Playing Meeting and more snow!

Whew, I'm worn out! I just got my work out gathering the eggs and feeding and watering the chickens! The snow is up to my knees, so it's a workout just to get out to the chicken coop. Then I have to haul their water container all the way up to the house where my wonderful husband has a faucet with some stuff on it to keep it warm so we can fill up the chicken's water everyday, and then back again!

I started this post with the intention of posting this video of the kids playing meeting! It's so cute when they do that. Mischievo is quiet the preacher, huh? We trust and hope he'll grow up to fulfill the meaning of his name "preacher of rightousness".



After I started this post my husband brought to my attention how hard it was snowing outside, so I took this video.



My husband measured the snow in the front yard and it was 13" at about 1:00 p.m. It still snowing hard so I think we're in for a whole lot of snow! It's not even supposed to get over 36 degrees for the next ten days and it still shows snow on the day it's supposed to get up to 36. Right now it's 18 degrees out, which feels warm compared to the 5 degrees we had a couple of days ago!

Info on the last slideshow!

Ok, I don't know what's wrong but I can't seem to post a slideshow and write anything extra along with it! Maybe this is why I haven't posted in so long! I've just spent the last 15 minutes fooling around with my blog trying to get it to do what I want!
So, anway, it's been snowing since Saturday here. It started at 34 degrees and now it's 14 degrees. We have about a foot of snow. It's not snowing very heavily but it still pretty. Trying to keep the house warm with our wood stove so we can save some money!

Thankfully, everyone seems to be better except Little Miss Priss has a cough that's worse at night. Her pink eye is completely better and no one else got it, which is a real mercy.

The slide show is of the past week and some pictures of the snow.

It's Snowing!

Some catch up pictures

Very belated 2 month pictures and lots of catching up

Many months ago I started this post, so I thought I had better finish it! I'm back for this post anyway.
Here's Baby B's two month professional pictures.



And for comparison here's Mishievo and Little Miss Priss at 2 months.



So, anyway, I have tons more pictures to post since Baby B is now 7 months old and I haven't posted in ages! Nobody is probably even reading this anymore! I'll have to do another post with pictures since I don't feel like waiting to upload them all right now. I just want to get everyone up to date on things.

We finally figured out when Baby B was 4 months old that he had silent reflux, which is acid reflux without all the spitting up. He had been very fussy while I was feeding him since he was born and I just thought the bubbles were bugging him because he would stop fussing once he burped. So when he was 4 months old and still doing that I thought it was strange because I figured he would be used to it by then. He was also waking up crying like he was pain a lot in the night. Sometimes you would have to pick him up and walk him around until he stopped crying and then we could put him back in his bed and he would go back to sleep. Other times he would take his pacifier and go right back to sleep. He wasn't hungry because it would only be an hour or two after I had just fed him.

It was really driving us crazy and I was so exhausted. He didn't start sleeping so bad until he was about 3 months old so we couldn't figure out why he would all of a sudden start doing worse when normally babies start sleeping better around then! Also, when he was 4 months he started rolling over and that would make him wake up crying. So at first I just thought it was because he was rolling over and didn't like being on his back to sleep(we've put him on his tummy since he was born and I know that's not what you're supposed to do! In fact that's probably the only reason he wasn't any worse with the acid reflux than he was, since babies with acid reflux sleep better on their tummies.)

He was just such a good, happy baby during the day and that made it all the more puzzling, besides fussing while he was nursing, anyway. Somewhere I had heard or read about silent reflux and wondered if maybe that was his problem. I started researching it on-line and so many of the symptoms sounded like him. One reason he probably likes his pacifier so much when my other two would never take one is because sucking on a pacifier neutralizes the acid trying to come up.

Finally, we took him to the doctor to see if she would agree with us about him having silent reflux. She definitely agreed and prescribed some medication for him and that definitely helped with the fussiness during nursing. We also ordered a special wedge with a sling to keep him from sliding off for him to sleep on. That really helped with the sleep.

I only gave him the medication for a couple of weeks until I asked my midwife if she knew of a homeopathic remedy that would work. She said to try Nux Vomica and I did. It worked as well as the medication so I stopped the medication. Now he hardly every even needs the Nux Vomica. For some reason when I nurse him right before bedtime he fusses a little more, so that's about the only time I ever give him the Nux Vomica.

