Blogging Troubles

So, I've been trying to update my blog for a few days but we are having some computer problems.

Three weeks till my due date; the house is in order, warm weather has arrived, yard sales have supplied me with a fresh supply of newborn sized clothes, we're just all waiting, waiting, waiting. I hope we don't really have a whole three weeks left to wait, but even if we do, I know it will fly by. Then I'll have a crying newborn and think of how good I had it during pregnancy, lol.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

I've been thinking about laundry lately.

I have a love-hate relationship with my laundry. I really like sorting the piles, filling the machine, hearing it all working as I'm doing something else, and even switching out the loads. But when it comes time to fold and put away... ugh. I hate it. I mean, in theory I like it... fresh, clean clothes for the family, stacked neatly in all the designated drawers. But in reality, it's always been the most horrible, daunting, BORING task ever.

That is, until I started listening to my husband.

Martin has been practically BEGGING me for YEARS to start doing smaller laundry loads. I felt this was impossible because then I'd never catch up. In my own laundry method, I fill the washer with as many articles of clothing as I can possibly fit (too many, it's true) and then I have to run each load through the dryer at least twice and usually three times to get them all dry (my loads are too big to hang it all on the line outside, but usually a few things get out there) and then when they are finally dry they sit in the dryer for days (DAYS) getting all wrinkly again.  Sometimes the pile comes out of the dryer and sits on a chair or bed or floor for an extended period of time until it's been stepped on/slept on/sat on so much that it all needs to be washed again.

Yeah, my laundry method is awesome.

So, I finally decided to try Martin's way. Small loads. Just a few things at a time, but more frequently.

AND IT WORKED.

I've been caught up on my laundry for about a week, and it's incredible. With small loads I never feel like I don't have the time to fold and put away! With small loads I can do MANY loads in a day and I actually enjoy it!! I have been hanging up shirts again and putting away my own clothes! (My clothes all go upstairs... it's a long way from the laundry room to the bedroom.) I'm telling you, this method of laundry-doing has changed my life!!  And the best part is, I never feel like "laundry" is a dark cloud chore looming over me all day long. I encourage all of you reading this to try doing laundry this way (if you don't already... maybe I'm the last person to hear about this.) See what you think! I love it.

In other news, we all have sunburns, which is a nice way to start out the summer season. Mothers Day was really, really fun, aside from one very, very obnoxious trip to Lowe's that the girls and I had to endure in the morning.  We spent the afternoon over on campus celebrating Mothers Day along with Martin's sister's graduation--I guess she is now Dr. AunT!

As you can see, we had lots of fun! The weather was absolutely perfect. PERFECT. And I love graduation time... it's such a happy time! Being on campus on Sunday was really fun. And from there we went out to Prophetstown for a picnic with my side of the family which was also really fun.  The girls were sunburned and filthy when we got home... it was a pretty good start to the summer.

This morning on Facebook I saw that the local u-pick orchard was ready for strawberry picking. Yahooo! Martin left us the car and the girls and I met my sister and her kids out there.  Greta and I together picked 10lbs of delicious, juicy, sweet strawberries while Anja and her cousin Grace picked 11 pounds! They won the prize (a dandelion.) All those berries went home with Grace, which is fine with me because we ate strawberries all day long and still have half our box left. Yikes! I guess we'll be eating strawberries all day again tomorrow.

And here's a picture of the little May Altar that Anja made. That pretty statue was my own contribution... but she liked having the Little People Mary on the table, surrounded by a flower headwreath and then completely buried in these funny pink silk flowers that we have. While she made it she was wearing a cat costume.

And speaking of costumes, Anja is in another I-Only-Want-To-Wear-THIS-Dress phase. Her dress of choice is her very fancy Easter dress from last year which is a pale pink with little white beads all over the bodice. She loves it, and she seriously wears it EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Oh look! She's wearing it in the picture above at the strawberry patch! About once a week she brings it to me and tells me I can wash it. It's getting so gross.  It has a hole in it and is covered in stains. Ew. I hope that since it's such a fancy dress and she is a 4 year old girl people who see her will realize that she is wearing a nasty princess dress because she loves it.... it's not like when they get attached to one t-shirt that gets disgusting and then it looks like you just don't do your kid's laundry.

And we're back to the laundry.

