Getting more real by the day

Last night, I attended a parents orientation meeting for Aiden's new preschool. It was mandatory for at least one parent to attend, and John didn't feel like going since he was all numb from dental work (and his brother was coming over to do guy stuff). Oh well, it gave me about 2 hours out of the house without kids.
I turned in all Aiden's registration paperwork, paid his tuition, briefly met a few other parents, and then sat through an hour-long presentation on how the school operates and what a typical day looks like for the kids. While this sounds a little boring all written out, the presentation was very informative. It became very apparent to me that these people are extremely passionate about what they do and it's all about the kids. Their approach is based on the belief that children are not citizens in waiting, but that they are already capable people, deserving of respect and if you give them that respect, they will surprise you with what they can do. What's great about this is that it's basically the whole way of parenting written about in Grace Based Parenting. I've been trying to follow that book in my approach to parenting and so I'm very happy to have found a preschool that approaches learning in basically the same way.

I'm getting excited for Aiden and I've been trying to talk to him about it some. I don't think he quite gets what I'm talking about yet, but last night he did tell me that now he would have some best friends when he went to his new school. It's not only a new opportunity for him, but also for me. During the presentation, the director talked about ways to turn the process of getting ready for school into a big old learning opportunity. I'm looking forward to giving myself the challenge of doing the things she suggested.

Aiden starts on the 3rd. The first day of leaving my baby might be a little hard for me, so please keep us in your thoughts that day. If you'd like to learn more about the preschool, you can check out their website: http://creativechildrenscenter.com

School time!

It was very last minute and my head is still spinning, but Aiden will be an official preschooler this fall! We found a preschool that, amazingly, still had openings in the 2-3 year olds groups (Aiden's birthday falls too late for the 3-4 year olds group and he's not yet potty trained, which most preschools require for that age group). It's small private preschool in Beaverton/Aloha and it's owned by a very nice lady who is the director and also the kindergarten teacher. Her daughter will be Aiden's teacher and she is very sweet and friendly. All of the teachers there have Masters degrees in Teaching and they showed us typical projects for the different age groups. By kindergarten, they have them doing geography! They are very big on fundraising and parent volunteers, so they are able to keep their costs down and very reasonable. They even give discounts if a parent or grandparent volunteers twice a month. I even found my perfect volunteer job during our tour today! Organizing the craft supplies shed! The director said I could even use their label maker. :^) Fun!

I'm so excited for Aiden. He was so excited to check out the place and just immersed himself into all the toys and activity stations within minutes of arriving. He will be attending twice a week in the afternoons. I can tell that he's going to love having the interaction with other kids on a very regular basis and I'm going to enjoy having some one on one time with Nathan. Lately, it had gotten to the point where I could tell that I wasn't able to do enough for Aiden during the day. He was getting bored with regular activities quickly, he wasn't wanting to play by himself very much, and he would begin to act out whenever I needed to focus my attention on the baby. This is great opportunity for us and I'm so glad that the door was opened to us. It's truly a miracle that we found a place with openings one week before school starts! It will be an adjustment for us, but I'm looking forward to how he will benefit from this new chapter of his life. My little baby is growing up....

Prayer please

For my readers who pray, I have a request:

My mother is in need of serious prayer. I won't (and really can't due to time and space) go into all the details of the past few years, but she has some serious mental issues. She is paranoid, vengeful, secretive, and a compulsive liar. She will say anything if she thinks it will get her something. She divorced my step-father, a loving Christian father, a couple of years ago and has ended up with an immature, abusive younger man who has serious anger issues and has even hit her on a few occasions. She has been spending the past few years trying to convince the courts that my step-father is the abusive one and she is at it again. He is the only steady source of love and devotion in my siblings' lives and she is trying to get it so that he isn't allowed to see the children and possibly even arrested for child abuse. Please pray that the courts and agents from Child Protection Services will see him for who he truly is.

