Seasons

One of my favorite things about summer is the fruit.  I love berries, and peaches, but really only fresh and they taste the best, like everything else, in their season.  I was thinking about that this morning, while I ate one of my favorite breakfasts, pictured below.

I cannot take any credit for this idea, I first enjoyed it at a cousin-in-law's house about 4 years ago and it has been a summer highlight ever since.  Mary B's has fabulous frozen biscuits, slice up some South Carolina peaches (they're better than Georgia ones) and/or hand-picked strawberries, add some whipped cream (cream-top as Ansley says), ground cinnamon, and voila.  It's so delicious. 

So I'm enjoying my breakfast this morning and actually thinking while I eat.  I actually have time for this now on occasion since both boys are nursing.  You see, up until this week, my schedule has been: Feed Graham + Pump + Feed Bennett = 2 hours + 1 hour "break" and then start over.  The break usually involved making something for the other kids to eat, or me to eat, or just managing Silas which is a full-time job alone.  Now it is: Feed Babies: 30 minutes. So I actually have a small amount of time to finish a thought every now and then.  And some days I even have time to write them down.  

Alright, back to my thought:  The train started like this (I didn't promise it was a deep thought):  I love strawberries.  I especially love the hand-picked fresh ones.  I'd like to go pick some strawberries.  I cannot go pick strawberries because I have 5 kids 5 and under and as I have already suggested, Silas + strawberry patch = disaster.  We'll go pick strawberries one day, and it will be fun.  But until then, I am going to enjoy the season of life that I'm in. 

I am going to enjoy my thoughtful 5 year old (he can be very sweet when he's not knocking birds from their nest),

who, yesterday made his sister the last package of cream of wheat and put chocolate chips in it for her (she was also very excited about this because he evidently makes it a little more chocolatey than I do).  He made himself a bowl of Kix (I'm sleeping at this point), poured Silas and me a bowl of Kix, and had the recycling by the door ready to go out.

My sweet 3 year old, who loves her baby brothers and crawls in bed with me every morning so she can "sleep" next to them.

 My high maintenance almost 2 year old,

who is potty training, loves the babies, idolizes his older brother, and provides comic relief during the day to help me stay sane,

and my two precious babies

 that coo and laugh and snuggle and won't be this little for very long.  I will enjoy this season and not rush into the next one.

Baby Birds

So, yesterday Colin & Ansley came running in the house super excited yelling "Mommy! Mommy! We found a baby bird!"  So I went to look for a basket to put it in.  By the time I got back they had found a second baby bird and were just about beside themselves.  So they filled the basket with pinestraw and started the hunt for bugs. 

 
Fortunately, Silas was sleeping, otherwise our story would end here with two dead birds.  Well, I was not exactly sure what to do with these guys.  They reminded me a little of Graham and Bennett, all chirpy crying with their mouths open,

 so I felt like I had to help look for bugs because the search wasn't going so well.  After looking forever it seems, we found one cricket that we cut in half and they had to share.  This was not going to be easy.  Plus, we couldn't bring them in the house and if we left them outside a cat would have got them.  So they spent the night in the laundry room, and then this morning I sat down with the kids to pitch my idea of trying to get them back in the nest.  I had to ask some more specific questions about the location where they found them, did they see a nest, etc.  and this interrogation led to a surprise ending:  Evidently "found" in my five year old's vocabulary is equivalent to "knocked out of the bush because I want a pet bird."  So upon this discovery we had a lecture on how God gave Adam the animals to take care of, not to steal them away from their mommies.  At any rate, the birds now have the ritz-carlton of bird's nests,

we can see them from the kid's bathroom window, and the mommy bird is still feeding them, thank goodness.

As R. pointed out last night, I think I have enough mouths to feed.

