Chuckles

After Morgan and I pick McKay up from school, we have a little lunch and then it's quiet time. I put Morgan down and then McKay and I do something together before it's his quiet time. I used to lay down with him and sometimes still do if I need a nap, but lately I've had too much to do so I just tell him it's quiet time or he tells me. Then he typically ends up in his room playing with a couple cars or legos because I'm no fun while doing chores. Almost every time he sacks out right where he's playing. Last week it was on the floor where the sun was coming in through his big windows. He'd spread out a blanket with a collection of legos and he was curled up in a ball. Too cute.

Today I knew he hadn't been asleep long so I was going to pick him up and carry him to the van so we could go get Easton from school. I'd already put Morgan in the van and was cutting it close on time because I'd wanted to finish a couple chores like starting the dishwasher and swapping laundry loads. I went to pick McKay up and he was swaddled in a sheet.

As I picked him up I saw a bare shoulder and realized he had stripped down to his underwear before sacking out. What?! Why?! I didn't have time to wake and dress him and knew the drama that would ensue if I tried, so I just scooped him up in the sheet and put him in the van - laughing all the way! My laughter woke him up a bit and he just gave a sleepy, sly grin. I probably should have grabbed his clothes but I didn't want to make the extra trip and he was a heavy enough load all wrapped up. Do I carry him over the belly or under? There seemed to be no good answer.

Tonight as we snuggled and read books on my bed (which actually got made today!) McKay was snuggled up close to my belly side. When we were done he said, "Mom, I like rubbing your belly button." I hadn't even noticed he'd been rubbing my tummy the whole time! If you've watched McKay nurse that thumb of his, you know the other hand is busy caressing his ear or forearm. The boys get a big kick out of my spreading button. If I need to change their mood I ask if they want to compare belly buttons!

Ryan made cookies tonight and as I was walking toward the table I totally ran into one of the chairs with my belly and hollered, "Ouch!" It hurt real good. Ryan asked what I'd done and I told him I'd run into the chair because my belly was sticking out farther than I thought. Everyone started laughing at me and what can you do? I've already begun having the wet shirt around the belly look anytime I'm at the sink doing dishes. How embarrassing! Gotta start doing the belly check before leaving the house!

My bag

I think being stuck in the house all last week with sick kids gave me serious cabin fever. I've been so restless to get out of the house each day and that is just not me! Sadly, I've succumbed to a lot of selfishness. Thankfully, today took us to a new friend's house for a play date so my friend could unpack. Did that sound right? It's true and she's genius!

Most people wouldn't invite someone over a week after they'd moved in for a playdate, especially considering she's got eight kids! But while my crew was there, she was able to clear three dreaded boxes of miscellaneous stuff from her dining room table so the family can now eat meals together. All because her kids were entertained by their playmates and I got my baby fix while she had full uninterrupted use of her hips and both arms.

Weeks ago I had offered to watch her kids on the day they moved from the hotel into their house and had their household goods shipment delivered. And then my kids got the flu and I couldn't do the one thing I knew would be most helpful on a day like that. I felt awful. Now that we're well, I offered again but she just said to come over and keep her company while she unpacked. The isolation of being in her home after months of living in hotels with plenty of other people was starting to make her pretty lonely. The feeling of isolated loneliness with a move is still so fresh in my mind I just can't stand someone else going through it if I see it and can help.

We were able to attend a beautiful Relief Society meeting last night. The committee of talented women who pulled this and the previous two months' meetings off are really gifted - great themes, creative invitations, thoughtful speakers, delicious food, fabulous simple decor . . . I'm in awe of their mad skillz! January's meeting was mini-classes taught by a handful of sisters in the ward on the topics of prioritizing what's needful, home finances, getting to the temple, and nutrition. Then February's was so fun! Sisters volunteered to share something they knew in 5 minutes. There was scarf tying, how to select and cut a pineapple (contest), how to make a straw into a whistle, how to make homemade fresh cheese, how to tie a balloon animal, unique ways to display souvineers of our travels, how to accessorize with jewelry, how to make ribbon headbands and a few more. Last night's theme was purses.

