Mother of 3

This is an old pic, but I have only taken pics of Addy with my phone, none with my camera yet. I'll post more later when I get a chance.

I am a Mother of 3 this week because when I went home to Tulsa last weekend for Race for the Cure, I brought back my niece, Addison. This wasn't planned, but it was just me and Sam so we had room in the Jeep. Plus, I only have 4 kids enrolled right now, so I can handle one more. Addy is 4 and such a great helper! I'm kinda thinking about askin' Meg if she wants to trade cuz Jackson is driving me crazy today!!

It is sweet to see how much Jack hero-worships her and what a great "big sis" she is to him. In the evenings after his friends go home, Jackson gets lonely and always wants to come sit on our laps while we watch tv or hangs on me while I am cooking dinner, but with Addy here, he has a buddy to play with. I actually sat down and watched an episode of Friends on t.v. on Monday night and I wasn't even nursing!!

She is having a blast in my preschool this week. I asked her if she was ready to go home and she said, "Hmmm, no, but maybe my Mama and my Daddy can come here." Then today on the phone she asked her mom if she could stay one more day. On Saturday we are going to go to the library and the zoo, then on Sunday, after church, we will go out to my aunt Sara's house in Celina and she can play with Chris and Aubrey's boys, her other cousins (once-removed ?), Keagan and Levi. Then we'll head to Atoka to meet my mom and sis halfway to give her back.

This is the first time I have really gotten to spend extended quality time one-on-one with Addy. It is so fun to see how much she is like Megan was as a child. She even looks like Megan did when she was little. Dark blonde hair, long eyelashes, olive skin and she has so much spunk in her tiny 4 year old body!! I just LOVE her!!

Re-posting a draft...

Before I had kids...
-I got a full night's sleep regularly.
-I could run to the store for a gallon of milk and back in 20 minutes.
-I could leave the house without coordinating nap and feeding schedules.
-I didn't have 10 loads of laundry to wash, dry, fold, hang up and put away every week.
-I never uttered the words, "potty," "poo-poo," or "pee-pee"
-I managed to make it a full day without a spot on my clothes.
-I had never been simulataneously pooped on and thrown up on.
-I didn't have to take a stuffed dalmation with me everywhere I went.
-My house stayed clean for days on end instead of hours.
-I only had one butt to wipe.
-I never had to dig a dead bug out of a toddler's mouth.
-I had never picked someone else's nose.
-I wore makeup everywhere.
-I only had one size of clothes in my closet

Just reflecting, not complaining.

Failure?

Last night my boys teamed up on me all night long. Jackson has an ear infection, I think, so he woke up and couldn't go back to sleep. Then Samson woke up twice to eat when he had been sleeping up to 7 hours last week. It is so frustrating to backslide in that department. I got very little sleep as a result. I accidentally slept in and then didn't get to fully pump before my kids started coming.

Plus, I am very upset because I have been pumping so much that my milk supply is very little and Sam is fussy all the time because he is hungry. This weekend I had to start supplementing with formula.

I have been wondering if the economy would hit my business and it looks like it is starting to. I didn't get full enrollment as I had hoped, so I can't afford Mrs. Olivia to come help me right now. On top of low enrollment, in the last 2 weeks I have lost/had to dismiss one child due to discipline problems and another's father's hours got cut back at work and he can no longer afford me full-time so he switched to part-time. I now have 4.5 spots open that I need to fill if we aren't going to take out any more student loans.

Today I am feeling like a failure. I'm feeling like all the balls I have been trying to juggle are falling down around me. I need to share my stress with someone, but I hesitate to admit it because I feel like there are those who are happy to see that I can't handle it all.

OR...maybe I'm just feeling depressed because of the endless rain we have been having and lack of sleep. Maybe things will turn around. It isn't the end of the world if I have to quit nursing and it isn't the end of the world if we have to take out more loans, it just wasn't our Plan A. I guess sometimes you have to be happy with your Plan B. *Slap* Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Colleen, and get up and do something about it!! lol

Shapes

Story #1:
Tonight we were eating dinner (hot ham and cheese sandwiches on a bolillo roll and chips - hey, it's Thursday, I'm tired and the bolillo rolls I bought for lunch were about to go bad.)

ANYWAY...as I was saying, we were eating dinner and Jackson picked up one of these chips and said, "Issa Ti-ango!" (It's a Triangle) Smart kiddo! ;)

Story #2:
This weekend we went to my aunt Sara's house which is north of Frisco about an hour away. As I mentioned in a previous blog, the DVD player wasn't working, so we were talking to each other, singing songs and we were both pointing out things we saw outside. (Jackson likes to find "Amewican fwags (American flags)," "wadda towas" (water towers) and various animals. We frequently do this when we are just driving around town because I like to save the DVD player for longer trips so my child isn't ALWAYS watching TV and so it is a special treat when we are on long trips. I decided to add stop signs to our list of things to find, so I pointed some out and we talked about the color and the letters on the stop sign and I told him it was an octogon. The rest of the trip, he would see a stop sign and say "LOOK! Oc-go-gon, Mama."

Should I Be Worried?

I'm not. These pictures were taken at the 2nd annual BILC Back-to-School BBQ at our house the weekend before school started. The girls were playing with the dress up clothes and Jackson brought Ben a dress and said "Help me, please." Ben said no. So he came to me and I helped him put it on. I mean, who cares, right? HE just wanted to play what the girls were playing. He likes to try on all the dress up clothes, masks and hats. I say, let him explore. Let him be a kid. It makes for a cute picture anyway...