He still wasn't that good of a sleeper even with medication and the wedge. He would wake up around 11:00 p.m. and fuss until we put the pacifier in and then he would wake up twice more to nurse before morning. Sometimes he would make it with just the two nursings and not wake up at 11:00. I put him to bed at 8:00 p.m and he would sleep until 8:00 in the morning. He did that until last week when we finally decided enough was enough and now he's been sleeping through the night from 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m., sometimes 7:00 a.m. without any feedings. It is so nice except now Little Miss Priss has been sick all week and she's been crying for mommy and daddy a lot in the night. It's been worse than what Baby B did! Now Baby B sleeps better than she does and he's been sick, too.

In spite of it all Baby B has been a pretty happy baby, when he doesn't have to sleep anyway. He rolled over a little before his 4 month b-day and got two teeth right on his 5 month b-day just like his big brother did! Now he's can sit up fairly well by himself and he loves to roll around on the floor or play in his Exersaucer.

Baby B is a little behind my other two weight wise because when he was having such a hard time with the acid reflux he wasn't eating enough because it hurt him so bad. Then about 3 weeks ago he got over two long weeks of bad diarrhea. I even had to change his diaper at night when he would wake up to eat. Poor guy has had so many set backs. He started off like he would be bigger than my other two. He still has the cutest chubby little legs, though. It's been a long 7 months! It's funny how time can fly, but when you're in the middle of it, it seems like a long time.

Mischievo and Little Miss Priss are growing up so fast, too. Mischievo learned how to ride his bike without training wheels a few months ago now. Little Miss Priss likes to get dressed all by herself. She does a pretty good job, too! We just need to get her potty trained now. That would be so nice. I hope she will be as easy as Mischievo was. She doesn't like being dirty or wet but I can't get her to go on the potty. She just sits there and then says she's all done, without doing anything. Maybe when things get a little better around here with sleep and colds we'll try a little harder to get her potty-trained.

Well, I hope this wasn't too long, but it's been so long since I posted. I hope I remembered everything! Oh, we also got a new front porch on our house. I'll have to do another post with more pictures. We have chickens now, too. I've also been grinding my own wheat and making my own bread. I make all of Baby B's food, too. I use the Super Baby food book and its not really that much extra work. So, I've been so busy. I don't have enough time to do all the things I want to do. If I want to do something besides work than other things take a back burner and then I'm behind. So, since I like to do many, many things besides work, I'm always behind!!! I have a pile of ironing, since that is my least favorite thing to do and laundry never stops. I still haven't had any of the pictures we've taken of Baby B printed out since he's been born! I haven't started a scrapbook for him and I've never finished Little Miss Priss's scrapbook of her first year. Oh, well, I figure as long as I have all the pictures I can catch up another year. I've started knitting a sweater for Mischievo and want to do matching ones for Little Miss Priss and Baby B. We'll see if that happens!

P.S, to the last post

Well, I can't get that video on here. I wish I had someone here to help me with it. It's just not working for me.
Also, I wanted to thank everyone that left me encouraging comments on the One Month post. It was a big help to me. Thanks so much. The Lord has really helped me through this.

12 weeks old!