What? Yup, purses. As March is celebrated as the birth month of the organizing of the Relief Society, it is always a celebration of sisters and their individual and collective power for good in saving souls and bringing families to Christ. Ours was a celebration of the phases of our lives signified by the purses or bags we carry to fulfill our purposes on this mortal journey. It began with a door prize game and a delicious taco bar with all the trimmings you could imagine. Fresh chips and salsa and Red Robin-esque raspberry lemonade! YUM!!! After the meal, my cute friend Dawn was beaming with happiness from within to the extent that she was kinda doing a happy dance in her chair. That's how good this evening was! They even had bags with noted goodies for the five graduating seniors to lovingly send them on to their next phase. We were all fed and taken care of. Replenished. Uplifted.

The evening ended with a 'what's in your purse' game. An item was called out and the first to hold the item up from their purse got the placard. Prizes were given in the end. It was truly hilarious! And so appropriate as the breadth of items sometimes reflected the spectrum of our stages in life. And bonus - now we all know who to go to with emergencies during our meetings! Them purses are mighty useful!

And then today. First thing every morning, I love watching the kids follow Ryan around egging him on to tickle them, scare them, and give them kisses before he leaves. Morgan's the cutest because at that age her demands for affection just melt you like butter. We finally got out the door for our fun playdate and had a great time. Afterwards, the kids were tired from their long day so that when chores had to be completed before their customary, cherished Friday video game time - there was some weeping and wailing. When I mandated game time breaks, hunger consumed them. But apparently not enough for Easton to fully commit and like his rice and beans. He just "half-liked" it since black beans aren't his thing.

Morgan began melting down and so I put her to bed early. She didn't even fight it, just asked for a baby and then sweetly snuggled into her blankets. Man she's so beautiful and sometimes when we're looking at each other, I see an old soul that looks familiar and it startles me. How did I get to be this lucky to have this gig?!

Ryan is nose-deep in his work with the X24 exercise which is kicking off this coming week. It is so great to see him excitedly nervous about his work, he's positively giddy sometimes lately! It's a great thing!

The announcement of imminent bedtime sent McKay into tears until he was told they could have Jell-O for dessert. He stopped mid-cry, it was hilarious! I seriously can't remember the last time I had Jell-O but the kids are always asking for it at the store so I made some the other day in little containers. What fun to remember how much I like Jell-O, especially with a bit of whipping cream on top! I overheard the boys tell Ryan tonight they like him best because he gives them more whip cream on top. True enough!

And throughout the day, my mind was drawn back to my bag [I've never been a purse gal although they're lovely but it would require shopping and I'm not good at that yet.] All day long whether on the go or just at home, I'm always reaching into my bag for something. And sometimes what I need isn't there and it's disheartening that my lack of preparation or attention to detail has failed me or someone I love in a time of need. It's got me thinking of how to replenish and keep a deeper store. I've got work to do. But first, I'll get a good night's rest!

Who to hang with?

We had a beautiful sunny day today - perfect for enjoying friends outside after the school's sushi and baked goods fundraiser for Japan. Easton's buddy, Anthony, has a dad who loves baseball and took the day off to play with the kids. Ryan joined us as did a few other moms and their kids. Anthony's dad, Joe, is the perfect coach - calm and encouraging. He pitched to and coached each kid and had them all hitting the ball without a tee. It was awesome! Both Easton and McKay had some great hits and gained a lot of confidence in just this one afternoon.

I love to play sports and grew up in a family that loves to play sports. I knew I wanted to play them with my kids and it's so fun that the boys are getting old enough to understand games and play them. Coaching soccer is fun but we're taking a break and letting the kids try some new sports this spring. While coaching, I always felt like I was missing out on making new friends with the moms since making new friends is something I enjoy. During Easton's basketball season this winter, I didn't do a very good job of being a friend because I was busy entertaining and corralling Morgan and McKay so they didn't interrupt practice. And the majority of the moms present weren't eager to be social so I kept myself busy chasing my little ones.

