I'm gimped up today because I was trying to be a fun mom outside yesterday and pulled? tore? my hip flexor. Lesson learned. No more fun momming. Only boring momming from here on out.

But this is good, I'm telling myself because it's forcing me to really slow down. Like to a hobble. And if there's one thing that's become increasingly clear to me in my thirties: we are bad at slowing down.

This has served us well in some right because I really like what we've done. But between businesses and babies. We tired.

Jacob is juggling all the things and building our third AirB&B cabin.

We're really enjoying this business (you can catch our listings HERE and HERE) which is good. When we started we knew we were excited to build stilted cabins, but we didn't know how we would feel about running a hospitality business. Turns out making money helping people relax and then reading reviews about how much they love what you've built is pretty awesome. So...come visit us!

People ask if Jacob builds the cabins himself, and the short answer is: yes. He can do all the things and it is amazing to me, but whenever I gush about it I think of this Portlandia skit, and then I feel ridiculous. We try to hire subs as much as possible to make things go more quickly, but he pretty much does it all himself. So dreamy.

So Jacob's average day might look like chainsawing in a tree, then taking a work call up in a tree, then texting his wife about the four Cara Caras flying around, then texting his wife again asking if she's picked the tile for the cabin bathroom, then heading in for school pick-ups, then stopping by his brother's new juice bar in town to help install some shelves, then coming home to help navigate babies while we get dinner on.

My days are equally hustley except they look a lot more domestic. I'm doing my darndest to soak up the baby, smell the proverbial roses, and fish the literal paper out of her mouth.

Because (SURPRISE!) we had a baby! It's a nine month old!

Basil Gracie is everywhere and into everything and delights us all the time. She's taking after her parents and doing all the things at once. Last week she had a bad cold, cut her first tooth, and started sleeping through the night. She's been crawling and pulling to standing for a few months now, so she's setting family records. She claps and is also doing this strange thigh-hitting thing which I think is her version of a wave.

She saves her biggest grins for her siblings, and we're all sappy in love with her.

Roman especially loves her which is good because man has that boy been a stinker recently.

He turned four and immediately started behaving like a three year old. I think the parenting experts call it "pushing limits."  I tell him to come and he sprints the other way. I pick him up and he'll try to headbutt me. And his eyes get wild with dangerous excitement whenever he gets a chance to disobey. He's also been sassy. The other day he called me "dumb" and then insisted that he wasn't name-calling because he'd actually said "jumb."  (-_-)

So Romie is Wreck-it-Ralphing limits right now with a side of teenage girl thrown in.

But then he'll do the sweetest thing that has ever been done in the world. Like ask me to button up his shirts so his "heart won't get cold." Or tell me he wants to spend the last five minutes before bed time hugging Basil.

Then I just want to snuggle right into his rock solid smooshy little boy body.

And so I hit publish for the first time in over a year on these little bits of nothing. Enjoy the flowers before the frost!

Mom's Morning Out

As of two weeks ago our chickens are laying eggs - or at least three of them are laying eggs? maybe more?

After I spent two months checking the nesting boxes twice a day and underneath the tractor and the parked trailer and behind the crepe myrtles on one side of the house and the nandena on the other side of the house to no avail, Jacob found the first egg. Which he of course left there for a baby to find, because it just so happened to be our baby's birthday.

The freshly minted two year old came in mighty proud of himself and his "burday ugg. iss my burday ugg, mom!" and we promptly cracked it into his cupcake batter.

Worn out on his big day:

So the baby isn't so much of a baby anymore. He's two and he's in mother's day out two mornings a week along with his big sister and the big man's in Kindergarten,

Look at this coolio.

I feel like - in the course of a week - I graduated to a whole new phase of parenting - like I have one leg firmly out of the trenches. I don't know what to do with myself truly. I get to make annoying administrative phone calls in the calm of a morning instead of in stolen moments while locked in the bathroom hoping it doesn't sound too echoey on the other end. I don't have to overthink every single errand that needs to be run. I get to stop in at a coffee shop, stand patiently in line, and nestle in with my laptop...and blog!