Well, I'm not doing very good about posting am I? It's not even that I don't have the time, I'm just too lazy! He's 12 weeks old already! I can't believe it! My midwife was here on Thursday so he got weighed and he's 14lbs. That's bigger than my other two were at this age. He has the cutest chubby little legs and the biggest smile. His smile has the ability to make me forget any blues I might have! He's had a cold and cough for the last two weeks, so sleep hasn't been that good, but I must be getting used to it because I hardly take a nap anymore. Before he got sick he was doing at last a five hour stretch or longer at the beginning of the night. He did five hours last night, so maybe he's getting better. When he was 7 weeks old he did a seven hour stretch and that was so wonderful! I needed that so bad. I had just had the worst week since he was born. I was actually able to sleep, too, which doesn't always happen. Not being able to sleep is probably what makes it so hard for me when I have little babies. It's happened to me every time I've had a baby. It doesn't happen every night, but sometimes it seems like it's every other night. I'll just lie there and not be able to fall asleep, or I'll fall into a light sleep full of dreams and wake up at the slightest noise and it feels like I didn't sleep at all. Most of the time I fall asleep fine at the beginning of the night but if I wake up before the baby does, I'll have a hard time falling asleep. I think it's getting better, though. I've been feeling better now, too. I hope it keeps up. I think I've finally just been able to accept that I'm just going to be tired for a while, especially with three kids under 4. This too shall pass, right? And then I'll wish I had my little ones back! Well, here's some pictures of my littlest man. This one was taken when he was about 8 weeks old. Here he his with his big brother, who still likes to hold him a lot. Here's Mischievo and his baby brother all ready for Lord's day at conference. This is the only official two month picture of him, unfortunately. Asleep in his swing, looking so sweet. Giving his daddy one of his big grins! He's also laughing now and has been since he was two months old. It's so cute. He's very ticklish. We did go to Sears to get some pictures taken around two months old. I'll have to scan one in when I get them back. I keep forgetting about them, they're probably ready to pick up. He was so good for his pictures. He's always ready to smile at people. He's a very social little guy. It was so much easier to get his two month pictures taken than it was when Little Miss Priss was that age. It was so hard to get her to smile! And I was trying to get Mischievo and Little Miss Priss together and it was so stressful. It was very hard to get them smiling at the same time. I decided to wait to get a picture of all three together next month when I do Little Miss Priss's 2 year pictures. So, anyway, life has been super busy. My husband has been so busy and working so many hours. It's been so hard. Then there's tons of projects waiting to be done around the house and yard, too. A few months ago my husband built a new shed and attached a chicken coop to it. That's finally all done and we just need to get a fence up and we can have chickens. We actually already have some, but someone is taking care of them for us until we're ready for them. I can't wait to have my own fresh eggs! I just got the cutest video of the baby! He's been talking away in his swing while I've been posting this. There's a mirror on the mobile and he was just talking away at himself! I'll have to try and get it on here, somehow. It's on the video camera and I've never put any of those videos on the computer before. I have everything I need, I've just never done it.

One Month Old!

Here he is, one month old! In some ways it went fast but in other ways it seems like it was a long time ago that he was born. Sleep deprivation makes it seem like a long time when you're in the middle of it, but when you look back it went fast! Does that make any sense?
So, anyway, he weighs ten pounds now. He sometimes does a four hour stretch which seems wonderful after 3 hour stretches or less at night. He's a pretty good baby, but has his fussy times, usually at night, but it doesn't take much to calm him down. It really interrupts our sleep, though. He seems to like his pacifier, which is a big help. My other two kids didn't take one, so this is something new.
So, the baby's doing good, but the mommy isn't always doing good. It's kind of hard to talk about it and I haven't told very many people about it. I have a hard time with postpartum depression and it's the pits. I didn't think I would blog about it, but I thought maybe someone else reading this might struggle with PPD, too. Sometimes it seems like other people have it all together, but you don't know how it really is. I know people probably think I'm doing just fine, because I don't tell anyone about it. I guess I feel ashamed about it sometimes, even thought it's not something I can help. I just wonder why I have to have such a hard time when other people do just fine. All I want is to be able to enjoy my baby and my other two children, but that is so hard sometimes. If I could have a full nights sleep I don't think I would have a problem. I usually feel better when they start sleeping longer. So, anyway, I have some good days now, so I think things are getting better. I need to learn how to trust the Lord better, I think. He will help me through, this, I know.

Pictures of our newest addition

Well, here's some pictures of our newest little one. Here he is in Grandma's arms an hour or so after birth.

Big sister, Little Miss Priss, was very excited to see the baby!

Big brother, Mischievo, wants to hold his baby brother all the time. He does a good job, too.

One more picture of him that I took today in his swing.

I'll have to post the complete birth story later. He was born at home under water after about 6 hours of labor, which included an hour and a half of pushing! Not much fun, but I'm so glad it's all over and he's here. So far he's very calm and laid back for the most part. He doesn't complain too loudly and is easily consoled. I just hope it keeps up!

It's a Boy!

Well, he's finally here! Born at 4:00 this afternoon. 7lbs. 3oz., 20 3/4 in. long and a big ole 14 1/2 in. head! The Lord has done great things for us, we're so thankful that he's here and all went well. We're both doing fine, but very tired, so I'll post pictures and more info tomorrow. I'll have to come up with a blog name for him. If anyone wants to know his name just leave a separate comment with your e-mail address and I won't post it, if you don't want everyone to know your e-mail address. Good night!

39 1/2 weeks belly pic

Well, I finally got another picture taken of me. It doesn't look very good because of the shadows. Oh, well.

Today is my due date and no sign of a baby coming. Little Miss Priss was 8 days late, so I've been trying to prepare myself for this one being late, too. It's still hard though. I'm so tired of being pregnant and I'm so uncomfortable. I don't sleep very good at night and it's so painful to roll over. I'm trying hard to just stay busy and be happy for every day that I have to get more things done. Today I'm just tired of waiting. I can't seem to get motivated to stay busy.
Well, enough about me. Here's a cute pic of my kids, since I haven't been doing very good about posting.