My dilemma today then was that I wanted to play with the kids but I also wanted to sit and chat with the moms because I really haven't made much of an effort to do so at Easton's school. I'm pretty content with my church friends and neighbor since I'm such a homebody, but always feel a tinge of remorse for not extending myself more often to people outside my natural church circle.

Today's group was a little eclectic. I'm sure these ladies would have been fine without me, but I also felt a pull to play hostess of sorts. You know how when you invite some people and know that they are eager to hang out with you while the kids are off having fun. I felt that vibe from one especially and didn't want to disappoint. So there I sat with the moms the majority of the time, feeling torn and more and more pregnant. (I am seriously losing my lap, much to Morgan's chagrin.)

I hope next time I play more with the kids while they're fresh and excited to play. As they wind down, then I can go hang with the moms. I want my kids to remember me playing with them. Time's too short! Besides, friends come and go but family is forever!

Before I forget . . .

It's been known to happen and then plague me as I try to fall asleep at night. Funny things the kids say that I want to jot down and keep, great home organizational ideas, errand that needs to be run, something obscure that I should remember to pack or plan for our next trip to simplify my life . . . so here's some recents:

When I was making cupcakes the other day, McKay who loves to help in the kitchen very matter-of-factly said, "Mom, I will help you! I know the destructions."

Morgan's most likely phrases to me lately are "Mom, I hun-ny" [hungry] with a gravelly voice or since she's been sick, "Mom, I snug-ew?" If we go somewhere or someone comes over and she feels anxious I might be leaving her, she insists, "Mommy, I snug-ew on a wap" [your lap]. And then she'll tell me to sit, especially if she's walking off to play. I gave her a hair cut a couple weeks ago, her very first ever so now it brushes her shoulders. Man is she a sweet adorable thing, losing her baby look and charming the pants off mom and dad! Ryan's especially a sucker for her when he gets home!

Easton's class is learning about public places and toured the city's water treatment facility. The selling point he told everyone about was that he was going to, and then got to drink the freshest water on the planet! "Like 1 second old!" His class is also visiting the fire department and town hall in the next two weeks. I really like how his school walks or rides public buses to great local places with such ease. When they were studying patterns all around us, the teacher took small groups of 6 down the road to an old church to look at and sketch patterns in the stained glass.

Morgan and then McKay have been sick all week with a stomach bug. The two times I braved driving to get Easton from school, they both threw up or had the runs. I chickened out the third day and called another mom out of the blue to ask if she'd bring Easton home. Car rides with bowls on kids' laps was just standard operating procedure this week and yet a certain headstrong girl has had enough of the bowl and would rather puke on herself. Fun times. But I'll be honest, after having a houseful of kids during a school break last week, it's been great to have the excuse to lounge around all day snuggling my babies and reading while they watch copious amounts of cartoons! Morgan doesn't seem to be bothered by disappearing lap space due to my growing baby bump although there are times when I want to holler!

My visiting teacher and I were chatting yesterday about all the stuff going on in Japan after the devastating earthquake, tsunami and now the nuclear crisis. I realized how little I actually know about nuclear facilities even having grown up near a famous one where my dad and both grandfather's have worked. It is truly criminal to know so little about the dominating factor of my home economy. So it's time to read up on it!

Our favorite babysitter moved back to the states last summer. She's applying for a summer internship and needed the dates for a weekend getaway we'd taken where she'd watched the kids so I could be one of her references. I tried looking at my iCalendar but I've only been using it for about the past 8 months so I had to go to the blog which is in sore need of some back-labeling to make it easier to find things. Since moving here we've traveled a lot, right? Well, I'd never sat back and listed all the trips/cities/countries we've been to and it was simply amazing to me!

We truly have been so blessed to have this opportunity over here. Ryan's sure to get us out on a few more big ones before we lay low and have this baby. The Netherlands tulip festival, Greece, Ireland, and southern France made the baby deadline.

