This weekend was fun and nuts all at the same time. 😉

I walked in to check on her before I went to bed and found Eisley sleeping in my most favorite position that babies get into the other night – oh my goodness, I love this. When their little tush is in the air and their cheeks are all smushed… it’s just like the most heart-melting thing ever. 😉

These three – goodness. I love watching them play nicely together. Sometimes, we have days where it’s just one fit after another but the days when they are playing sweetly are just the biggest blessing.

And look who came to visit!! Nonnie and Papa O came out for a long weekend and the kids went nuts. So fun to see them! They always spoil us rotten.

 

Seriously, I am SO ready for spring. I’m not ready for the allergies or the wind or some of the non-fun parts, but I am really ready for warm weather again. Our house has been freezing cold again this week thanks to more snow/freezing rain. Spring is so close!!

I’m pretty sure this is Eisley’s most favorite spot in the house. Ha! She LOVES to play in the dishwasher. She loves to load it, she loves to unload it and if it’s cracked open at all, she wiggles those tiny little fingers in, yanks the lid down and goes to town.

I dropped Nathan at parent drop-off after yet another snow/sleet and he was getting his backpack on and had the audacity to look this old. I spent the whole day in mourning over how fast his childhood is passing. And as soon as I picked him up from school, I threatened him with swaddling every night again unless he slowed down. 😉

Completely unplanned, we ran into Gammy at our grocery store one day after school. Ha! The kids were ecstatic. 😉

I forgot to include this picture about our Valentine’s Day! Aunt Nicole invited us over and we spent the morning making so many fun crafts. Such a sweet thing for her to do. Then she made us heart-shaped grilled cheese and little hand pies. The kids had so much fun!

Looking for Waldo together. These two are the BEST of friends and the WORST of enemies right now – they just fight like cats sometimes and I get so frustrated but then they have so many times of these sweet moments and it’s just so good for my heart. I tell them often that they are each other’s best friend. Parker has so much hero worship for anything Nathan does right now – for both good and bad. 😉 I pray for them to love each other and grow up to love each other more every day.

Three little weirdos at lunch. They were cracking themselves up about something. Love when they are all having the best time together!

We had kind of a low key week, which was SO nice!! On Friday, we met some friends at a trampoline park in town and the kids had so much fun. I basically had to pry them out of there. 😉 At one point, they got so excited and yelled for me to come over and told me they had a “super awesome trick” they were going to do and then did this:

So stinking cute. I hope they always think it’s a super cool and awesome trick to run down a trampoline together holding hands and jump into a foam pit. 😉

On Saturday, I took Eisley to go visit Shannon and baby James and came home to find the boys on their bikes out in the cul-de-sac with Jon. Nathan was too busy riding to take a picture but I convinced Parker to pause for a second. 😉

Little cutie head. 🙂

Sunday, Eisley was not having it when I tried to drop her off in the nursery (and Mom is a bleeding heart when it comes to the baby. Always. I am the worst at leaving my kids in the nursery) and she was not having it in the service, so it was the foyer for me and the teething grouch. 😉

Sassy pants. She has gotten feisty, especially when she’s cutting a tooth.

Such the proud little walker now. She was everywhere. A really sweet older couple were sitting out in the foyer too and they kept watch me chase her around and laughing and at the end of the service, the man came up to me and told me their youngest was nineteen and I needed to just soak in every second because it seems like yesterday they were out in the foyer with her.

I think with Nathan, I would not have believed him. With Parker, I might have believed him a little more. But with Eisley, I cry every time she does something new because Nathan was just this little and I was just taking him out of the service. And now he’s in kindergarten. It really does go too fast. 🙁

 

So, we discovered something about our Eisley girl this week.

This girl loves herself some shoes. 😉 Ha! I took her and Parker to get some new shoes for the spring at Payless (Gammy already got Nathan a new pair, so he was set!) and she seriously wanted to try on every. single. shoe in the entire store. We settled on the brightest sneakers on the planet. 😉

Such the little model. 😉 She was SO proud of her new shoes!! She brings them over to me constantly to put them on her. This morning, it was at 7:35am and we put them on over her footie pajamas. Ha!

The boys decided to do a basketball game so they set up the chairs so we could all go watch them play. 😉

I got a Hobby Lobby gift card from Aunt Nicole for my birthday and one night Jon had a meeting with a real estate client at the same time as the boys’ Awana, so Eisley and I dropped the boys off and hit the clearance section. They had a TON on clearance and I think Eisley was pretty much over it by the third aisle. 😉 Ha! We left empty-handed, sadly. Unlike the pirates in Pirates of the Caribbean, nothing called to me. 😀

Possibly the biggest thing we have realized in this fixer-uppering is that the house is just never going to be DONE. Every single time we finish one thing, we find a hundred more things that still need to happen. It’s nice and encouraging. 😉

But one thing we are really bad at doing is looking at the house and only seeing what still needs to be accomplished rather than what has already been done. So, on cleaning day this week, I decided it was about time to put up some “almost done” pictures. We still have a few little odds and ends and decorations, but most of the big stuff is done!