I'll try to make sure and let you all know when the baby comes. Hopefully that will be soon!!!

Painting

Well, I'm finally getting around to a post I promised! A couple of months ago now, my in-laws were here visiting and my mother-in-law helped me paint my kitchen and one wall in my living room. It looks so nice and I'm very happy with how it all turned out. The kitchen took way longer than I though it would, though! There's lots of small areas that have to be handpainted instead of rolled on, so that took longer. We worked on it for two days. Now, I just need to start working on repainting some of my cupboards and drawers. Maybe this summer.

Here's a before picture, so you can see what color paint I had before.

Here's what it looks like now.

This is the wall by our eating area.

Here's the living room wall.

The pictures really don't do the paint justice, since you can't really tell what the true color is. The paint in the living room almost looks the same in the pictures as the kitchen, but it's really quite a bit darker.

Well, I do have a ton of cute pictures of my kids I could post, but I'll just have to try and post them later. We just got back from a trip to Seattle yesterday and I threw up twice yesterday on the way home. I still don't feel 100%, I feel really weak and food doesn't settle in my tummy very well, but I'm hungry! I need to get another belly picture taken before this baby comes. I haven't been doing very good about that this time. It's starting to seem more and more real that there's going to be another baby around here in a month or so. I'm so ready to be done with being pregnant!!!

I'm still here!

Thanks, Knittery for your concern! I'm glad someone's missing me! I guess I'm allowed to post without pictures, huh?! I usually get hung up on getting pictures posted and that prevents me from doing any posts at all. I'm always thinking up blog posts, but that doesn't get them on here! I've been extremely tired lately so blogging is on the back burner. We've had several bouts of sickness over the last month. My in-laws were here for a few days and my mother-in-law helped me paint my kitchen, which I really wanted to post pics of but will have to do later. Then, that same weekend I was responsible for our all-day-meeting. So, I started the next week pretty exhausted and ended up sick! All I could do was lay on the couch for three days in a row and let my kids run wild. Even after that I was still very weak and tired. It took a long time to recover, plus the kids were both sick at some point while I was sick. Since then, Little Miss Priss has been crying out a lot at night, so I haven't been getting many good nights of sleep, plus I have to roll over so many times at night due to aching joints. Two weekends ago we flew down to my parents for my cousins wedding and came home very exhausted! Then on Thursday, Little Miss Priss had diarrhea all day long and ended up dehydrated on Friday. It was kind of scary. We kept trying to make her drink water and Pedialyte and she wanted to sleep a lot all day long. Thankfully she was feeling better by evening and was totally herself again on Saturday. Today, I'm really tired due to the time change and late nights. So, those are all my complaints! Sorry if this wasn't a very encouraging post. I will try to do some better posts with some pictures one of these days.

No pics of the snow post!

Well, I thought I had some pictures of the kids playing in the snow last week but they turned out so dark you can hardly see the kids so I'm not posting them. For some reason my brain went dead when I was trying to think of a title to this post!

Here's a cute picture I took of my kids.

Here's Little Miss Priss being her goofy self! She loves clomping around in her brother's snow boots. I thought it was especially cute with the pink dress!

I think I set myself back trying to make a snow house for my kids last week. Afterward my hip hurt so bad. Its been doing so good until now. It's still not back to what it was. If I could get enough energy to do some excercise it would probably help. I'm in the third trimester now and I definitely feel it. I'm so ready to be done! My belly feels so heavy and I have so many Braxton-Hicks contractions. If I'm walking around for very long, especially in the evening, I feel so uncomfortable. The contractions don't hurt, they're mostly annoying and uncomfortable, especially if my bladder feels full! Which it almost always does, now! It still seems like a long time until this baby is supposed to be born. In some ways I'm glad, since I'm not exactly ready to deal with a newborn right now, but in other ways I'm ready for it all to be over. Plus, I can't wait to meet this baby!

25 week belly pic and catch up post

I'm really behind. I'm 27 weeks already and I'm just now getting around to posting my 25 week pic. At least I took a picture! It is so hard to get it taken. My husband is so busy these days that I never want to bug him about taking my picture, so I have to do it my self. This picture looks really lame. I hate my own picture, it never looks good to me, but anyway here it is. Just look at the belly and not the face!