And I'll soon take my first trip with a friend on a nerd-excursion! We're headed with a chaplain sponsored group up to Ravensbruck Concentration camp outside of Berlin where some memoirs I've read took place and then cross the border into Poland to visit Freidrich Bonhoeffer's institute at Finkenwald. If you're interested in a great documentary, take a look at "Bonhoeffer" made in 2003. He was a Protestant pastor, among the first to vocally speak out against Hitler as he rose to power and then he later became involved in the assassination plots on Hitler. He was part of a new breed of theologians in his time that truly believed the Sermon on the Mount was something we were meant to live by and not just know about. That in itself is a fascinating historical tidbit of European Christianity. Very interesting time and well-made documentary.

This trip is perfectly timed with things I've read or am reading. Last year I read and highly recommend "The Hiding Place" by Corrie Ten Boom. She and her family lived in the Netherlands through the Nazi occupation until being sent to concentration camps for hiding Jews. Her story is so beautiful and famous for her ability to cling to her faith and be able to forgive the depravity of her oppressors. There's also "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl" - whose family goes into hiding in the Netherlands but is ultimately discovered and sent to a concentration camp. Also a good movie.

I've been listening to "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A history of Nazi Germany" by William Shirer for a couple months now. This is my cooking and cleaning the kitchen listening. Mr. Shirer was a reporter in Germany and Austria during the early days of the Nazis and through the war and aftermath. It's an interesting birds' eye view and well researched work. I'm only up the the eminent invasion of Poland and the beginning of WWII - almost half-way through the book which is 57 hours or 1200+ pages long. I so wish my brain held on to facts like it did in school days!

My current bed-time reading is the memoir, "Michaelangelo in Ravensbruck" by Countess Karolina Lanckoronska. A level-headed Polish Renaissance university professor gets swept up in the Polish resistance and prisoner welfare programs as the Soviets and Nazis divide up and invade Poland. She accounts for life under both Soviet Russian and Ukrainian communist occupation as well as Nazi occupation. She is sent by the Nazis to Ravensbruck Concentration camp. The details of her story and experiences are so interesting while I'm absorbing the history of the Nazis! I have never known anything about Poland other than it being the location of some of the most horrible Nazi extermination camps. I am gaining a great respect for the brave and proud Poles and mourn how the Nazis systematically swooped in and exterminated entire cities' "intelligensia" - the very people who led or made the cities function. No wonder Poland and much of Eastern Europe had such a hard time recovering from WWII when most of their civic leaders, engineers, universities, teachers, pastors and clergy, and others disappeared under occupation or war!

Power of Motivation

We've got the younger two cousins visiting this week while school is out. Yesterday I enforced an afternoon quiet time of an hour and half. No one slept but Morgan so it was pretty much a wash except for the kitchen getting a good once over. However, the kids were so eager to get out of quiet time that they'd do just about anything to get up . . . like do a quick house pick up and vacuum the entire apartment in no time flat with very little oversight from me! It was awesome! I felt like I'd stumbled on a new found power!

We had some beautiful sunshine and warmer temperatures today so the kids were in and out of the house, but everyone was still getting a bit stir crazy. They'd exhausted their repertoire of activities so it was time to take our show on the road. We didn't venture far - just to the PX indoor playground to run off a bit more energy with the possibility of meeting new friends while I could sit at a table and "read" my book in relative solitude. The Law given to the kids as we pulled into a parking space was simply that they couldn't beg for food at the foodcourt since they'd practically just eaten their weight in Ramen for lunch.

But I had a surprise up my sleeve. I brought our big bag of change with us and five little cups. After they'd played for a bit, I called Easton and Lizzie over for their challenge. We would get ice cream cones if they would count out the change for five cones. It would be an understatement to say they were excited at the prospect and set to work instantly! McKay, Miles and Morgan weren't much help but often served as good distractions and reasons to do recounts. It was like a timed math test and sure felt like it!

Then I asked them how much it cost for a double scoop. Their eyes got real big at the prospect and so I asked them to walk over to the ice cream shop and calmly, politely ask how much a double scoop cost. They came back with the answer and the counting began again. To say they were all close to delirious hysteria is not far from the truth! TWO SCOOPS?! They'd hit the jackpot!