Preparing the Nest

You might remember my last post where I voiced my excitement at my clothes fitting again. Well.... they already don't. Again.

I still have more than four weeks left till my official due date. If the baby keeps growing at it's current rate, I'll have to have a homebirth simply because I won't be able to fit out my front door. *sigh*

In the meantime, I've been nesting in a completely insane way. It's nuts. I am not the "cleaning" type by nature--I have lived for many years in perfect harmony with my clutter and dust bunny friends-- but suddenly I've been struck with this urge to clean EVERYTHING. I mentioned a few things I'd done last week, but recent activities also include washing the inside of my washing machine lid, dusting all the baseboards in the house, scrubbing the outsides of all my kitchen cabinets, and painting the stairway (finally!). That last is my biggest and most important accomplishment, and here is a picture to show my pride:

 I am so, so pleased with how the landing is turning out as painted floors. Martin chose the absolute perfect color--he chose exactly what I had envisioned, except if I had been the one to go to the hardware store and choose it, I would've gotten it wrong. (Those who remember my nuclear glow bathroom might have an idea of how bad I am with paint color.) Upstairs on the landing it's mostly painted except for a little strip which is holding two dressers and a very large trunk full of fabric. All that furniture has to be moved before we can rip up that last strip of carpet and finally finish the floors. Maybe this weekend! But more likely next.  I have plans to make the landing a sort of extension of the bedroom. It will have a chair and a dresser that will be our changing table (the same green dresser that we used for the other girls) and it already has a shelf full of diapering stuff, including this adorable cover that we recently got:

 Love it. I'm so excited to have someone in diapers again. It's been a long time! And newborn diapers are SO TINY!!!!

Another thing my nesting has gained us is a cleared out, cleaned out, rearranged bedroom where we all fit and we all have our own bed! Greta was thrilled to have her own little bed at last, and Anja was happy to once again have her bed all to herself. And I am happy to not be sleeping in a twin bed anymore! Our room looks great (so great, in fact, that I invited my sister up to see it yesterday--usually the entire upstairs is a place of great mystery to visitors.) Now I'm ready for baby to come, and I hope he/she does so before the house turns to shambles again. That would be a little frustrating.

But the nesting urge has slowed. In fact, maybe even stopped. Yesterday I had these vague ideas of things I'd like to get done--organizing Martin's closet where our shoes and sweaters are heaped on the floor, doing a bit of outside work, clearing out toy baskets--but none of that happened. Instead we went to McCords with my sister and her kids for lunch!

And then I spent the afternoon mostly knitting and doing a teensy bit of laundry. The organizing just didn't seem so important anymore.

By the way, it's so fun to go out to eat at McCords and have all the kids sitting at their own table! It was soooooo cute.

Happy Weekend! And Happy Mothers Day to all the mamas reading this blog. May your day be full of pampering and sticky kisses.

Summerizing

Our local weatherman says that we’ve seen the end of our freezes and frosts for this year and so I feel more confident about getting the household ready for summer. We’ve done a little planting and yard work—four tomato plants in 5 gallon buckets, and one garden box filled with tomatoes, peppers and garlic. I think I’m going to devote the other garden box to pole beans and do that teepee idea with them, making a little fort for the girls (and neighborhood cats.) I know I’m really late for planting beans…. But hopefully they won’t mind the heat and will survive. And in the other garden plot, I don’t know what we’ll do.  I threw some melons back there last year so maybe if I weed it out we’ll get some melons growing back. Who knows.

Other than that, we’ve been mostly making plans for our yards and mulching the front—but we ran out of mulch, so the front of our house looks really lousy still and will until we get more, which we hope to do soon.  It’s funny—we kind of were hoping so much to not be living here this summer that we actually started planning our lives around not being here… hence the late start on the garden. So we have a little catching up to do, but I have confidence that by Memorial Day our yard will be looking swell.

On the inside I’ve been packing away winter clothes and maternity clothes. If you are ever in a pinch for clothing storage and happen to have some of those giant paper lawn bags on hand, they work beautifully for storing clothes!  They are heavy-duty so they won’t rip like regular paper bags, they are HUGE so they hold an entire seasons worth of kids clothes and as long as you mind that dotted line that says plainly “Do Not Fill Above This Line” they are manageable once filled too!  I was able to haul one all the way from the upstairs bedroom clear to the Back Room!  (The second one I ignored that important dotted line and I ended up having to ask Martin to take it downstairs for me. SO, MIND THE LINE.)