Nursing Woes

I have been trying to continue nursing Sam at least until he is 6 months old. This is a challenge now that my school has opened up because I can't nurse in front of the kids and right now I can't afford help because I don't have the enrollment to support it. So right now, I wake up with Sam at 5 am, feed him, then pump at 7:00 right before my kids get here. Then I can't pump again till naptime at 1:00 and then again after dinner around 7ish. Each time I pump I only get about 6-8 oz because I am not pumping enough and my body thinks Sam isn't eating as much when in reality my 15 pound chunk 3.5 month old baby is now eating 6-8 oz every 3-4 hours. I am rapidly running out of my frozen breast milk supply. To make matters worse, today I am suffering from a UTI and I was in such pain, I woke up at 4:30am and have been up ever since. I broke down and had to take a Cystex for the pain, which goes through to Sam through my breastmilk. I nursed him at 5, then pumped at 7 right before I took it, then at naptime I had to dump all the milk I pumped down the drain! I felt physically ill (and not from the UTI, lol)!! That stuff is like liquid gold right now and I watched 8 oz of precious milk just get wasted down the drain! AAAHHH! I'm not going to make it!!

Labor Day weekend (Whoo hoo!)

We celebrated Jack's birthday on Friday with a Backyardigans themed party. It was during the school day since our unit last week was birthdays and most of his friends are my preschoolers. We invited a few outside friends, too. I made a Pablo cake and he got really excited. He kept saying, "I want Pablo" because he didn't quite get that it was cake and not a toy for him to play with, but once I cut it up, he got the hang of it. From us, Jackson got a t-ball set, a tricycle, some Living scripture DVDs and a Tyrone beanie baby. He LOVES his tricycle and his Tyrone the best, I think. We gave him the tricycle on Monday night on his actual birthday when Ben got home from the hospital. It was late so he kinda had to open his presents and then go take a bath and go to bed, but the first thing out of his mouth on Tues a.m. was "I wanna ride my BI-sikko, Mama." Literally. The first thing. No good morning. Nothing. Then on Friday I gave him the Tyrone beanie baby with the Backyardigans party and he carried it aroudn all day. He put "Kyrone" in the stroller. "Kyrone shopping." He put Tyrone in his seat in the kitchen. "Ky-rone is HUN-gry, Mama." Tyrone rode his bicycle. Tyrone laid on his side ("Ky-rone is berry tired, Mama.") At naptime he wanted to sleep with Tyrone. It was fun to see him so excited. All summer we have been going to birthday parties and he is starting to get what they are all about, so to watch him realize and get excited that it was his turn was really cute! He loed it when everyone sang happy birthday and on MOnday when we had our own little family party and he opened all his presents, he clapped his hands excitedly and said, "YYEAHHH! Happy Birthday!!!"


Well, I didn't get to go to Tulsa to see my mom like I had planned. On Friday I was so tired after a long week of being a "single mom" since Ben started internal medicine last week, so I decided to finish packing and clean the house on Fri night because Ben's brother and his family were coming to stay in our house while we were gone (Ben went on the annual Labor Day dove hunt). I planned to leave early Sat morning, but when I got up, got the boys fed, and loaded up the car, I realized that the DVD player wasn't working in my car. Jackson is unbearable on long car trips without it, and I wasn't about to take him 5 hours to Tulsa and then 5 hours back with no entertainment and have to deal with what that would mean for me all by myself. No thanks!! I really wanted to see my mom , but I will see her in two weeks when I go to Tulsa to be in the Race for the Cure. (Did I blog that she was rediagnosed with cancer? This time it is in her lungs and a few other places. Although they found it in several places, all the spots are small. She started chemo again about 3 weeks ago.) Plus, if I didn't leave until Sat morning and had to be back by Monday morning (I had so much to do to get ready for this week. one woman show, remember?), it kinda took away the reason I was going - to spend a long weekend with her.

So...at the last minute I decided to go spend the weekend with my aunt and best friend, Sara. She has 2 grandchildren ages 4 and now 1, and Levi's birthday party was this weekend. Jackson loves to go play with Keagan and "Bebi." We had planned on going until I realized that my Tulsa trip and the birthday party were the same weekend. We already had all our stuff in teh car, so we just went to Sara's instead. Sara and I did some shopping and then headed over to the birhtday party.




The next day was Levi's baptism at Suncreek First United Methodist Church in Allen, TX. I really enjoyed what I heard of the sermon. It was basically about not multi-tasking our lives and taking time for Christ. That was a message I always need to be reminded of! Jackson was rotten in church, as usual. At one point, the choir had just finished singing this beautiful song accompanied by a French Horn, and right after when it was so quiet and everyone was just feeling the Spirit, my son yelled out "YYYYEEEAAAAHHHH!" and started clapping. The whole entire congregation started laughing, including me, although I wanted to die! Okay so it was funny, but I took him out shortly after that, as Suncreek has a nursery class during the sermon. I was grateful for that because usually I have Ben next to me to take him out when we are at our church. I was getting tired of wrestling him all through the sermon!

Today Ben and I were both home and he let me sleep in, went to the grocery store with me, made me lunch (burgers on the grill - YUM) and then gave me some time alone to get out and run some errands and do some shopping for myself, which I never get to do alone anymore. It was so nice!