When all five cups had the correct coinage we lined up and walked over to the ice cream shop in another corridor. They could barely contain themselves. I checked the prices and saw that they'd given me the wrong total so I had to pull them all to the side to subtract 70 cents from each bucket. The three little ones were near panic. We walked over to the counter and the kids began selecting their two flavors. Man, this a big deal to them!

The two ladies behind the counter got a big kick out of this process, thank goodness. There were a couple ladies standing by witnessing the event with grins on their faces. We were quite the little spectacle and then we were back at our table with napkins and busy lips smacking! This outing made everyone's Warm Fuzzy around the dinner table.

NOTE: If you're local and know of a bank with one of those change machines that swallows your random coinage for a redeemable ticket for cold hard cash - please share the secret!

The OB visit

Morgan accompanied me to my OB appointment this morning. We ended up having to wait over an hour because the nurse at the front desk forgot to put me in the doctor's que. Morgan was a trooper and at minute 45 when I knew I should be close to next in line, she needed a serious diaper change and of course the diapers were in the van. Thinking I'd be next, I tortured the others in the small waiting room. When two more ladies went before me, I couldn't wait any longer. I took her out to the van - which reminded the nurse of her mistake - and we returned fresh as daisies and were seen shortly thereafter. The doc apologized profusely over and over which I appreciated very much.

There's nothing graceful about OB appointments, right? Here in Germany, it's just a tad bit worse because they give you nothing to cover up with - no paper sheet to drape over you. Just you with nothing on from the waist down, the stirrup "chair", and your doc. Awkward. Between being a woman whose born children and having ulcerative colitis, there's not much dignity this soul could have at this point in a doctor's office. So I pretend like I don't care and just get it over with. Ten minutes, I can handle that. I heard the greatest helpful hint from a friend the other day who said she always wears a flowy skirt that she can hike up. Genius! But I forgot that wisdom when getting dressed in a hurry this morning since I'm still excited about my Old Navy maternity shipment stuffs that just arrived. Cute, comfy jeans - HALLELUJAH!!! That and McKay was having serious Fasching Power Ranger costume angst this morning since he couldn't find, didn't like, or I zipped too high certain parts of his get up. Drama!

I think I gained serious points in Morgan's eyes today by taking her with me to the doctor. She saw me get my blood drawn. This alone was big since she has just finished her infant immunizations on a one year delayed schedule (not for any moral reasoning, just that moving here did a number on the number of things my brain allowed itself to handle). Morgan knows what doctors do - they give shots, but she's never seen Mommy get a shot until today. I think it was good for her and she was super sweet to me. "A Mommy a shot?" "A Mommy a ouchie?" But I was brave and showed her it's not a big deal. Yeah me.

The minute we sat down with the doctor, Morgan (who is well-acquainted with office visits) began demanding a toy or treat. She'd already raided my bag in the waiting area and come up dry, so she'd been waiting for this moment. Doc had nothing to offer and I was at a loss so we just talked over her and got on with things. Once up in the chair, however, she stood by my side as the chair was elevated. She looked a bit uncertain and I was glad she was there to take my mind off the fact that I was half naked. As the doctor did the ultrasound, Morgan kept asking if I was getting a shot or had an ouchie from the magic wand. She patted or held my hand and it was seriously so sweet! I told her to look at the screen to see the baby in Mommy's tummy which she did, but obviously didn't quite understand.

As we were leaving the doctor's office, in fact right outside his office door and in the reception area she had a melt down. She kept saying, "A baby!" She wanted the baby since we'd just "seen" it! Our wait had made me late to meet a friend so I wasn't as patient with the funny situation in the moment but have been laughing over it all day since. Poor girl thought she'd get candy, a toy or at the very least a baby out of this appointment and she got nothin' and was letting the world know!

Oh by the way, baby Carter #4 is going to be a boy! When told, Easton and McKay both gave me big grins and then the boy/girl ratio of the family. We're very excited! Dinner conversation tonight was all about names. McKay likes Kip - from Easton's class readers. Easton likes Michael James. Ryan and I each have a favorite of the moment but don't agree. And so it begins!