I have tried all I can to tell the courts and CPS that she is the one who has issues and is putting the children in danger by being the man she is currently with. I can only do so much and at times it's so frustrating that it hurts. I have prayed on many occasions that she will see the light and realize how many people she has hurt, but I'm beginning to believe that this is just who she is and that she will never change. I've tried speaking to her about her behavior on a few occasions and I just ended up being verbally abused.

This is a very serious ongoing issue that my family has and we could use all the prayer we can get. Even though I am at a distance from my family, it still affects me deeply and pulls me away emotionally from dealing with my own children as I try to work through it. I have offered my testimony to CPS if they wish to speak with me regarding my step-father, so hopefully they will take me up on that and hear me out. I have spoken with them before and ended up with some good results because of it. There are also many people who know my mother well and have offered to back up my step-father against her claims.

I will update if any significant news comes to my attention.

The person I am

I'm far from perfect and I'm fully aware of this. However, I do feel like I have improved myself greatly over the past few years. I am constantly searching for the best way to approach parenting issues and to improve the quality of my marriage. I want to contribute all I can to make our way of life as fulfilling as possible. This means that I am continually challenged to give up pieces of myself to care for my husband and my children. In virtually everything I do, I try to ask myself if that is the best decision for my family. It is important to me to give my children a calm, steady, productive home life while giving them the love and respect that they deserve. I do this because I want them to be loving, respectful, and happy individuals.

I have to work on these things every day. There are some days that I feel like I have it all down, and other days I feel like I've screwed up somewhere along the way. But all in all, I am happy with the decisions that John and I have made for our family and I am encouraged to continue to improve upon myself. I can confidently say that I am a better person that I used to be.

But no matter how much you work on yourself, there can always be something to throw it off. Something to make you feel very discouraged. There will always be someone who wants you to feel like you've screwed up for one reason or another. Maybe they aren't happy with the choices they've made, so they have to make themselves feel better by bringing you down. Maybe they don't like that they don't have control over your life, so they try to get that control by messing with your emotions. If you fight back, they've won that control and you've shown them that they can do it. Most times, things like this aren't personal; it's just how they improve how they feel about themselves.
Because I have changed myself, I can deal with these things in a much different way than I used to. I wait until the raw emotions have passed and then I think through it like an intelligent adult. I don't scream, I don't yell, I don't fight back. I just realize that people like this need someone to pick on. People like this are always going to assume that they know more about you than you do. And I can shrug it off and know that people like this are just embarrassing themselves by acting the way that they do. And I feel bad for them.

I can't say that things like that don't get to me at all, because I'm only human and it's only natural that it will effect me at least a little bit. But I choose to take things like this as a challenge to improve myself even further and hope that someday the people who feel badly about themselves can find an opportunity to improve themselves too.

"People of purpose annoy - even infuriate - those who want to coast through life." - Tim Kimmel

Our Weekend

Sorry I haven't written much this week. I haven't felt up to it. Our weekend has been crazy, so I'll tell you all about it.

Nathan's fifth tooth popped through on Friday. Five teeth, can you believe it? He's got four on the bottom and now one on the top. The kid's only seven months old. Aiden's first tooth was barely breaking through at this age. I told John that now we have to have another kid, because I didn't get enough baby time with this one. He's crawling all over the apartment, sitting up on his own (getting there from crawling position and back down again), and has begun pulling himself up to standing on anything he can get his hands on. Where did my baby go??

We've been having a heat wave for a few days now, getting into triple digits. It's been really unbearable for us, as the temp inside our apartment has been a consistent 93 degrees. Blah. I thought my brains were going to melt yesterday and I ended up with the worst migraine I've had in two years, along with vomiting and all. Not great when you're trying to stay hydrated. My milk supply was basically nothing all day yesterday. And the heat wave claimed our guinea pig this afternoon. I tried so hard to keep her hydrated, but her little rodent body just couldn't take it. John was sweet and even tried to keep her alive by placing her in cool water in our sink and handfeeding her, but she still passed. I couldn't even look at her, she looked so miserable. John is finally considering my pleas to buy a cat, as we've lost three guineas over the past two years.