Does it sound like I’m nesting?

I love nesting. I LOVE IT. After many weeks of not having the energy to do anything but sit in a chair and knit (even though I DID more than that, that’s all I felt like I wanted to do) I suddenly this week am feeling this blissful end-of-pregnancy energy. The only downside is that with the energy comes a sense of URGENCY. I look at my house and I see so much that needs to be done before we can bring a baby home. Of course, I know this isn’t true—the baby will fit right in whenever it arrives. But still.  I’m getting all sorts of really important household chores done with all this crazy nesty stuff—like lint rolling my rugs and scouring the entire outside of my oven. It’s incredible. And then there’s the more normal (and truly more important) stuff like organizing the diapers, rearranging the bedroom to make us all fit, finding all the tiny baby clothes that I know are in a place I thought was smart and accessible at the time of putting them there, but now are buried under who-knows-how-much stuff in who-knows-which room.

And aside from all the work getting done, showing that this third pregnancy is nearing it’s end, the baby suddenly dropped on Tuesday afternoon.  It was very sudden.  And with this little development (especially paired with my new energy level) I wouldn’t mind being pregnant for a few more months!  My clothes fit! I can breathe! And I feel cuter than I have through this entire pregnancy.

 This is not the exact picture I posted on facebook... for one thing, it's not Instagrammed. But as I explained on there, I find it very hard to take my own picture in a mirror. My grandmother used to find all the photographs with her in them and cut out her face. I would totally do that if I knew how to use photoshop! I would gladly leave empty holes in my photographs where my face ought to be.

Ok, on to the other things going on in our lives lately. My nieces and nephew had an open house last weekend for their homeschooling co-op. We were late (if you can imagine that) because no one wanted to get dressed (shocker) and then we realized only after we were over on campus (horrible place) that we would have really been better off walking to this thing or at least taking the trolley over. But, it was too late by that time and we eventually got there and saw the very important people, one of whom is pictured here:

 Anja and her cousin, Bella, being awesome while Greta looks uncomfortable and like she doesn't really want to admit that she knows them. ("Why was I asked to be in this picture with these strangers? I've never seen these nutjobs before in my life! I swear!")

Afterward we found this really, really, really cool stick sculpture that I didn't know existed. It is SO FUN.  It's like a house made of sticks, except it's more like a maze with little rooms. We played in for a really long time, we all loved it.

 Here is my little family looking out one of the windows.

My other niece (Bella's big sister) made her First Communion this past weekend and it was a lovely day, but I forgot to put the picture of it on here that I meant to. She looked so pretty!

Oh, and I advertised on Instagram that there would be a story here explaining what the girls and I did TODAY.  Today we went to Toys "R" Us to ride a mechanical Garfield.

So, a looooooooong time ago, we went there to get somebody a birthday present and on the way out the girls wanted to ride this mechanical Garfield thing, so of course I let them. Anja had her ride and she thought it was great, and then it was Greta's turn and the blasted thing ate ALL my money and kept saying (very loudly and in a British accent) "Another Coin, Please. Another Coin, Please" every three seconds. Greta, of course, was upset and I was upset because such a simple thing as a mechanical ridey thing should NOT leave little toddlers devastated.  So, ever since then she's been talking about it and every once in awhile she mentions that we should go back and see if it's fixed. (By the way, she thinks it's a tiger and yells at me whenever I accidentally call it a cat... which is always, since it IS a cat. A very famous cat, really, but Greta has no idea.) Well, anyway, today we finally had the car on a day she remembered this broken ridey tiger, and suggested we go and see if it had been fixed yet. Great idea! We immediately scrounged up many quarters and headed out for Toys "R" Us. Only to find that the Garfield ride wasn't there anymore. It had been replaced by a car with a big mouse in it, wearing a sign that read "Out Of Order." Even that was okay, because there was still this big train that could be ridden, so the girls got in and I put in the quarters, which immediately plinked out again. It wouldn't take my money. They were BOTH BROKEN.

Toys "R" Us FAIL.