Birth Announcement

 This is the birth announcement I hope to be sending out soon, seeing as how the babies are over 3 months old now.  Oh well, it's been a busy 3 months.  I keep thinking of all kinds of things to write about, but I just haven't found the time to get on here and do it.  Maybe soon.  Seeing as how I can't remember to bring diapers or wipes or something totally important, don't hold your breath.  So far I've had to either use a spare t-shirt folded up as best I could to use as a temporary diaper, or once I used one of Silas' diapers (size 5) on Bennett (Newborn) so it fastened around his armpits and I probably could have fastened it around his neck if his arms hadn't gotten in the way.  I have to remind myself to eat and drink because I spend the rest of the day feeding 5 children.  Heaven help us when I start cooking again.  Actually I have cooked a couple of times.  "Cooked" is a loose term.  The fanciest thing I've done so far has been a roast in the crock pot.  It took all of 5 minutes to throw a piece of meat, carrots, potatoes and some seasoning in.  I didn't even go to the store to buy the stuff - someone dropped it off.   We've been heavily relying on the grill. But next week is when the meals stop coming so I'll have to start figuring something out.  3 months of meals was more than I could have ever hoped for so thank  you again to everyone who contributed!  Anyway, I have to feed my other 3 kids lunch, so I'll try to remember all of my revelations about child rearing until a later day.

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Sleep Deprived

It should not come as a surprise to anyone that this is my current state.  I sat down a couple of nights ago and calculated how much sleep I was actually getting at night.  It's somewhere around 5 - 5 1/2 hours on a good night.  This explains why I could pass for the walking dead most of the morning.  I am not and never have been a person who could survive on little sleep.  I remember one time when I was in college, working full time waiting tables and going to school full time, that some friends came over and I was so dead asleep that they posed me into all sort of different pictures with them, sitting up, and I have no memory of it.  Well I'm not quite to that point yet, but almost.  I was thinking about that this morning because I got up around 6 ish to feed the babies.  Well this takes about an hour to feed, burp, change their diapers, etc.  Then I normally pump, but since it was Sunday morning, I had to get the kids ready for church.  So Ansley had come in to watch around 7 when I was wrapping up, and she was just talking my ear off.  She of course wanted to hold one of the babies, so I let her do that, and then Silas wanted to hold one, so he did that, and then it was time for breakfast.  By the time the kids ate and were dressed it was 8:15 or so.  I had not eaten, pumped, or obviously done anything with myself since I was staying home.  It was then that it hit me:  When I start going back to church, I'm going to have to wake up at like 5 in the morning.  The sad part is, that when this happens I guarantee I'll sleep through most of the service. After everyone left this morning, I finally ate and sat down to pump.  I fell asleep pumping.  This is not the first time this has happened, but fortunately, all the other times this happened someone has been here and noticed and made enough noise to awake me, but no one was here this morning.  So I pumped for like 45 minutes.  The only reason I woke up when I did was that Graham decided it was time to eat again and started crying. 

Having said that, I knew a while back that I would not be getting anything done around the house for a while after they both got home.  So I've just been making a list.  It's getting pretty long, but I feel better knowing that it's written down somewhere so I don't have to carry it around in my brain anymore.  One of the things on my list is to finish up thank you notes.  There is a separate list of people I need to write, and it's also getting pretty long.  If you have given me a gift or brought food or flowers or done anything thoughtful and have not gotten a note from me, your name is on this list. I am grateful.

Gray Hair

So, for about the last 6 months or maybe longer, I've been growing out my gray hair.  I had, for a number of years now, been plucking them.  I don't have that many, but they are all in the front and sort of irritate me, so I normally just plucked them as I saw them.  They have a different texture, they're a little wiry, and pick up the light in ways that I just wish the rest of my hair did. I always ask my hairdresser to check the rest of my head to tell me how bad it's getting, because I am trying to put off getting highlights as long as I possibly can, mostly because of the expense and the maintenance involved once you start something like that.  Well at one visit last year, she told me a story about a lady who plucked her gray hairs and also got highlights, and the gray ones never got highlighted because they were too short to color since she plucked.  So I've been growing them out now for some time so that when I decide to take the plunge, I won't have this issue.  Well I've also been growing out the rest of my hair because I'm lazy and don't want to have to fix it, and so when I pull my hair back in a pony tail is generally when I notice the mass quantities of grays that are kept hidden when I wear my hair down.  Needless to say, I've been noticing them a lot lately.  Normally I would just notice them and go on with my life, but evidently since the extra 25lbs I'm still carrying around has made me feel like I have a double chin and jowls, my subconscious has been bothered by all of this more than I realized and I dreamt last night about gray hair.  In this marvelous dream, R. was pointing out all of my gray hairs.  He was picking through the hair on my head and pointing out that I had a lot in the back and they were really just everywhere and getting out of control, and then he lifted up one side of my hair to point out this huge patch of gray hair that was all growing in together.  Just in case you are wondering, he would never, ever do this. Most of the time when I start whining about it he says something along the lines of "I love your gray hair."  Or something like that.  So I'm not sure where this dream came from, but I think I'm going to have to pluck at least one of these hairs because it is staring me in the face every time I look in the mirror. 