I'm so ready for this heat wave to be over!!! It's gotten to the point where Aiden was standing naked in the middle of the living room, screaming. Not crying, just screaming. Oh yeah, and he locked himself in his room and it took us forty minutes to get him out. We ended up having to take the doorknob apart to do it. Needless to say, we turned the doorknob around so the lock side is on the outside of the door! Oh, what a weekend we've had.

My funny little boys

Or rude little boys. Feel free to choose.

I needed a babysitter for a little while yesterday morning, and John's cousin Hannah was gracious enough to agree to watch the boys for me. I returned a little while later to have Hannah show me where Aiden had arranged the magnetic fridge letters in a nice little row. Within that row of letters was a four letter word beginning with F. Luckily for me, Hannah thought it was funny (at least I hope you did!). I was a little embarrassed, but snapped a picture with my camera phone to show John later that evening. Now, Aiden doesn't know that word and certainly doesn't know how to spell it, so it really was purely random. John did the math in his head and the odds of Aiden randomly spelling that with all 26 letters available to him was something like 1 in 350,000. So, like I said, it was a little embarrassing, but I'm also sort of impressed. In an embarrassed sort of way.

Bodily functions and boys go hand in hand. I discovered this today while I was nursing Nathan. He was being quite gassy and was getting this little smile on his face while doing it. I called him a stinky pootie-tooter (one of his regular nicknames, actually) and he giggled at me. He then looked me straight in the face and said, "Da da", then went back to nursing. I sent John an email saying that I believed our 6 month old son just attempted to blame a toot on him!

Having little boys certainly is interesting sometimes!

This is how I'm going to lose my mind

I've spent the past few days wondering how 2 year olds make it to age 3. And by the time we get through October, I'll probably wonder how 3 year olds make it to age 4. Better yet, how do parents of 2 and 3 year olds make it? I'm convinced that somehow, I've ended up with a 2 year old that isn't mine. He's so naughty! John and I try to convince ourselves that this truly is part of having a child this age, but good grief. I had some errands to run on Thursday and it ended up being right around lunchtime when we were out. I decided to get us lunch after we were done; I just had to go into Verizon to get my information transferred to my replacement cell phone from my broken one (the screen died about a week ago). Aiden had taken his shoes off in the car, so when I went to put them back on him so we could go in the store, he kicked me in the head. When I scolded him, he slapped me in the face. After that, I told him that he was going to have to sit in the stroller and wasn't going to be allowed to walk around, so he started screaming bloody murder. Of course, our really quick trip into Verizon took almost an hour and a half, so Aiden was starving. He would randomly scream while we were waiting for tech support. He acted like this for the rest of the day. At dinner, he threw his bowl of macaroni across the room. He was promptly sent to bed.
I could go on and on and on about the various naughty things that he's been doing, but honestly, it's been happening so much this week, I can't remember everything. I love my children, but it has definitely been a week where I've been thinking of something my mother-in-law told me last Sunday. That you can love your children with all your heart, but there will still be times when you'll think, "I have made a huge mistake with my life".

It's not only the naughty stuff that starts to wear on you after a while. Nathan has been developing so fast, I can't keep up with him. He began pulling himself up to standing a few days ago and of course, he now tries to do it all the time, on anything he can get ahold of. This means MANY falls and tumbles. Yesterday alone, he cut his scalp, gave himself a goose-egg, got a bruise on his forehead, ended up with a huge scratch down the side of his face, and scratched and bruised a big line in the middle of his head. Of course, he's basically bald, so everything is visible. He gets stuck everywhere. Under the table, behind the rocking chair, between the couch and the side table, under his swing, in Aiden's closet, under our bed.... It's so cute that he's mobile, but I can't get anything done! I get so frustrated after a while that I have to put him somewhere were he can't move, which is usually his swing or the exersaucer. He gets a little annoyed because he prefers to be moving around, but I can only handle so much.