So far I've loved it. I love the hectic mornings of making the lunches and watching people toddle into school with their backpacks. I've loved how they run to me when I pick them up. I love the alternate mornings of being home with just the little ones who are still content to simply dig in the garden and splash the watering can around. I've loved having a schedule that I have to work around, and times when I have to be out the door, and a reason to get out of my proverbial or literal yoga pants.

We'll see how long the high lasts. I've struggled with a weird narrative that I don't "deserve" to get breaks like this - even if I'm spending my "breaks" catching up on our business accounting, freelancing little jobs, or doing otherwise "worky" type things. I've become so accustomed to always feeling frazzled and behind on things and listening to my broken record of the "poor poor overworked overtired little mama." Now I drop little kids off and then get back into the empty van with sunglasses on and skinny jeans and ankle boots and I don't even know myself.

Having a schedule and seeing the week in chunks of time has really helped me find space. A few hours of personal space. Space in my week for laundry or for meal-planning or for reading a chapter book to the six year old during the opportune nap.

And more space in my heart for the same old shenanigans.

With that I must go. I'm at my town's beautiful old library which typically smells of equal parts  musty books and children's story hour, but someone has put on some potent and vaguely peach-scented lotion which is my cue.

Happy day and happy week to you!

:)

Ro Baby Update

Romie is almost one. We took him to the pediatrician yesterday for a 9mo (12mo?) visit and while we were there I dug up pics on the blog from Jake's first birthday and Lucy June's first birthday. All the blog scrolling showed me just how much I'd forgotten about what J and L were like as babies. When I wrote stuff down, I was sure I would NEVER forget it...but I have...the blog confirms it.

So I thought I needed to do a post dedicated to the RoBird before I forget his entire babyhood.

I'm pretty sure he's a leftie, even though Jacob thinks I'm wrong.

He's still big. 97% across the board. Because he's been in 18-24mo clothes since he was six months old, clothes have never really fit him right. The soft-knits of babyhood have always worn more like sausage casings and pants always skew capri.

He took his first step at 10.5 months old. We were at the library for storytime and I was following him around as he crawled among the board books when he stood up and took a few steps. There they were: his VERY FIRST STEPS! And we were in a storytime full of toddlers, so nobody noticed or cared. Except for me! And I cared a lot! Such is parenthood.

This makes him our earliest walker. He's the most "physical" of any of the babies we've had yet. When he walks, he'll just start barreling forward until he falls down. He climbs up on and falls off of everything. I've even seen him trying to climb out of his crib. His favorite thing is to crawl all over people who are lying on the ground and smash his face on them, especially Jake. He has recently started pointing at stuff - which he does with his whole body, his arm shoots out straight and he cocks his head down so that his shoulder smushes against his cheek.

He doesn't have any words yet - a fact that I was 0% concerned about until the pediatrician recommended we start reading to him. At the time it sounded like such a lunacy, but the pendulum has swung and I'm already feeling guilty that he hasn't gotten any rounds in with Goodnight Moon... or any book for that matter. 

He's probably the best natured of any of our babies so far. He notices people. He's generally pretty chill. He loves being in the thick of it with his two older sibs and is quickly branding himself as the dumb jock sort.

Finally, I had the pediatrician take a look at his mouth issue and we got an official diagnosis: snaggletooth.

We'll probably take him to a pediatric dentist at some point once the tooth grows in a little bit, but for now...we'll just keep on loving him. Snaggletooth and all.

Photo creds to my girl Claire

A Third Baby's First Week of Life

My, if it hasn't been a few months of totally unexplained if entirely explainable absence.

Three kids.

Three kids has me whooped. I'm pretty sure our fourth kid will be an accident.

We're gonna dive right in with a catch up post just in case little Romie ever wanders through the archives and asks if he had an infancy.

You did, Romes, a really jolly one.