Luckily, I know that there is a ridey carousel thing in our mall that the girls rode once last fall and loved. So we went there. But we went in the wrong door (because I hate the mall and never go there) so the first thing we came to was a collection of ridey toys that were not the carousel, but more like the ones at the crappy toystore. Hop in girls! Ready... Set... OH WAIT, IT'S BROKEN AND NOW IT'S EATEN THREE OF MY QUARTERS!

And of course, it was Greta's that wasn't working. I slipped her into Anja's choice ride, which WAS working (thank goodness) and everyone was happy. Then we headed off to find the carousel.

And this is where our trip greatly improved. There are three different vehicles on this carousel and I just happened to have two dollar bills in my purse and we had one dollar left of quarters so we were able to ride the carousel THREE TIMES, so each girl got a ride on each vehicle! Everyone was happy and once we were out of money we went to the indoor play area which is actually pretty great because it's designed for pretty little kids and it's just a place to climb and slide, which is awesome. Nothing is high enough that a fall would do any damage, everything is really spread out but contained, so there's plenty of room for everyone, and climbing and sliding are my girls' favorite things to do, so they were extremely happy to be at this place. I tried to pretend we weren't in the mall (where I was quickly realizing that I am waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay behind in the fashion world. Like a decade or more. Yikes) and I tried harder to pretend that the other three parents there were not all glued to their smartphone screens while their kids were being so cute and funny.

 Cute and funny, like mine! I'm so glad it's summer.

Springy Trees

Wow! Thanks for all the sympathy and kind words about the house! Our search continues. Last Sunday we took a little family drive (after a spur-of-the-moment lunch outing at Dog N Suds, the local hotdog drive-in/rootbeer stand) out to a house in a nearby town. It looked interesting in the pictures and was nearly ten acres. Intriguing, right? We got there and were blown away. In both a literal and a very bad figurative way. The nine acres was okay, but it was mostly field and was surrounded by bigger fields. And it was a really windy day. It was so windy I almost couldn't get Greta out of the car because the wind kept closing the door on me! And then there was the house, which was really something. had at least one gaping hole in the roof, but the best part was the tree that was branching out of the windows--FROM THE INSIDE!!  If it hadn't been such a long, whiney drive to get there (evidently church, followed by lunch in the car, followed by a thirty minute drive to the middle of nowhere is not an ideal day for a three year old and a four year old) it would have been really, really funny. I'm kind of excited to see what kind of other miserable places we find during this search!

Later that night on Sunday Martin and I went to a grownups-only dinner with my sister and her husband. I wish I would have gotten a picture of the four of us. It was a really fun night! Good Indian food, free henna, and since we slipped out early from the dinner due to an early bedtime but then it turned out the kids were all having a baseball game up at Ooma and Oompa's (or something like that) we all went out for a cup of coffee as well. It was a really nice evening!

For Easter I knitted up some little eggs for the girls. I ended up making five or six of them, and then I made a nest out of mohair. (I got the eggs and nest patterns from the blog Small Things, thanks to my sister who got me reading that.) The nest turned out super cute, but I didn't get it done as quickly as I would've liked, and since I didn't have it done by Easter morning and I couldn't finish two in one day (that day being Easter Sunday) I gave the nest and a few of the eggs to my niece Bella for her birthday (which was what I had intended, except I was going to make a second one for her. But in the end, it doesn't really matter at all and this long rambling paragraph really has no point up to now.) So anyway. I eventually did make a second nest and instead of using the original egg pattern (because those eggs turned out pretty large...) I made up a straight needle pattern for smaller ones and they turned out alright. Then I found the pattern on Clare's blog for the little chicks, and I made one in this funny unspun natural colored wool I had and then I added wings to make it more birdish. And this is the completed project all together, as it sits on our dining room table now:

I really love the mohair nest. On Holy Saturday we cut a branch from one of our oak trees which barely even had buds on it and the girls covered it in little playdoh buds. It turned out cuter than it sounds. We stuck the branch in an empty wine bottle and have been using it as a table centerpiece with some springtime animals underneath (except Greta likes to make all the animals take naps, so she lies them down on their sides... so our cute little springy table arrangement just looks like a pile of knocked over toys every day.) Now that we have this cute nest and bird, we moved the tree to the dining room table and Anja has put the bird up in the branches of the tree and it is really cute.

