Mom Part 2

Where was I....oh yes, infancy was not so natural like I thought it would be.

I guess it wasn't awkward, but I just wasn't sure what to do ALL DAY long with a baby who couldn't express himself in way I understood yet. The whole babies just eat, sleep, and poop, is a lie too. May some do? Cap was a great sleep until 4 months old too, but there was still a lot of daylight in between eat, sleep, and pooping.

Between 4-6 months Cap stopped sleeping. Wow, that was rough. He didn't even take naps hardly. We called them capnaps. Short 30 minute things that left him just hard to entertain. At first I didn't care because he was still sleeping through the night, but then that stopped too. At 6 months old, we took him to a friends retirement party and stayed up till close till 9 pm. He woke up almost every hour that night. I was miserable and at my end so I sought some sleep guidance.

After 3 days into sleep training Cap, we had a great schedule going. He was so much happier, he could concentrate again on thing, and I for the first time in a while was enjoying the mom gig. What a difference sleep will make!

Finally a month into it, the thought of another baby didn't make me want to throw up. Up till that point I was scared I might never want to do this again. The way my body was I don't think I was physically able to have another one that soon, but at least the thought didn't make me sick!

I was still having a hard time with my role as a mother. I struggled with whether or not I was good at "it". I also missed doing the things that I loved especially the ones I did with Bryce. By not having kids until I was almost 30, I had a lot of time to do great things "freely". A tight sleep schedule and a breastfed baby doesn't leave a whole lot of "freely" in the day. Going from traveling the world, running ultra-marathons, baptizing friends in the Merced River, climbing mountains, shows at coffee houses, teaching and discipling young adults, to Full Time Caretaker of a little helpless boy was just a tougher transition than I ever expected. Because every time I climbed a mountain or spent my entire morning running, I knew one day I wanted to have children and stay at home with them full time.

So I kept trying to figure out how to have both worlds.

Oh and at 8 months, it hit me that I was ready to have another baby. Crazy I know. In the midst of struggling in my mom role, there will still times of peace. I was ready to have another one to disciple and love on. A couple months later we were able to get into the doctor and have my IUD removed.

Some where around that time, we started waking up at 6. I LOVE mornings, and when Cap came around, well, mornings just weren't the same. I was okay with that, but I needed to find some sort of medium with it all and some time where I could be alone. Well, this is one of the best things we did. Instead of the mystery of not knowing when Cap would declare morning, we declared it first! Time to read, be still, and enjoy the AM a little.

to be continued...

Family Pics

 One of the many great things about my mom is she takes great pictures! She had lots of practice with us 4 kids. So we took advantage of having someone 'free' around since professional pictures can be pricey! I can't say we had fun, but you wouldn't be able to tell it by the photos! Cap was just being more than a handful and not wanting to have anything to do with any the spots we wanted to be in. BUT again, you can't tell by the pics. We were shocked to see how many good ones we got out of the deal.

We had a more than great Christmas with my family in Texas. First time all 4 kids were together in 4 years from what we remember. Adding 2 grandkids in the mix was fun. It was a crazy busy week since we had two parties at the house with family, but we all had a blast. I mean, Chick-fil-a nugget platter, homemade subs, Christmas crack, tons of Speciale's, homemade lasagna, italian sausage, bread, and a birthday cake for Jesus! Oh my, fun, fun as Cap would say!

One of my highlights was going shopping on the 26th with my mom hitting the after Christmas sells. This has been a tradition for us since I was younger, but the last year I was in to do it was in 2005. Every year I miss my mom on the 26th (more than the other days that is) but this year we had fun till I could not go any further! :) Cap even spent most of the morning with us too!

On to my mom's pics.

I wasn't being too much of a rule follower on this one 

I love this one just wish the telephone pole 

wasn't coming out of Danger's head!

He thought this was Jesus and wanted to show him his 6 pack

sweet little hand

I like how we captured how he still stands up 

He just stared and stared at this. 

It was pretty cute!

His favorite part was going on the train.

Though still very much a handful:)

I like this one since it says San Angelo in background. 