Roman is remarkably good-natured. As I'm lugging all 22 pounds of him from room to room while I chastise a four year old and potty-train a two year old (her choice not mine), sometimes I remember to look into his face. He looks at me so adoringly. It kinda floors me. I do my best to stop and love those moments, but I'm not very good at it.

Ok. Here we go. Roman's first week of life.

When his brother and sister came to visit him in the hospital the first time, I was holding him in my lap, and when he heard their voices, he craned his head back and forth and his eyes searched the entire room. Meanwhile they were beelining for him: Lucy June couldn't contain her glee when she first saw him. It was magical.

Magical.

I'd never seen one of my newborns respond to voices so obviously.

He came just a little bit early - earlier than all the other kids. I had scheduled a loan closing on Tuesday, but he was born on Monday. Jacob went to the appointment and while he was signing a million documents I was watching all three kids by myself in the hospital room. With some help from Winnie the Pooh and Netflix Too, it went remarkably well. It was stressful though. I held my breath and waited for everything to devolve for the entire two hours.

Roman's early life has had many of those moments. Darker moments. Moments where his stubborn mother doesn't seek out the help she needs and puts too much on her plate until her stress and anxiety start to leak out all over her house and into her relationships.

I couldn't skip the closing even though I'd had a baby, so I was scheduled to sign my name a million times on Wednesday right before we planned to take two day old Roman to have his bilirubin checked. So I would go sift through papers for twenty minutes and then we'd take the baby to the pediatrician. I was not excited about this, but it would be OK. We could do it. It would be fine.

Then Lucy June fell off the top bunk. Right onto her head. My was it horrible. It started swelling immediately, and we were just a few minutes from leaving for the closing/pediatrician outing, so we figured we'd muscle through the closing and then get some eyes on the little girl's head at the doctor's office.

Jacob dropped me off at the closing, while he drove around the block a few times with the kiddos. Lucy was unhappy, but lucid with a lump. I shuffled into a swanky office and sat down in a leather chair at a conference table and signed and signed. I felt like such a body - a fragile body in a room designed for pantsuits. Then there was a knock on the door. It was Jacob carrying Lucy June, and both of them were covered in vomit.

So we expedited the pediatrician visit. We piled in the car. The newborn was crying, everything reeked of vomit, I was hyperventilating.

At the pediatrician's office I tried to settle the baby down and feed him in the newborn area. The triage nurse who was checking on our probably-concussed daughter came over to ask if a suspicious triangle-shaped indentation on Lucy June's forehead was normal. Through tears I shook my head that I couldn't tell. Had she fallen on a lego? She did have a widow's peak. Maybe that was it? The triage nurse patted my shoulder, told me we would probably need to have some imaging done on her, and left me to my tears and my newborn.

Things quickly got better. By the time we saw the doctor, Lucy June was playing with toys and sporting her black eye like a clumsy champion and was pretty much her normal self. He told us to go home and call if she vomited some more.

Jacob had a huge job starting the next day that he couldn't reschedule. So my mom descended on our house like an angel of mercy and took care of everything. My friends picked up Jake for playdates. Lucy June and her shiner hung out with my mom. I nursed my baby and my very bruised postpartum tailbone.

Then it was Sunday - Jacob's day off - and the toilet backed up into the bathtub, so Jacob got to spend the day digging a hole in the backyard to reveal a broken sewer line.

And that officially rounded out the baby's first week of life.

I don't write these things to complain or to elicit a rush of combox sympathy. I write them because I'll probably want to remember them.

Some of it is funny. Some not so funny. I want to write it down. I need me some catharsis or something.

Or probably should remember them. There's more craziness to add to this. This was just week one.

Life is exhausting right now.

But I'm learning how to settle into good moments.

Also, these are all pics from back in September. Roman now looks like this:

Perpetually flanked by siblings.

And like this when sausaged into a size newborn baptismal gown.

Working Caption: Husband leaves room for the Holy Spirit at Baptism