And here's a little picture of Greta from a few mornings ago when she decided to draw on her face with blueberries while I wasn't looking. She was pretty pleased with herself.

Geeminy, can it really be true that I am only seven weeks away from my estimated due date for this baby?! That seems almost impossible. The other day while I was feeling sorry for myself being so big and preggo and tired, I thought "how did I do this when I had baby Anja to take care of too?" I must have been so tired! I really don't remember much of Greta's pregnancy at all (too tired to form memories, I guess) but it must have been really hard. However, everyone we met who said they'd had children about that close together in age said it was hard at the beginning but in the end, the best thing ever and boy were they RIGHT! I can't imagine a bigger space between my girls. I love, love, love that they are so close together in age. Everything is so easy! They can share clothes, they can play the same games, they can both buckle themselves into their carseats.... my life these days is a cinch! If I were smart I would be making and freezing meals, or making cloth diaper covers, or doing something else productive that would help me out in that time coming soon when my life won't be nearly so cinchy.

I'm also really excited to have a June baby! I've never had a warm weather baby before, and I'm looking forward to it. I'm also really looking forward to not being pregnant anymore, haha.

Sadnesses

This is not the post I had wanted to write for my interesting post, even though I had prepared for it in my head.  But this is the way our interesting situation turned out, so here it is.

The short story: We put an offer on a house, but we didn’t get it.

The slightly longer story: We found our dream house at a dream price, did everything we could to get it and were beat out moments before the deadline by someone with cash.

And for those interested in all the little details of such a story, here’s the whole thing:

Over the winter we reached a point in this house where we were both financially able to get out and feeling the need to get out due to our expanding family size. I like this house. But it’s not right for a family with young kids. And while it’s a convenient, exciting, pretty awesome place to live for a college student or for a young, childless couple, it’s not the ideal place to raise small children. So we thought it was time to start looking around the area and see what’s out there.  Our ideal spot included a couple of acres, a do-able commute to Martin’s work, and an old house is a plus.

One Saturday in March we had an appointment set up with our realtor (the really nice man who sold us this house) to look at a place about 45 minutes from town. I felt so stupid going out there because I KNEW it wasn’t right for us, I KNEW it was too far and I felt like I was wasting his time and ours by even going out there. But it seemed impolite to cancel, so we went ahead and did it. It was definitely not the house for us, but it was good to talk to our realtor and tell him exactly what we were looking for. And he responded with news of a foreclosure property he’d be listing that wasn’t yet on the market, but it would be soon. He described it as a couple of acres inside our county and a house that was virtually unliveable. It sounded like a pretty sorry place, but it was on the way home so we figured there was no harm in looking and we followed him there.

The road took us through one of our favorite parts of this area, right along the river over by Fort Ouiatenon. And when we pulled into the driveway of this “unliveable” house, Martin and I just kind of stared at each other. It was gorgeous. It was your typical 1900-ish farmhouse with a new roof and new siding and a brand new wooden porch. It had an old barn and a newer pole barn and trees and pasture and a huge garden spot, complete with garden gate. We were speechless. And, less importantly, (but I still took it as a sign) the color of the house was the color I’ve always said I wanted my house to be—a wonderful light green.

He showed us the inside of the house. All wood floors. All finished original woodwork. Three bedrooms upstairs, right close together. A walk-in pantry. A huge cement-floored basement. All new windows, all new wiring… the place was incredible. The one major hiccup was that it needed a lot of finishing work (no paint on any of the walls, for example) and it needed a kitchen.  But the one thing in the kitchen was an old farmhouse sink, which I of course fell in love with immediately.  And the rest of the house was perfect.

The two acres it sat on had pawpaw trees, raspberry bushes, possibly grapes, maple trees, five lilac bushes, and one other tree that I thought was a fruit tree of some sort.  It was the ideal homestead conveniently located right at the edge of our own town.

It took a little thought and strategic work, but we worked out the money side and were able to make an offer as soon as it was listed, last week. We planned to keep and rent our house. We were approved for a loan that would cover the improvements needed to the farmhouse. We had all the workers lined up all the inspections we needed were accounted for.  It all happened fast and easily , and everything seemed to be really working out in our favor. It really seemed like our stars were aligning! (And I suppose they were… just in someone else’s universe.) We could’ve been in by the time the new baby was born.

