Priceless

Antique Automobile Coloring Book .25 cents.

Talking Scooby $2.

Pottery Barn Kids Whale Step Stool $5.

Vintage Retro Yellow Dresser $10.

Kaitlyn announcing that she locked a master lock onto her seat belt when you have a dresser in the back of the van and no other seat for her... priceless.

The new hood in Erie

When we moved here, Eden started Kindergarten and made two friends who made it through to second grade with her as declared friends who she must extend birthday party invitations to. Oddly enough, their last names start with A, C and a D so they were all grouped together at Kindergarten graduation and I snapped a photo. I loved it because they were a rainbow with the blonde, red and dark hair. Left to right, is Lauren, Charlotte and Eden.
In about a month, her first fast friends at school will be close enough neighbors to walk to each others houses. I'm thankful for her to have this continuity in her life. We left Littleton when she was two and a half and she was devastated after the tea party we hosted to tell all of her cute little friends goodbye. Then, when we left Kasson, she cried her first true heartbreak cry. She sat on those stairs and cried for her home and her best friend and I felt AWFUL! So now, Eden will be near her friends and we'll have water gun fights and run in the sprinklers and ride bikes to the ice cream shop and all of those things that you hope your kids will experience with their friends through childhood. Man, I'm such a sentimental sap.

This is Eden and Lauren dressed up for Halloween this year.


This is Eden reading a birthday card from Charlotte this year:


Kaitlyn is in Kindergarten this year and she is in class with Lauren's little sister whom she made friends with when Eden and Lauren struck up a friendship. She asked me a few weeks ago if she could have a tea party with some friends from school. She chose Fiona, Katelyn and Abby. They all live in Erie and two of them live within a stroll of the new house. I snapped a pic of their party. Left to right is Kait, Fiona, Katelyn and Abby.

All I have left is to find Nick a circle of friends. I hope it all comes together for the little guy this year.
So, that's why the nomads are moving again. And stay tuned, I wouldn't be surprised to see another move coming up in the next two or three years. ;-)

As a mother...

We all curl our toes when we think about the "sex" talk. We paint these pictures in our minds of how we'll stutter and avoid it until the last possible chance and then hopefully just pass the whole thing off to the "sex ed" teacher in sixth grade. Okay, not all of us. I'm the lone ranger who flew by the seat of my pants and just knew that if I answered every question that came to me completely giving no more and no less than they asked, it would all go off famously... and... so far, it's going great. When Eden was four I got pregnant with Nick and she wanted to know how a baby got in there. I got the cutest little book that was called "How Babies are Made" and read it to her several times. It was so cute, completely avoiding sex, just showed a cartoon picture of sperm and egg saying they join together in a mothers womb and then they grow into a baby. She was fascinated with sperm and eggs, thinking it was amazing that it took a piece of a mom and a dad and they joined together to make a new person. It was all she wanted to know. A couple of days ago we were packing up her room for the move and she said. "Mom, how old are boys and girls when they get their sperms and eggs?" I had to have the question repeated because I had been very engrossed in whether to keep all 487 stuffed animals or just 162 of them. Once I hit the reset button I was fine though.
"Oh, you were born with eggs, all of the eggs you'll ever have are already inside you... but that's a good question about sperm, I guess I forgot. I'll check that out. Why?"
"Oh, I just wondered if that's why Abby and Ethan can't take a bath together."
When something has been germinating in a completely innocent mind, it can be very hard to grasp where it's going.
"Hm, what do you mean Eden? I'm not quite getting it."
"Oh, well Kait and Nick still take a bath together sometimes but Abby and Ethan don't so I thought maybe if they were in the bath, the sperm could swim over to Abby and she could get pregnant."
This was very enlightening and I was very glad that I had pursued this conversation.
I smiled and said "No, you have to have actual sex to get pregnant, you can't get sperm out of the water."
She nodded and said "ooooohhhh."
I wondered if the next question would come. We've come that close before and she'd never pursued it.
After a minute it came "so what exactly is sex?"
I said "the penis goes inside the vagina and releases the sperm, and if the girl is ovulating, the sperm fertilizes the egg and a girl gets pregnant. So you see, it's not easy to get pregnant, you have to have sex, and that's why God made it that way. Sometimes, if people have sex with someone who they aren't married to, they can get pregnant and have no daddy for their baby. God's plan for a family is that every child gets to have both a mommy and a daddy, and it's beautiful. So, you should only ever have sex with one person, like me."
She nodded very seriously and said "Daddy."
I decided to go ahead and explain when a girl could get pregnant since it was hand in hand with the rest and was after all, the original question. "And, a girl cannot get pregnant until she has a period."
"What's a period?"
"It's what I have each month when I bleed. It's an egg that wasn't fertilized by a sperm. Every month a woman ovulates which means she produces an egg and if a sperm doesn't fertilize it during ovulation, she has a period about two weeks later. A period starts when you're 12 or 13."
She sat quietly thinking about everything I said and said "okay, I get it."
No embarrassment, no blushing. Nothing. It was strictly a scientific question for her. I decided that it was nice that she asked me before all of the boy crazy stuff started. It seems to be so much easier to just add a little piece of information to the stack as she asks. Hopefully it will all end well. We'll see. I really should have read a book or something. Too late to second guess now! LOL! Btw, to my mommy friends, I did also tell her that it's not appropriate for kids to talk about, and each parent tells their own children about how babies are made in their own way.