I absolutely LOVE how it’s turning out. When we discovered our little infestation issue after we bought the house, I was so so sad and I cried constantly over it because I just knew that we’d made the biggest mistake ever buying this giant money pit of a house. But Jon has been quick to remind me that we got it at such a good price because of all the work it needed. A good thing to keep in mind as we take on these projects!!

The biggest transformation of the house has definitely been the kitchen, so I’ll start there. Originally, when we bought the house, the goal was to deep clean the existing kitchen, live with it for a few years and then remodel when we’d saved up for it. We had a pretty big chunk of money in savings that we had already marked for the flooring, painting and backyard. But, like I said, we found an infestation along with a ton of just nastiness and nightmare-inducing grossness and after trying our best, we realized we could never get it clean enough. Plus, we couldn’t figure out where the mice were getting in without ripping out the cabinets.

So, we decided that we could live without a functioning backyard but we couldn’t live without a functioning kitchen, took our backyard budget and stretched and penny-pinched as much as we could. My amazing dad came and helped us measure and install and level cabinets, Mom came and painted and gave us color advice and God was so good. Home Depot had major sales on all of the things we needed, when we needed them, in the order we needed them. We got the cabinets on a 30% off deal, we got the appliances on a major sale and when we went in to order the countertops, the man told us to wait a week and they were also going on a huge sale with free corner rounding AND the one we liked the most was the cheapest option to begin with. We installed almost everything ourselves (except for the countertops and appliances, which were free installation. But the cabinets, hardwood floors, pantry doors, all the cabinet pulls, the blinds, etc. was all us), which also saved us a ton of money.

So. All that to say – it has been stressful, expensive and Jon and I have both (and my poor parents in the beginning, bless their hearts) poured some pretty significant amounts of blood, sweat and tears (mostly mine) into this house. I used to cry all the time from just sheer exhaustion and wish we had just stayed in our last house because we loved it and it didn’t require any work, but I can honestly say that I truly do LOVE this house now. It is such a blessing to us and the space is just such a wonderful thing with all these busy, loud kids around! I love that we have completely made it ours. I love our neighborhood and two dear friends live within a 6 and 7 minute walk from my house. God is so good to us.

Okay. Enough of the sentimental rambling and onto the pictures!! 😉

Just to refresh the memory, here are a couple of before shots of our kitchen the day we bought the house:

And my kitchen now:

I absolutely love how it turned out! I really felt like white cabinets would just brighten the space so much and be such a nice contrast to the new paint color. We cut the wall and shortened the breakfast bar to make it all the same height and it opened the space up so much. We have plans to refinish our  barstools (and likely table and chairs) to match one of these days. 😉 And I’ve slowly been decorating! Most of it are things I already had. My favorite piece is the fence on top of the cabinets – it’s actually our old fence from our old house and I love the memories of it!

Another couple of views:

My pantry doors were my birthday present and I love them. 😉 Funny how your birthday wishes change over the years. Ha!

We still need to add the quarter-round around the bottom of the cabinets and our plan is to add beadboard on the sides of the island and ends of the cabinets, just as a little something extra. Maybe we can tackle that project this summer. 😉

And that’s the kitchen! On to the dining room! Here’s the old view:

And the dining room now:

In this room, the biggest thing we did was take out the nasty appliance garage. It was in the corner where my bulletin board is now and was about 5.5 feet high and just covered in some black, nasty stuff. We took down the old blinds, got rid of the top window coverings altogether and redid the floors, trim, paint and light fixture.

The dining room set was my grandmother’s on my dad’s side. I have SO many memories of this set and I absolutely LOVE that something that was so cherished by my grandmother is now in my home! We had basically zero dining space in our old house, so we have been truly enjoying having so much space for us to gather with friends and family.

When we bought the house, we had no idea what we were going to do with the front living space.

It still amazes me how dark this house was. There is so much natural light in this house!! We knew we would probably do another living area, so we decided to take up the tile and put carpet in here as well. We also decided to carpet the hallway and the area under the stairs. Originally, we were just going to kind of keep this room pretty simple and maybe try to find a used couch somewhere, but we ended up turning it into a playroom.

This was just the best decision!! It gives the kids so much space, all their toys don’t have to constantly be in my family room and they have room to run around. There’s often a fort or fire station or restaurant happening in here. Love seeing their imaginations have room to come to life! Aside from paint, trim, flooring and blinds, we didn’t do a ton in here. I stained the tops of the little short walls to match the staircase, but that’s about it.