Another One of Those EC Updates

Quick Time Line:
4 weeks old: started infant potty training, started doing pee's in the potty immediately.....not hard to do with an infant who pee's all the time:)

5 months: doing lots of pee's in potty along with some, but not all poo's

7 months: all poo's in potty unless there was a random nap poop, lots of pee's but still lots of wet diapers

10 months: started to sign potty to us

12 months: started to notice we never had misses while out of the house. so we started full time undies except for sleeping. he began to only have 1 accident a day.

14.5 months: had our first clean and dry day!!!!

till 18 months: we did lots of traveling and moving and tons of different time zones. started not telling us, getting distracted easily and having misses. i started wondering what to do and getting a little frustrated, which didn't help.

19 months: i let it go and started to relax about it, he immediately got better and stopped having misses. later in the month he stopped peeing during naps. thank goodness!

21 months: started holding it for 3-4 hours. occasionally over 5 hours. does not like to poop in public AT ALL! he will hold his poop all day if he has to.


Cap just got over some sort of stomach bug. Throw up for 1 day and diarrhea for a week. I have always been glad we did infant potty training. I mean, I have hardly cleaned poop diapers since he was 7 months old. But this week with all the diarrhea I have been especially thankful! I have been so proud of Cap and how he has been telling us when he needs to go and hardly having any misses these days. We are still using a diaper at night. But a lot of the time he is barely wet. I am in no hurry for night time dryness because I don't want to get up in the night if he needs to go potty. Terrible I know! It will come when it comes though!

Not much of a Christmas post I know. I have been writing this over the last week or so just haven't had time to finish until now!

Merry Christmas and hope everyone is enjoying some down time!

Mom part 1

I dreamed of being a mother since I am pretty sure my brother Bryce came home from the hospital. Being the only girl with 3 brothers left me being a motherly tom boy I guess you could say. Bryce and Collin would probably say it just left me to be a bossy sister:)

I guess like everything else you haven't done in life you have this idea and picture in your head of what that will look like. I had 41 weeks to dream about this little human that was being fashioned inside of me. I pictured how our first days would look like, what we would do on our first warm spring day, and how our summer would be look like with the kid strapped to me as I worked at a boys summer camp. 

I had a more than great pregnancy. I loved just about all of it! What a great purpose to grow a child inside of you. Than the whole labor thing came. I was as ready as you could be not ever having gone through with it. I was excited to see my body do its thing! Well, this is what it looked like in a nutshell.

March 10

3am: can no longer sleep through contractions

12pm: contractions are 3-5 minutes apart, I am cleaning house not knowing when the next time I can

6::30pm: head to hospital 

11:00pm: dr. broke my water

March 11

6:00am: must push! they see his head immediately.

9:30am: i am (very politely i am sure) asking for another option since we weren't getting anywhere

dr. leaves to do emergency c-section, i refused to push and lay on my side. however, i couldn't stop pushing and instead started screaming bloody murder into my pillow because of the pain.

10:30am: dr. suggest we give the vacuum a 3 contraction try and from there an emergency c-section. we then had to do a partial epidural. i bawled since i has gone that far without one. oh well, bring it on. 

11:20am: 5 pushes and 1 funny looking head later the boy arrives. we are exhausted but stoked! thankful the wait was over and we were all together. 

Then recovery. I think I would have rather have done labor twice then to have the recovery I did. It was miserable to say the least. I have never hurt that bad in my life. I felt so terrible and hurt so bad, and I felt like I was constantly being told how lovely motherhood was. At the time, though I know everyone meant well, but I just wanted to scream. It hurt to walk, sit, go to the bathroom, live. 

6 months later, I finally hit that moment where I didn't feel miserable all the time. But it was a LONG time before I felt like my body was at its "New Normal".  Not feeling good really effected "motherhood" for me in those first months. I feel like I got cheated a bit with infancy. Though I do have some great memories or Cap during that time, it just dampened it. 

You know that warm spring day I had dreamed about and what we would do together. Well it finally came. My plan: my sweet newborn laying on a blanket in the grass while I planted flowers and worked on our flower beds. Well, 2 minutes into my plan, Cap is crying, my hands were already filthy and covered in dirt, tried tons of things to make him happy with hanging out while I worked, but he was not so into it. My plan was ruined. We went inside and I tried to figure out what I was supposed to do all day by myself with this little newborn. 

I figured out quickly that infancy might not be something that came so natural for me.

to be continued...

