house and 7 other children so young. It caused me to do some soul searching and I finally realized that the Lord does indeed give you the grace to carry out what He has called you to do. If I only had 1 baby right now or if this was my 1st I would undoubtedly see no other way out but the bed. I would declare myself incapable of normal daily life and probably give in to self indulgence in my feelings of rotteness right now. But I once read that motherhood is the journey out of self centeredness and that is so, so true...more so than I could've ever known going into this part of life. I daily die and give up my own life to meet the needs of these ones that God has so graciously given us and allowed us to raise. I'm not so good at it sometimes but I do it. I force myself out of bed in the mornings and I rise to greet 7, usually smiling, faces and 7 eager hearts to see what a new days holds. I forge ahead..sometimes with force to get through the next hours....as I busy myself with daily tasks..instead of focusing on how I am feeling at this stage. The smells endured as I feed everybody and the sights beheld as I look at food that longs to turn the stomach is just overcome due to an amazing amount of grace and mercy that God bestows on those who He has called. I have done nothing but sleep....and chunk toys at the computer....for the last 2 days. But there has been an ability to do that. And when there is not I am given the ability to overcome. But yesterday I was blessed with 3 1/2 hrs of undisturbed sleep. And once I entered this part of life it is those things that I have come to be thankful for and those things that truly bless me. Today, as the new floor was laid, I was able to sleep again completely and totally undisturbed. Since our bedroom was out of commission I just crashed on the boys' bottom bunk as they laid down for their naps. It was such a novelty and they were so excited to have me join their room that they didn't fight their own sleep much and we all 5 drifted off for hours. The room also held a very distraught Aubrey who needed sleep due to having become an emotional wreck since her glittery shoes were thrown away. They had begun to stink due to the fact she has worn them for months now without taking them off. I have had to force her to take them off for bed. And so she has slept with them beside her and then first thing in the morning she straps them once again to her feet. She has worn them for no less than 9 hrs a day for at least 8 wks....probably more. Stink does not even begin to do them justice. So....her world was turned upside down today when they hit the trashcan. I had mercy on her, dug them back out and instead hid them in the top of the closet....which now the closet stinks...as I trouble shoot how to clean them. Febreeze will not even begin to solve that stink problem. So...in her emotionally drained state she fell asleep with the boys and I.
Baby's 1st sunburn...beautiful park days are back again
But I am good and God does indeed give rest to the weary and give His children rest. He revives and gives the strength to carry on. If you knew exactly how tired I am at this point you would know that these words are no less than a miracle right now and something I have come to rely on the Lord for. His strength for when I cannot rest and the knowledge that He does give rest in His time.
Sunset
And so far my strange and absurd cravings have turned towards hinting that this may indeed actually be a girl. I have yet to crave the same thing on any given day...except for the now long gone longings for weeks of nothing but potato soup and Malt O Meal. Ugh! That just makes me sick to even think about it. In fact..I had made so much potato soup since I was consuming so much of it that once that craving died there is still tons in the frig. And I have yet to muster up the inner courage to open up the containers to dump it. Something that was so incredible only a week ago is now what has the ability to send me running to the nearest trash can. So now we have graduated to grape jelly, tons and tons of red meat, eggs with rice and brown gravy...for breakfast I might add, toast.....did I mention with grape jelly???, and egg salad....it's a good thing Easter left us with plenty of boiled eggs. And you know you have a ton of kids when you allow each one to have 6 eggs to personally color and you end up with 42 boiled eggs....since of course no one could even believe we would leave Gavin out of the group. Amazingly 6 little people just stepped right up and volunteered to color his eggs too so that there, of course, would be no exclusion of anyone no matter their size. Imagine that. That adds up to a whopping 3 1/2 dozen boiled eggs. When I was little we each got a dozen to color. I thought about it and if we dare attempted to follow with that same much loved tradition here we would have no less than 84 boiled eggs. It's a good thing that egg salad sandwiches are much loved by everyone here. Cause we've eaten a ton of them in the last few days. The long time passed down family favorite recipe:
Of course we giganticized this recipe so we altered the measurements of everything. Even Evye loves it........and that's saying alot.
It has begun
And it's only been 3 wks and not 4 but I am so taken with the swiftly changing and expanding miracle of a woman's pregnant body that I have cheated it by a week and taken more pics. So, now there's a 4 wk and 7 wk pic. What'd you think? Did it grow? And this 7 wk pic of course looks like I did when I was freakin 6 1/2 months pregnant with Grayson.....but after 7 kids what can I say? It just knows what to do and it does it! And I'm sure in the years to come I will no longer see the background of dirty clothes..I was going to crop it out but then it cropped some of my butt out and make the pic look funny...not that my butt couldn't have afforded to have been cropped out...there's certainly enough of it there. God's creation is an amazing thing.
HAHA! That sentence did not exactly come at the right time in that paragraph. Alright let's rephrase here...God's creation is an amazing thing when the equation of my butt is not being taken into consideration.
7 wks
So.....thrown onto our weekly chaos Brad was put on light duty. To have grown so accustomed to a fireman's shift and then to suddenly be dumped completely out of it and put on a daytime 8-5 schedule has the ability to turn one's world upside down. That was torture. And it seemed that he was gone for days....maybe because he was. He tore up his shoulder while on duty and after writhing in pain over the entire weekend was finally able to get it checked out on Monday. He was instructed not to even lift Gavin with that arm which therefore rendered him very incapable or lifting patients or the vent fan. So it was that they gave him the dire predictions of what would probably be an inevitable surgery and weeks of light duty. That was not what either of us had in mind. So I called on our ever wonderful circle of prayer warriors that God has surrounded us with here. After a week of LD and his 2nd assessment he was released this past Thurs. with a stunned dr that said he figured that surgery was just a given having seen the amount of pain he was in and the range of movement he had....or the lack thereof. Pain free and back to normal, very happy to be back on shift and not sitting idly and board beyond imagination behind a desk, he is back in the seat of the trucks.
Between getting the van fixed....dropping it off, being without for awhile and then having to pick it back up.....along with the whole light duty thing and the floors being laid with yet more people still coming to measure other areas of the house for flooring and the JBF Sale approaching way too fast I am kind of tired. I still have the 3 boxes still waiting to be priced, tagged and hung and I'm about to the point where I'm ready to quit. I have to have everything there by Wed night and the thought is overwhelming to me at this point. I have committed to work it for 8 hrs to receive 75% instead of 70% but I am silently wondering how I will pull it off. I am thinking that maybe what is left can wait until the fall sale and I will just take what comes from this and apply it where I can and not attempt to work it. The children and I are taking off for the Smokey Mountains sometime here in the next 2 wks in which we will then be gone for an entire 7-8 days. Preparing for that is a feat in and of itself. In which we will only turn around and come home to need to leave again for another 7 days at the end of April while the original floors are restored. I am excited beyond all belief but I am also cautious due to my level of pukiness and fatigue at this point. The homeschool bookfair is also at the beginning of May. I hope that I am over this by that time. I have not even bothered to figure out when 12 wks is due to the fact that I can hardly see the end of the present week. I don't remember ever feeling quite this bad with any of the others. the girls were always the ones I grew sick with but not quite to this extent from what I remember. I think it has just been 6 years since I have been through a pregnancy like this so it just seems worse now. Come on week 12!