The old staircase:

Oh the carpet runner. It was just my fave. And the new:

As I was taking these pictures, all the clouds came in, so I had to turn on some lights. And Kody apparently decided that a few pictures needed a real life model. 😉 I love how this turned out. Originally, we were going to do hardwoods connecting the dining and entry and continuing down the hall, but I’m so glad we went with carpet. Parker sommersaults from the playroom to the family room every day and we’ve had a couple of getting-used-to-stairs accidents that made me REALLY thankful we had carpet and padding at the bottom there. We stained the banister, painted the rails and took off the window coverings again so we could actually have some natural light in here.

Which brings us to the old family room:

SO dark. So depressing. We started by ripping up all the tile and getting rid of all the wires sticking out everywhere – a good plan with kids around, I think. 😉 I stained the beams and painted the trim. We also got rid of all the old blinds.

The family room now:

Kody is just following me around at this point. 😉 First off, it’s amazing how much the carpet, new blinds and paint makes such a HUGE difference!! I love our family room. We still need to put things on the walls, but it’s come such a long way.

I already did a little something on this, but we did a few more fixes, so I’ll just put it in here too. Here’s the old weird closet that is just to the left of that last picture:

Seriously it was just creepy. Here’s what we did with the space:

I LOVE our school room! I’m so thankful that we ended up doing this here. It’s so nice for the kids to have space to work and cut and make a mess and it’s very easy to just clean everything up, shove all the books in the closet and go on with life. 😉 When we are doing school in there, the kids pull their desks out so I can write on the white board and when we are done, it takes no time to just push them right back up against the wall. Those desks are some of the best $6 total (well, not including the paint I used to refinish them) I ever spent. 😉

And that’s it!! You’ve now seen almost all of the downstairs except for my laundry room and downstairs bathroom, but those before and afters will have to come another day. 🙂 If you’ve stuck with me this far, thanks for reading this incredibly long post. Ha! So much fun to to go back and remember where this house was and how far we have come. It’s been a TON of work but there has been so much reward in the process. Parker likes to call us the “family team” when we are in the middle of a project and that’s exactly what we’ve become. 🙂

More to come soon!

On Tuesday, Eisley was standing by the back of the couch and just started screaming. I went over to give her a hug and there was blood on the couch, so I immediately thought she’d bitten her tongue or something, but somehow, she had sliced open her hand. She had gotten a hold of a closed pen (baby-proofing with two other kids has just been a constant battle), but it didn’t seem like anything on there could have cut her. We scoured the entire back of the couch and the floor, but we have no idea how she managed to do that. We even checked under the couch to see if one of the staples had come out of the fabric or something but couldn’t find anything. It was SO weird.

It was a nasty cut, though. Bless her heart. I got the bleeding to stop pretty quickly with pressure and cold water, so everything online said we didn’t need to take her in to our pediatrician. But keeping something clean, dry and bandaged on an almost 14-month-old’s hand is next to impossible.

So we got a little creative.

My poor sweet girl! I took a couple of mittens that she’d gotten for Christmas and just did a running stitch connecting them to the sleeves on her shirt and jammies for a few days. She did so much better handling it than I did. I know she’s my third child, so you’d think I’d be better about the random injuries and such, but goodness. Let’s just say that I am not the parent my kids want around when something happens. I tend to freak out. So, of course, this happened when Jon was at work.

In much happier news, Parker has been so into that dumb video “Peanut Butter Jelly” (thanks Beechems) and on Wednesday, I asked him what he wanted for lunch and he started singing, “Peanut butter jelly with a baseball cap” like the song. So I gave it to him and he thought it was about the funniest thing in the entire world. Ha! Love when they are this easy to entertain. 😉

Off to check the band-aid. Poor baby girl.

Confession time: I am not the best at resting.

Those of you who know me in real life are probably laughing right now because you know this is something that I tend to struggle with. I just don’t sit well. I don’t like to sit, I don’t enjoy lounging around and especially if I can see or am aware of something that needs to be done, I physically cannot just sit there and ignore it.

The day before my birthday, I started my second postpartum cycle and so I spent my birthday in a lot of cramping pain. So, I was taking Motrin pretty much around the clock. Well, the night of my birthday, I got so lightheaded I could barely stand up and it scared me to death. I thought I’d accidentally overdosed on the ibuprofen even though I knew exactly what time I’d been taking it and I was taking a normal dosage.

The next day, I felt okay all morning and then same thing happened the following night, even though I hadn’t been taking ibuprofen. I was so lightheaded that I thought I was going to pass out while I was holding Eisley, which was completely terrifying.

