I may have an unhealthy excitement for vegetable gardening. We had a garden that we shared with another family in 2013 and I was so shocked at how much I enjoyed it! When you spend nearly every minute of your life doing the type of work that doesn't show any results for weeks, months, maybe even years (heck, maybe never!), there is something SO emotionally healing in sticking a seed in dirt and watching it pop up a mere 7 days later! And then harvesting actual food from that plant a month or so later!! It's miracle and you got to have a hand in it and you got to see results super quick!! It just makes me feel like I'm doing something. Where as some days it feels like I just put out the same fire over and over and over again in the mom job. Ultimately, I know the truth. That my job matters and there are results that I can't see, yatta, yatta, yatta. But, man, getting to do something that shows results immediately is such a blessing from the Lord! So, because of the drama of our trials for the last three years I have been unable to garden for different reasons. But last summer when we moved in Robert dug up a garden for me. While I was pregnant with Lucius I started digging trenches in it and putting compost from the kitchen in them and then burying it. By the time I was 41 weeks pregnant I had finished just over half of the garden and by then I was fixing to pop and the ground was getting too cold and hard to do it anymore. So now the dirt is swarming with big fat worms (can you say, "little boy dream dirt pit"?!) and is rich and dark! This week we started planting! I, seriously, wanted to do a happy dance while we were working out there! So excited! The kids think I'm nuts. So far, I have been able to get out there with the five older kids to plant a couple of extra vegetables each day. Snap peas, asparagus, onions, carrots, Wild Man's carrots (short fat ones he picked out), spinach, lettuce, and broccoli are all done. I still have to plant the cucumbers, brussel sprouts, and the zucchini will be later. The great thing about this area is you can plant almost all of these twice because the weather stays pretty mild for a long time. Anyway, I will try not to bore the blog readers with talking too much about the garden. So, we are revamping our learning schedule because of the changing seasons, babies, and gardening. We will be doing outdoor activities after breakfast and saving our group learning for nap time when the three younger kiddos will be either asleep or having quiet time alone. So far this is working great! Although, I do miss having my alone time in the afternoons. But it's not very realistic when you have six kids so, oh well. Here are some pictures.
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There is a book I read when Hurricane was a baby called Happiest Baby on the Block. I didn't agree with all of it but was helped by a good portion of it. One of my favorite things I took from it was the theory of the "fourth trimester". The idea is that there are three trimesters in pregnancy and a fourth for the first three-ish months after baby is born. During which time is the adjustment phase for baby in this new world! She/he deals with this differently depending on the baby. Hurricane for instance dealt with it poorly, indeed. With crying constantly unless she was nursed and held aggressively tight. Somewhere between 3-4 months old she slowly grew more accustomed to the world and needed me a little less. Some babies sleep, basically, through most of the fourth trimester, like Tender and The Boy did. Regardless of my babies different personalities though, they all finished the fourth trimester the same. With a new found amazement of the world around them! This world, it could not be ignored! It needed to be looked at and grabbed at all the time! This was NO time for sleeping or cuddling. For one of my children this time was wasted to even take a break to nurse (I consistently had to nurse this baby in a dark room every time for a couple of weeks before they realized they still needed sustenance breaks to discover the new world). All my babies decided around the age of 4 months old that about 30 minutes of a nap was quite enough thank you. Then they would roll around the bed and look at everything around them. Lucius is in this phase right now! He's so silly. He has totally mastered the entertainment center and can stand in it and grab all the toys around but still has sketchy neck control. Also, I took the two babies to wellness exams this week. Lucius is 4 months old and weighs 17.5 pounds and has a shockingly big head evidently. I think it was 18 1/2 inches around, which, they tell me, doesn't fall in the percentile chart. Hulk is 18 months old and weighs 29 pounds, which is heavy, but he's on the short side. This weight tells me that he has gained 8 pounds in the last 4 months! Pretty impressive for the little guy and very emotionally healing for me when I remember his little skin and bones body during my pregnancy when we couldn't talk him into eating anything besides the tiny amount of milk my body could produce for him. When he runs around the house with his shirt off I could just cry with joy seeing his healthy belly hanging out and chubby cheeks. Above is a picture I took sometimes before Lucius was born last summer. Been working on this one for a week or so. Last week some tooth pain that I had been suffering from for a couple of weeks crescendoed. After two appointments with my normal dentist, her being rushed to the hospital with kidney stones, having to find another dentist that would let me come in with an emergency, two appointments there with two different docs, having two teeth filed down, and a ton of x-rays, none of which showed an abscess, they finally decided that it had to be an abscess anyway and took a good guess as to which tooth was the culprit and drilled that sucker open to find the problem. They blessed me with getting me in for a root canal in the same day and antibiotics (breaking my streak for not having abx in 6 years). All of this required Robert missing two full days of class and one day of studying because he had to drive me around and take care of the kids. I wasn't given any pain meds because of nursing so I have been taking ibuprofen and tylenol alternately, which I hate, but can't find relief any other way. And, of course those drugs just put a dent in the pain. Whenever I have a baby I unconsciously start grinding my teeth in my sleep from stress and sleep deprivation. So that caused more trauma to the problem. Anyway, I'm on the mend now, still in a good amount of pain but hopeful that it will be totally better soon. Also, prayer on coving the dentist bills would be nice. My insurance covered root canals for other teeth but not this particular one. Boo!
The four older kids are headed to their Memaw and Papa's house tomorrow and Robert and I are devising all the fun stuff we will do with just two babies in the house! : ) I'm also hoping to get caught up on all homeschool stuff. The kids are doing all right but I'm WAY behind on grading and filing and just organizing in general. Plus, I'm wanting to start staying ahead of them in their Life of Fred books so that I am fresh on the math they are learning. I told them I was going to start homeschooling myself! ; ) Anyway, I gotta go. We are at the seminary for tennis. |
LindseyI'm the mama and wife. Updating you on our life! Archives
January 2022
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