But, the house was owned by the bank. And banks are tricky and they like their money, and they would prefer to get as much money as they possibly can. And so, when we offered the asking price, it was not accepted. They wanted more. We had a deadline of Wednesday  at noon to put in our “highest and best” offer, and we did exactly that—we offered the absolute most we could afford, which was considerably higher than their asking price.  We wanted this place VERY badly. It just felt like home.

And we almost had it. We were the highest offer until minutes before the deadline, when someone slipped in with a cash offer that was more than we could have afforded. We lost it by minutes.  

Now, in retrospect, the workings of the bank seem unfair and slimy. At the time it seemed weird, but we thought we had a real chance at getting it and we were willing to pay our top dollar to get it. We were willing to do much of the work ourselves. We’d been planning out colors and details and our future in that house for weeks. The bank’s system of selling seemed like an inconvenience to us for having to wait so long but we were accepting of the fact that that’s how they did things—they evidently never take the asking price, always more.  Since we knew that ahead of time, it seemed okay.  But I feel like the time it took to get their few thousand dollars more cost us our dream house. Why couldn’t they have just accepted our offer of their asking price?! It’s just not their standard procedure. They want more.

So now, come June, instead of bringing our third baby home to a sight of fruiting trees and the sound of horses whinnying nearby, we will come home to the same old sights of the port-a-potty across the street and the thugs pushing their shopping carts around. Instead of turning my big kids outside to play I will continue to say “no, we can’t go out right now” because there are too many pedophiles hanging around outside. I’ll continue to close my windows on nice days because the smell of the neighbors’ house makes me sick to my stomach.

But it’s okay! I’m getting over it! It is, after all, just a house. (Our dream house. A house like no other… but I’m trying not to think about that.) We are still a happy little family who possess all our limbs and five senses. A house is just a material possession, right? And we do HAVE a house… we have a roof over our head, which is all we need. And it’s a nice little house! Even if we will be five people crammed into one bedroom really soon.  And besides, I am a firm believer (especially when bad things happen to other people) that there are no mistakes or accidents in life and that everything happens for a reason. Who knows why we were not meant to get that place. Maybe it will get blown down by a tornado. Maybe one of the neighbors is a pedophile. Maybe the garage would’ve fallen down on one of the kids. Who knows? And we may never know.  We just have to trust that it turned out exactly the way it was supposed to.

We will continue our home search. We’ll keep looking for another perfect place—possibly a MORE perfect place. And everything will be just fine in the end, as obnoxious as it all seems right in this moment.

So that is our interesting story! I was very much hoping that this post, when it was finally written, would’ve been the opposite of what it is, but oh well.  I can’t help feeling a little more bitter toward the Big Bad World than I used to be, and I can’t help thinking (aside from “everything happens for a reason”) that “if it sounds too good to be true, it likely is.” But, oh well.  There is something out there for us… we just will probably have to wait awhile to find it!

In other news, I’m REALLY glad it’s Friday and I’m fully intending to get out on my own a little bit tomorrow. Are all four year old girls so screechy? Anja has developed this habit of screeching laugh that is driving me up the wall. I mean, I’m glad she’s so happy all the time… but my poor eardrums…  I think tomorrow (or maybe tonight?) I’ll go to Barnes and Noble and enjoy a hot drink while browsing the crafting books. That sounds really, really nice.

And speaking of Anja, today after picking up the same mess for about the fourteenth time, I muttered “I’m so tired of picking up all the time.” Anja heard me and responded, “but you don’t pick up all the time. Sometimes you just sit around doing nothing.”  Let me tell you, that girl and her confidence-boosting words… wow, I just feel so GOOD about myself all the time!

And for the record: When I’m “sitting around doing nothing” lately, it’s because of that damn sciatic (is that how you spell it? I still can never remember how it’s pronounced) nerve that is acting up again this pregnancy. I feel like I had a break from it with Greta… but this time around it’s just like it was when I was pregnant with Anja. Does that mean I’m destined to have another self esteem wrecker? I’m not sure I can take more than one.  (Although this morning after I finally rolled out of bed and joined Greta and Martin downstairs, Greta told me how pretty I looked as I was huddled over my coffee barely able to open my eyes yet.  Her sweetness often makes up for Anja’s more salty opinions of me.)