I called my midwife and she had me go get blood drawn, but everything came back normal. When it just kept getting worse each day, I went to urgent care and they did a bunch more tests and everything still came back normal. So they told me if it happened again, I needed to go to the ER because it was just not safe for me to be home by myself with the three kids, climbing up and down the stairs carrying a baby if I was on the verge of passing out.

The next day, Jon took off work and I just went to Mom’s house and laid around (see note earlier) and right after lunch, I got so lightheaded again. So Mom took me to the ER, where we waited for what felt like years, finally got put in a room and then waited for years again. In the meantime, they couldn’t get an IV started in me until they’d blown a vein (my arm seriously looked like there was a baseball stuck in my elbow. SO painful – it took two weeks for the bruise to completely fade) and they’d tried all my other veins several times. I think I did pass out for a couple of seconds when that happened. After a lot of tests, the doctor came in and recommended me to go see a cardiologist because he was worried something weird was happening with my heart rhythms.

They got me in pretty quickly and after looking everything over, the doctor told me it looked okay to her and that she thought I was just in some pretty major fatigue. She told me I needed to sleep, I needed to eat, I needed to rest and I needed to drink water.

All very easy things to do when you consider the three kids part. 😉 Eisley was in another non-sleeping, wanting to nurse 12 times a night phase, I had just finished up a deadline and even with everything going on with me, there was still school with Nathan and normal life stuff that needed to happen. I’d probably been averaging around 3-4 hours of good sleep a night and trying to write, which I know takes more out of me, even though I can often convince myself that my work time is rest time because I’m sitting down (such a lie). I had been getting up at 5 (occasionally earlier) to work on deadlines even after not sleeping all night and just with everything, I just got completely, 100 percent run down. I think that all of the stress and events of the summer and fall finally caught up with me and I just couldn’t handle it anymore.

So, we went into recovery mode. Mom and Dad were so helpful and they came over several times to help out while I tried to nap. Jon took over the nights with Eisley and she started sleeping close to 10-12 hours at a time within three nights. I started making sure I was eating breakfast AND lunch and wasn’t just existing on two cups of coffee until 2pm every day. And I put myself on vacation, slept until the kids woke me up at 7:30 and forced myself to sit and read or lay down while the kids were napping during the days.

Within the week, I was doing much better and now, three weeks later, I’m pretty much back to normal. I can tell when I’m pushing myself too hard and I still get a little lightheaded if I don’t take the time to make sure I’m drinking enough water and eating enough protein, but I learned some valuable lessons. One, I’m not in college anymore and I can’t exist on coffee and carbs for days on end like I could before. Two, I have a lot of little people (and one big one) who do not function well when I’m not doing well, so it’s very important for me to make sure I’m taking care of myself as much as I’m taking care of them. And three, the biggest thing that Jesus whispered to my heart through all of this – even God rested.

So important for me to know. It’s OKAY to rest. It’s GOOD to rest. It’s even commanded in the Bible to rest. God knows we can’t do everything all the time and keep up with everything all the time, so He has us rest. I know as moms we tend to look at everything going on in the world and on Instagram and Pinterest and think we need to have it all together, but even those people don’t have it all together. We can let things slide. We can have a dirty kitchen, the kids can still be in their jammies at 3pm and honestly, kids love it when dinner is frozen corn dogs and microwavable veggies.

I’m learning to give myself a break. If this is something that you’re struggling with, I hope you’ll give yourself the permission to take a break as well. Because God has already given it to us, we just need to let ourselves do it. A hard, long, kind of scary lesson for me to learn. One I hope I don’t forget.

Oh this one. People are always seeing her in the grocery store and places and telling me things like, “13 months! That’s the best age!” Mm-hmm… The best age to have Mom NEVER sit EVER. Notice she has started climbing the stairs and then posing. With great mobility, comes great responsibility…for the mom.

About 2am, the night of Groundhog Day, we had this city-wide blackout which lasted for like two hours and of course, everyone woke up because all their sound machines turned off. The next morning, we found out our internet was still down and so we had to wait to watch the delayed broadcast of Punxsutawney Phil telling us if we were going to have six more weeks of winter or not. But then, our internet FINALLY worked and we could FINALLY WATCH IT MOM. Nathan was SO excited for it, Parker was so confused and thought it was a party for Phil and then, so we could experience every possible emotion before 10:30am, Nathan was SO crushed that we are supposed to have six more weeks of winter. While Nathan bemoaned our fate, Parker flipped around the house singing, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR HEDGEHOG” at the top of his lungs.

Also, I accidentally dressed them all the same that day. So there was Groundhog Day. #happybirthdayphil

“Look Mom! We’re a football team!”

One of Pops’ friends got a new TV and gave us their other (gigantic) one. The boys were so excited and wrote them the most adorable thank you notes and Nathan drew a picture of the Wild Kratts on the new TV to go with it. So cute. 🙂