On a totally different subject, the house is back to normal.  The front porch has been cleared, the mattresses are gone from the middle of the house, and our attic and storage shed have never been more organized than they are right now.  So I no longer have that to stress me out.  Graham is just about the perfect baby.  He eats every 4 hours just like they taught him to do in the hospital, sometimes I wake him up but most of the time he wakes up right one schedule, eats and goes right back to bed.  I'm still pumping because he's not nursing very well, so even when he nurses I pump after I feed him, and I usually prop him up on the Boppy while I do that just in case I haven't burped him well enough, and so sometimes he'll look around for a bit but then he just drifts off.  Noise doesn't bother him at all, thank goodness, so he's just out in his bassinet in the middle of the house sleeping all day. I am still pretty exhausted from going up to the hospital every night, and if I ever do have a day where I feel really good I try to run errands, and then feel awful the next day.  Today is the next day in case you were wondering.  But my mom is here, so I'm still able to nap pretty well.  She'll be here for another week, which is great because Bennett is supposed to come home on Monday, and I'll have my postpartum visit and then have a few more days to try to get stuff done before she leaves.  But I figure once we're not going to the hospital every day I'll have a little more energy, although I'm sure it will be redirected toward the babies.  There's no way they're going to both sleep this well for very long. 

Oh yeah, and I saw more gypsies at the hospital. 

Nesting

I have sat down a number of times to update this since I last posted, and well, you can see how well I've done.  There were not too many changes in the boys for what seemed like a while, so I was really trying to get the house in order.  It had changed somewhat since my hospitalization and needed some attention.  Unfortunately, I was prohibited from doing much due to my surgery, so I mainly stared at the place and tried to give some direction to my sweet mother, who not only listened but actually did a lot of the work.  I also had a couple of wonderful friends come over to help with rearranging furniture and the like so that we could get things ready for the boys.  All of that said, the place is coming together. 

We do have a couple of mattresses still in the middle of the house waiting for us to clean out our storage room to put them in (hopefully done this weekend).  And there is some furniture sitting on the front porch that we no longer have room for in the house, but aren't sure we have room for it in the storage room either.  At one point I was starting to feel like I was living out a Sanford and Son episode, but my antidepressant has kicked in nicely and I'm starting to be ok with it.  If it's still there in a few weeks I'm just going to have a yard sale.  Which leads me to this - I love Craig's list.  I have been selling all of our personal possessions on this site and it is wonderful.  Well not all of our possessions, but some of them.  Ok, two to be exact, but hey I would sell a whole lot more if I could.  One of the items I sold was our tv stand.  We had a bookshelf built in to our living room and so we didn't have room for our monstrous old tv and the tv stand that it was on.  So I sold the TV stand on Craig's list and donated the TV to some man who collects junk that people leave on the side of the road for the garbage man to pick up.  Anyway, the lady who bought the TV stand, we'll call her Alice, was from Massachusetts, and was very sweet.  The lady she brought with her, whose name I'm not going to change, Ann, must have been from a very rude part of the country, because she was just that.  When they came to collect the tv stand, they had to first move the tv off of it.  It was old, and very, very heavy.  So when I told them they could put it on the floor, Ann says "I'm not going all the way to the floor with this thing, here we'll put it right here." And promptly puts it on a toy box in my living room.  The TV was not really sturdy on this piece of furniture, and so Alice, the one who was actually paying for the furniture says "We can't put that here, it's going to fall over on the kids!"  So Ann starts rearranging my whole living room to prop the TV up with other pieces of furniture, and when she is satisfied, says "There, that won't fall over now, but you'll need to keep your kids out of here until someone can move it to the floor."  Gee thanks, Ann.  Why did I not say something?  I have no idea.  I think my jaw must have been on the floor, either that or I had stopped breathing because I could not get more than a word out of my mouth at a time.  When they started moving the TV stand, Ann's next suggestion was to just put it on the rug in the entry way and use the rug to scoot it to their Mercedes SUV.  Alice exclaims "Ann!  We can't do that!", to which Ann says, "You don't know how to move furniture" and then Alice says back "You don't know how to take care of other people's stuff!" All the while giving me an apologetic look.  If it wasn't for Alice and the fact that she was the one paying for the furniture I might have clocked Ann at that point, because I was starting to come out of it.  Anyway, needless to say they did not use my rug to move the TV stand, and I got my money and everything is fine now.