Random Updates

This is just getting embarrassing now. This whole no camera thing is really cramping my blogging. More than that though, I am getting pretty sad looking at our photos from the year and we hardly have any good ones. We have a bunch of phone and Ipad pictures but those just aren't very good compared to what I normally take. We had so many great pics last year, but I guess this year will be a little different. I am starting to get pretty determined about finding a new one. Hopefully soon!

We have a had a great past few weeks, but very busy. Busy is not always a bad thing, but I prefer a more simplified life. Cap and I haven't been home much lately except for nap time. We haven't been doing school for a few weeks now. I am totally okay with that, I just know we are hitting that point where it is time to spend time at home with just us.

We are in the process of buying a friend's window company. Bryce has started driving up to Denver a little over an hour from here for extra work. We are thankful for the work, we just wish things would get going more here locally. Please pray that our current door hangers are more fruitful than the last.

Cap is being quite the character lately. His personality comes out more everyday. He has been loving his snow boots lately. After taking his pj's off in the morning, he usually goes straight to his boots and puts them on. He walks around with one shoe on lately. Or one sock on. He ask for tractors EVERYDAY. Seriously, ALL the time! Any kind of work type truck will do for him. Yesterday we got to see a train pulling tons of work trucks on its load. It was actually pretty neat. I have never seen that before.

Cap thinks we are super parents. He thinks if he ask nicely that I can just pull a tractor out of thin air. Or a balloon out of thin air. He can get kind of upset at times that we aren't as super as he thinks:)

A couple of cute things he said last week:
1. He was in his rubbermaid in the shower taking a bath, when some water randomly dropped out of the shower head. He yelled, "Rain!!! Jesus!!!". Cap knows Jesus makes the rain and so he got really stoked about the rain in the shower.

2. The rain in the shower led to a talk about all the things Jesus makes. We made a big list of things he knows and he was really listening to it all. The next morning I put him in a shirt that I had made him. I asked him, "Do you know who made your shirt?" He smiled and yelled, "Jesus!".

He is a cute mess. I am so thankful he is healthy and feeling good. He has a very different personality when he doesn't.

Thanksgiving was awesome. I have zero pictures of the day, but we had such a good time with family and friends. We had a random group of people all connected in one way or another with no family near by, so we had a Thanksgiving all together. Sometimes when you get 15 people, some never meeting before, it can be awkward. But it wasn't at all. Many laughs and stories that day, and bunches of yummy food.

We will be in Texas for Christmas this year. We haven't been their since 2009. We are looking forward to it, and I am excited about the drive. I miss road trips! Bryce and I have always had so much fun driving across country.

I really love the church we go to. Great teaching. Amazing music. Good community.

Beautiful weather here. We have had random really cold days followed by high 60's which is warm here. I can easily wear shorts in the sun when it is high 60's which I couldn't in NC. Oh, and found out we have 360 days of sun a year!!! That means only 5 days a year does the sun not come out at all during the day. Crazy! I could have 5 days of clouds in 1 week in other places I have lived. For someone who really needs sun, this was a cherry on the top for me. Even on snowy days, the chances are high the sun is going to come out.

We  bought a Christmas tree. It was looking likely that we would have one this year, but I kind of got sad about the whole deal. I really like having Christmas decorations out. We had to get rid of most of our when we moved but kept a few that we still really liked and meant something to us. Well, it took all of 5 minutes to put them out around the house. I got sad. Then tried to figure out the cost of a tree and if we could afford one. I found one for $20. And found a tree stand at thrift store for $2.50 so we went for it. So, I felt good about our purchase and love having the tree in the living room.

Okay...off to play with playdough or something crafty.

Well, 5 hours later. No playdough. Instead we went to the park and had tons of fun. I took the camera because I am for some reason extremely sentimental about the pants he is wearing in the pictures. They no longer fit, and I retired them last night. I got them out of the dirty clothes hamper and decided we must take some pics. My mom bought him those pants when he turned 1 and for some reason I am just sad they don't fit........good bye green pants. See you again next round I am guessing....

look at that tongue hanging out

he really loves to swing. he laughs so loud everyone else

starts laughing too...very contagious

i ask him if he wants to go high and he says

high like a bird 

very determined face on this boy

trying to take vest off. 

cute little dirty bum