Here's a cute pic of Little Miss Priss in her pig tails. This was the first time I've ever put her hair in pig tails. I've been waiting all my life to have a little girl to do her hair! Finally, she has enough hair! She doesn't appreciate it, though. She fusses when I try to do her hair.

We went to Seattle for a little vacation about 2 weeks ago now. We stayed there from Thursday night to Wednesday morning. We had a very nice time and we did more things than we have before. We went to the aquarium one day and took a ferry on another day. Both of the kids liked the aquarium and the ferry ride. We also got visits in with family.
Here's a picture of the kids on the ferry before we pulled away from the dock.

Here's Little Miss Priss with all her goofiness eating her sandwich on the ferry.

And here's the kids sound asleep on the way home with their teddy bears that their Grandma bought them.


So, I guess I'm still not really caught up because we got lots of snow on Sunday and now I have pictures of the kids playing in the snow yesterday. I'll have to try and do another post before the week is over for that. I'm really losing my motivation to blog. For some reason I can easily find other things that I'd rather do besides blogging. I also enjoy reading everyone else's blogs better than writing my own posts. It's much more interesting!

Huge windstorm!

We had a huge windstorm yesterday with sustained winds of 50 mph and gusts of 80 mph! Of course, we lost our power due to many trees falling. We were without power from about 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Since we're on a well that means we can't get any water either. Thankfully we do have a generator, but I don't know how to hook it all up so I didn't have any power until my husband could come home from work at about 2:30, maybe. It was a pretty scary storm and I watched many things fall down all around us. There are still many people here in Walla Walla without power, including one of our neighbors, since our tree took out their power line!

We took a lot of pictures of course. There were so many trees down. It was amazing! Many streets were just completely blocked. Almost every one's house lost some shingles. Some lost their roofing all the way down to the plywood and now they are predicting rain and snow in the next few days! We went to Home Depot today to buy a chainsaw to cut our tree up that fell and pretty much bought one of the last gas powered chain saws! The roofing department was full of people, too.

Here's a picture of our blue spruce tree that fell down in the front yard.


I pretty much knew it was going to blow over. I was hoping I would see it fall, but I had to go into the kitchen for something and when I came back to look it had already fallen! It was amazing to see the ground flexing under the tree every time a strong gust of wind blew. I could tell it was most likely going to fall away from the house, but I was a little worried that it could hit the house. As you can see in the picture it fell toward the road, kind of, and is partially blocking the road.

Here's a picture of some of the wires it damaged.

We were actually planning on have this tree cut down, so it's not that big of a deal that it blew over(except losing power and all that of course!). The power company was starting their process of every two years pruning trees by power lines and they would have cut it down for us.

The first thing I noticed as soon as I came up the stairs yesterday morning(we sleep in the basement) was that our shed had blown over! Here it is.

As you can see its pretty rusty and old. We were planning on replacing it, anyway. This next picture you can see the kid's slide was thrown all around and our glass picnic table, too. We actually saw the wind pick up the slide like it was nothing and throw it around. I was afraid it was going to come into the window by the patio. Instead it hit the corner of the house and bounced off into pieces. It should all go back together, though. Mischievo was all worried about his slide when he saw that.

Here's our grill, blown off the patio like nothing.

And finally, part of our fence was blown over!

So, that's the damage we had at our house. We might have had a few roof shingles blown off, too, but nothing bad.
This morning we drove to Home Depot and also took a few pictures around town. Many people had way more damage than we did.

Here's a house with a tree blown over on it.

These next two photos are of the high school's roof. So many shingles were blown off!


Some trees blown over at a park.

Here's the Nissan dealer's sign.

A house with a lot of shingles missing. There were worse ones but I didn't get all my pictures uploaded.

This tree was blocking the whole road.

Here's a picture of the worst damage we saw and with an amazing story to go along with it. This tree pretty much took out the whole 2nd story of this house. The lady who lives in it was in her bedroom, which is right where the tree hit, and she felt like she should get out of her bedroom and go downstairs. As soon as she started down the stairs this tree fell in on her house. She would have been maimed or killed of she hadn't left her room.

Here's another house with a tree on it.

And yet another tree down.

There are many more pictures that I could have posted but I figured they would just be repetitious. These pictures give you an idea of the kind of damage that was done. Pretty amazing to see 100 year old trees completely uprooted by the wind.
Well, hopefully I will get around to doing a catch up post next week sometime. It's been a long time since I posted! We've just had cold after cold after cold!!! I've never had so many colds in my life. So, I'll have to post more on that later.