I've also been cleaning out closets and come to a number of conclusions about the mass quantities of stuff that we've been able to accumulate and how ridiculous it is, but I'll spare you all of that because later today, something very exciting is going to happen - Graham is coming home!  I'm so excited and the two older kids are beside themselves.  Silas doesn't have a clue, but he knows something is happening and keeps walking around saying "Graham" over and over again.  He's going to be in for a surprise I think.  Bennett is still a few weeks out - but he's growing and so they'll probably let him come home by the time he puts on another pound.  So it won't be long before we're all home.  Now the real fun begins!

Gypsies

I finally saw some.  Most people I know cannot believe that I have lived in Augusta for 5 years and never seen a gypsy.  Well, I guess the "correct" term is Irish Traveler. I have driven through Murphy Village numerous times and seen their weird mansions with all of the huge windows totally covered up, but I had never seen an actual living person until today.  I was fascinated and wanted to stare.  I saw them at the hospital, since that is the only place I'm going these days.  I had actually been looking for them for the last 6 weeks or so, because I heard about how they take over the waiting room when one of them is having a baby.  Another patient and one of the nurses, and then a friend all described them the same way, and they were all right.  When I saw one, I knew what I was looking at. 

I first saw three middle aged women with the same exact hair-do. It was sort of poofy, and didn't move at all.  It looked very unnatural, like a bad wig.  I haven't seen a 'do this bad in a while, so that alone was cause for me to (try not to) stare, and then I saw the waiting room.  There wasn't an empty seat in the house.  All of the benches around the well baby nursery were taken, and the NICU waiting room was also full, and every chair on the 3rd floor of the hospital was occupied.  About half of these people had the same bad hair-do.  The younger girls - like my age :),  had their hair in curls.  Lots of curls.  It was almost pretty, except that it too, looked totally unnatural and wig-like.  I have no idea how they get their hair to do this.  It was big and curly and that's the only way I know how to describe it.  Everyone was made-up.  Very made up.  I didn't see any little kids, which I was sort of disappointed by, because I've heard that they dress up their 2 year olds the same way.    There also were no men, at least none that I could see.  There were about 5 teenage boys, who looked like quintuplets.  All wearing white vests and a pink shirt underneath.  Actually everyone was wearing pink, evidently when one of them has a baby they all show up in pink or blue depending on the gender of the child.  Most of them had a flattened face.  Some think that this is from years of inbreeding, and I heard from a somewhat reputable source that a lot of their babies have health problems due to this (the inbreeding, not the flat face).  At any rate, they all looked the same.  I have heard that there are only 3 last names among the 1500+ people that live in their community.  There are the blond and brunette ones that have quite a bit of money and flash, and then another group that isn't rich and who live in trailers. When I was leaving, there were two who got in the elevator with me, a young brunette and her mother.  The young girl was talking very fast - which was another thing that I had heard about them.  They talk fast and have an accent so you can't understand what they are saying.  My sister and I happen to have the gift of speaking fast, so fast that my dad on occasion has accused us of speaking a different language.  I had no problem understanding what this girl was saying, but I can honestly say that I have never, ever, since moving to the south, heard someone talk this quickly.  I smiled at them, which for those of you who know me is something that I don't get accused of doing too often, and they actually did smile back, sort of.  Which contradicted what I had heard about them being rude to anyone who was not part of their group.  Not totally rude anyway.  We weren't BFF or anything by the time we got out of the elevator, but I thought exchanging smiles was nice.  That is the whole story of my first gypsy encounter.  For some reason I am totally fascinated with these people.