But geeminy, these girls. Just now I dressed Greta’s doll for her and then told Greta that her baby looked adorable. She burst into tears and screamed that I wasn’t supposed to say that.

Yeah, I definitely think it’s time for this mama to get a little alone time.

Easter... and What You Don't Have

We had a lovely Easter. Here we all are--I have added this family picture to my sidebar under "Our Growing Family" which hasn't been updated since two Christmases ago. (!)  Getting a family picture is hard work alone, but getting a somewhat decent family picture is practically impossible. This is the best we've been able to do in more than a year.

Easter was really nice. There is nothing else quite like the Easter mass at St. Boniface. Sadly, there's nothing quite like the personality change that takes place in my children the moment we step into St. Boniface either. They behaved like non-humans, to put it kindly. Honestly, the people behind us probably thought Greta had something mentally wrong with her. You think I'm joking, but I'm not. She was making these crazy faces and screaming and flinging herself around. Then Anja started doing kind of the same thing except she kept hitting her head on the pew--on purpose. Awesome. All this was intermixed with loud cries every three minutes of "I WANT TO GO HOOOOOOOME!!!!!" Yeah. Not the most spiritually fulfilling of Masses, but that's ok. Because it was Easter and they still had trumpets and it was still beautiful.

We spent the afternoon at my parents' house with parts of both our families, eating really good food and hunting for Easter eggs, celebrating my niece Bella's 4th birthday (we now have three four-year-olds in our extended family!) and soaking up sunshine. It wasn't the warmest of days, but the sunshine was warm and the afternoon ended with many of the adults lounging on the patio, each in his own personal sunbeam with his own personal reading material. Definitely a good holiday.

So, you know how they say "You dont' know what you've got till it's gone?" Very true. I believe it. But there's also a saying that says "You don't know how awful your appliances are until they finally break and you have to replace them." I found out about this statement a few weekends ago when one Friday morning Martin woke up and heard, as he said, water running in a room where there is no sink. It was our water heater and it was leaking. And it was dead. It was a mild inconvenience for a few days, but the inconvenience ended with a new water heater, and suddenly I realized that I've been living with an "inconvenience" for five years. Our new water heater actually WORKS! It heats water--a lot of water! And the most amazing thing is that it STAYS HOT. Not the water coming out of the faucet (although that stays hot too) but the water in the tank!  It used to be that we couldn't shower first thing in the morning in the winter because the water would be MAYBE lukewarm. We had to first do some dishes or something--just enough to make the water heater re-heat... or whatever it does. But I believe my cold winter showers are a thing of the past! Not only that, but with the old water heater we got maybe two inches of bathtub filled with warm water before it went cold. We kind of had to run the girls' baths in stages. Not anymore! Now there's warm water left even after the whole tub is filled!!!!!!!!  Not only that, but today I ran a bath and did dishes AT THE SAME TIME and I didn't run out of hot water!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  This is really incredible. I shouldn't be surprised... looking at our old water heater, it's clear that it was produced in prehistoric times. But I never realized how bad it was. I never knew it wasn't normal.

But now.... my eyes are opened to a whole new world of hot water.

We're having some pet issues along with our appliance issues. The main issue now is Matilda.  She's had this pesky bladder infection for a few months now--she's been to the vet three or four times. It'll go away with medicine and come right back again. And of course, we know when it has returned because we walk through our front door and smell that horrible smell of cat peepee. Finally we couldn't stand it anymore (most of what she goes on has to be thrown away because I can't get the smell out.) We decided that until we can get a good supply of this natural enzyme medicine that seems to work from our vet, she'd have to spend some time outside. We didn't think this would be an issue at all. Lots of cats are inside/outside cats and they always come back, right? Wrong. Not Matilda. We can't catch her now, and she seems to have a boyfriend. (She's fixed, so there will be no kittens. Just a lot of "companionship.") These two are inseparable and if we try to scare the scabby black and white stray cat away, she just runs off with him. Annoooooyyyyiiiing.  We'll see what happens. I think she'll still come back, but just in case, I've been putting food out on the porch for her (and all the other thousands of neighborhood strays, of course.) We'll see.

And I realized in my last post that I spelled "Tandem" wrong. Sorry about that.

We're still nursing.

And there might be an interesting post coming up soon, so stay tuned.