Because he's so mobile now, our sleeping arrangements are going to be changing tonight. We've had his crib with one side off up against my side of the bed and it's worked fairly well. Nathan has been starting the night out in his crib for the past week or so, and giving us a couple child-less hours in the late evening. But last night, I had put him to sleep in his crib and an hour and a half later, I hear faint crying. I go into our room and he's not in his crib. He's not in our bed either. The crying sounded faint and distant. My little baby had woken up, tried to get out of bed, fell to the floor, and ended up under the bed. I have no idea how long he'd been there. He was pretty upset and gasping for breath. Obviously, I felt like a horrible parent and spent the next 30 minutes hugging, kissing, and nursing him. He was fine and ended up going back to sleep in his bouncer, but that basically finished off my nerves for the week.
So our main goal today is to move the crib away from our bed and put the side back on it. As much as I know he needs to be contained like that now at night, it's still going to be a huge transition for me. I'm used to snuggling with him at night. This means that he's not a little baby anymore. He's growing up too fast and I'm really hating it (my hormones are really whacked right now - I'm bawling).

Well, I've just gotten Nathan out of his swing and he's already hurt himself. Time to go snuggle my growing boy.

My Best Friend's (from high school) Wedding

This past Saturday, I had the honor of attending the wedding of my best friend from high school. We'd sort of lost touch over the past 4 years and finally reconnected in the past year, but only online. I finally saw her again in June and was immediately in tears. Her wedding was beautiful and the love and respect that her and her new husband have for each other is just amazing to see. I was sitting right on the aisle at the very back, so when she came around to walk down the aisle, I was right there. She saw me and gave me this huge smile and an excited little wave as she walked past. It was good to know that she was so happy to see me.

I couldn't be happier for Haley, but as we returned home from the wedding, I realized that I felt slightly depressed. After spending a few hours trying to decipher my feelings, I finally realized that seeing her had brought up so many old memories. Being a teenager wasn't great for me and her friendship was really the only thing that brought me happiness for a long time. I was feeling depressed because I remembered how we would laugh. I don't laugh like that anymore and it made me sad. I was discussing this with my friend Katie (who happens to be Haley's cousin) yesterday. She said that it's too bad that we grow up and life gets in the way of really truly laughing. We get so involved with housework, children, work, finances and goodness knows what else that we don't have time to be silly anymore. We're supposed to be adults; being silly and laughing so hard that a Skittle ends up in someones nostril (long story) isn't practical.

The past month has been especially hard, so finding chances to laugh are few and far between. I have been trying very hard to remember how blessed we are and to keep that in mind day to day. While I was driving the boys to the park to meet with the other mommies yesterday, I gave thanks that we are able to afford a newer car that works well and that we aren't struggling to keep gas in our car due to the prices. I am thankful that we can pay our bills every month without having to worry about affording groceries after the bills are paid. I am thankful that John is employed in such a field where he is in high demand (though that means that we aren't getting to see him very often). I am thankful that our children are so very healthy and that they continue to amaze us with their development.
Aiden is learning more words than ever and is very obviously craving more learning experiences than I can keep up with. Nathan has motor skills of a child 3 months older and while I'm mostly happy with that, it's been a real test of baby proofing on my part! To share, here's some milestone photos:

Sitting all his own. He figured this out by himself and very quickly too. He was never stuck in the sitting position. He immediately figured out how to get from crawling to sitting position and back down again.

Crawling along! He can get across the living room and into the kitchen in a matter of seconds. He's so tiny still, it really looks ridiculous to me. He has also figured out how to hide under the table, but this means that he continually gets stuck in other places while trying to hide.