Girlfriends and God

Last year I hit thirty and thought things would start to make sense. Who was I kidding? I still feel like a nineteen year old girl "playing grownup." People have always said that age is just a number and now that I'm thirty-one I think I have figured that one out. The question of where I'm at, now that I'm thirty-one is the most interesting contemplation, not the monotonous progressive counting reminiscent of kindergarten. A great discovery now that I'm in my thirties is the incomparable value of girlfriends and God. I'll be honest that I guess I'm a late bloomer in this respect. Most people seem to grasp the value of girlfriends fairly early on but I didn't. Managing relationships has never been my strong suit and I was not good at prioritizing or showing appreciation for my girlfriends at all. Through my twenties I think Jody and I explored the immeasurable worth of having a true connection with your spouse as you begin a family. It was great and I look back on it with a glow of satisfaction. But now I'm broadening and thinking about things in a little different way. My chum Jenn brought over Chinese and we had a four hour lunch today. When I was primarily focused on Jody, I used to sensationalize how grand it would be to go have lunch with him, and it is grand if he has the day off of work. On the other hand, if you go on a work day, he will be thrilled but distracted and you'll be lucky to have him 70% at attention for a little less than an hour. I'm not saying Jody is an abysmal lunch date. I'm saying it's not the best way to connect with him and it's not the most relaxing thing in the world that you can do for him. On the contrary, I feel like I'm slightly taxing him. I don't regret the effort, I feel we have nice memories from our lunches and I'm sure we'll still do it, but under close examination a good question is "What is the best way to love your man with meaning?" Around noon Jenn called to tell me she was running a bit late because she had tried to cram a little too much into her morning so she could be free all afternoon without chores. I laughed and told her I had done exactly the same thing. We were so focused on how great our lunch date was going to be, that we had crammed a ridiculous amount of effort into setting our entire afternoons free. And we were glad we did. We ate way too much Chinese and gabbed it up for the whole afternoon. It was kind of a dawning of a new realization for me. How nice to have my dream lunch and an animated discussion of things that would be physically painful for Jody. How nice for Jody to come home to a less than needy wife who had a great day and prepared a fine dinner. By the same token, how nice it was that he and I had a lovely breakfast together without my telephone or internet when he had a day off last week. I feel the same glow from both experiences and I'm glad that I'm learning how to tap into the "good times".
The other thing I'm exploring in my thirties is resuming my "best friend" status with God that I had in my teen years. It seemed like I just couldn't do it in my twenties. I had baggage from churches, choices and the overwhelming new job of wife and mother. I think finding God in the middle of it was just beyond my faith and organization level. It seemed like whenever Jody and I made a step in that direction we'd hit a spiritual wall and the Holy Spirit was elusive. I look at how reachable God is to me now compared to my twenties and I'm kind of flabbergasted and very thankful. I spent a worried and guilty decade wondering how I was ever going to get back to Him and here we are. I finally feel myself pulling back into a comfortable and familiar friendship that makes everything in life make sense. So yeah, I'm glad I'm thirty-one and I'm pretty sure I'll be glad to turn fifty-one and eighty-one.

And a Happy New Year!

We had a fabulous time in Arkansas with my family. There were a couple of dim spots. Daniel, Hannah and Karhys weren't there and many things conspired against us making it to the farm, so the kids have to wait to meet the new filly named Jasmine indefinitely. I must say though, we had great food, as much tea as a person could want, a latte at my fingertips at any moment(courtesy of our great host Brad), a warm fire and five children in the house to make it feel completely like Christmas. I wish I could recall all of the things that made me laugh until I cried but they escape me and I'm left with a warm happy feeling that should last me until spring.
A couple of days before we left, Brad asked if I wanted to go to a thrift store with him and I agreed. We eventually wound up at a pawn shop where a man was trying to sell a 12 gauge home defense shotgun with pistol grips and a night spotlight. It was rather ironic because Jody had just told me two weeks ago that he wanted one for Christmas. I have a rather soft spot for home defense, so he kinda hooked me. Long story short, the pawn shop wouldn't pay his asking price but Brad and I were jockying for the chance to, and Brad the gentleman let me win. We strolled into the house and I handed Jody the case and told him I got him a little something for taking care of all five kids while we were gone. So we blasted out of 2010 with a shotgun on the back of Ginny and Brad's property. So fun!
Today was the girls first day back at school. Eden had a history report due which had somehow morphed into Jody assembling a model of the U.S.S. Constitution. I really thought he was going to lose it and smash the whole thing to pieces a few times. He would explode and then smile at me rather sheepishly and try again. One time I heard a clatter of tiny pieces and then "shhhhhhhhhhhhhh------oooot!" As he neared the end, he turned to me to put on the rigging and sails. It was not a well made model. I'll just stop. I might be able to make a story about this funny sometime down the road but I think the pain is just too fresh. Anyway, Eden sat down and wrote a very nice report on "Old Ironsides" and I loved it.
Today I am sitting here for a moment to document how wonderful my morning with the two greatest guys in the world has been. We shuttled the girls off to school and then had pumpkin bread, sausage and eggs with hot tea. We were satisfied with the rarity of this treat in and of itself when a hawk landed on our back fence and

decided to breakfast with us. While he happily dined on a fresh bird, Jody took the opportunity to take his portrait which he seemed to enjoy. He let Jody come right into the back yard with him.