Christmas Vacation

One thing I've learned over Christmas vacation so far:

If you ask your daughter to clean her room, she will practice her cello.  Even though she hasn't actually bothered with practicing the entire school year.

Query: if I ask her to practice her cello, will she clean her bedroom?

I can be flexible, you know.  :)

We Interrupt the Season...

I know it's the holiday season, and I should be posting fabulous uplifting posts and be of good cheer, and whatever....  But I just need to take a minute to implore the powers that be for ... whatever it is that I need.

For those of you who know me well, and worry about me, this is NOT a full-blown meltdown.  More like a mini-meltdown.  Kind of like Christ in the Garden at Gethsemane when He asked His Father for this cup to pass from Him, but then He still got up off of His knees and pressed forward and did what He had to do.  That's what I'm going to do, too.

But this is the part where I whine and complain.  Not that Christ was actually whining and complaining.  But this is the part where I am less perfect than He, and I whine and complain.

Yesterday was an ... um ... adrenaline-filled day for me.  Lizziy went to the surgery center to get her tonsils and adenoids out.  After he performed the operation, the surgeon told us that we had absolutely done the right thing, that her tonsils had tonsil stones (something I'd never heard of until then, but what amounts to large amounts of nasty dead cells and bacteria and all sorts of ickiness in her tonsils that needed to move on out), that her adenoids were interfering with her breathing, and that the surgery should much improve the quality of her breathing, her sleeping, and life in general.  A good thing, even though it's nervewracking to put one of your babies under general anesthesisa and the knife, even if you've done versions of that to all of your other children, too.

Meanwhile, when she's in recovery, coming out from the anesthesia, the nurse is telling me they expect Lizziy will probably vomit, and the kid in the bed next to her starts puking, and my pregnant tummy just can't take it, I send Bob in to be with her.  Good plan, right?  He's always the one who handles the vomiting at home, and he's really good at it.  He'll even help me handle my vomiting, which I think it the epitome of true love.  Anyway, the next thing I know, he's passing out?  Having a seizure?  SOMETHING, on the floor unconscious.  He'll probably be furious at me for posting this, but you know what?  It was freakin' scary, to see my chosen love for life lying there and not knowing what was wrong with him.  And having a bunch of nurses and doctors there that weren't sure either.  That part wasn't terribly reassuring.  And one of my babies meanwhile lying in another room disoriented and nauseous and in pain.

So Bob comes back around, and they decide it was just the talk about blood.  Why do people pass out about blood anyway?  But I digress....  While he's getting his color back, and being babied by the nurses, with his feet up, Lizziy throws up in true Lizziy fashion, while the old man across the room starts hurling, I mean really hurling.  And of course, I'm standing there, pregnant tummy under control through sheer will power alone.

We all go home, pick up Sariah from my fabulous visiting teacher's house.  Lizziy is the model patient.  She was doing what she was asked, eating, drinking, resting, and not whining or complaining (unlike her dear old mother).  But Sariah just didn't get it.  She didn't get that Lizziy was tired and sick.  She knew something was wrong ... but I think what she understood was that she, Sariah, was suddenly not the center of her parents' universe, and it had something to do with Lizziy.  We'd all gotten up early, I'd had the scare of a lifetime, and now we have a cranky, righteously indignant 2 year old.

Rest will cure this.  Not.  We go to bed with a 10 year old daughter with a carved up throat in our bed.  Not a big deal, except now I can't flip around restlessly anymore like I usually do because I'm not supposed to be sleeping on my back because of the pregnancy.  And I have a toddler being potty-trained at night.  And an obnoxious greyhound with nighttime bladder control issues.  And hips that hurt because my sciatic nerve has decided to kick in.

So this morning, everybody expects me to be SuperMom still.  Or to clarify, they still expect me to be the SuperMom that they're always complaining I'm not.  I'm tired.  I'm grumpy.  I'm queasy all the flippin' time, even though I should be about 10 weeks past that.  I'm worrying.  I'm scared.  I'm bordering on emotional and mental exhaustion.  And today I'm supposed to balance my checkbook and pay the bills, buy groceries, go get Rex's birth family for a visit, finish getting ready for the holidays, take my oldest daughter shopping, do more laundry and more dishes, prepare a lesson for the primary class I'm supposed to sub in tomorrow, mop my floors, buy more ice cream, and be a happy, loving, supportive, always-there-and-always available mother and wife.

I'd rather go curl up in a corner and cry my little eyes out.

And where, oh where, I ask you, am I supposed to find time to facebook?!  This is the worst indignity of all, I think.

See?  I told you I'd get up off my knees and press forward.  That's what moms do, right?  They keep going because God will eventually give them a fresh energizer battery.  So.  I'm off to conquer the world.  :)

Christmas Party

Bob happened to catch some fabulous picture of two of my favorite girls at the ward Christmas party this past weekend.   They're gorgeous.  But I already knew that.  Now you do, too.

Happy Birthday, Jacob!

On Saturday, we went to cousin Jacob's 6th birthday party.  We haven't been able to see him in awhile, so this was lots of fun.  His favorite song right now is "Big Green Tractor" by Jason Aldean, but he wouldn't sing it for me, even when I sang it for him in my scratchy voice.

Grandpa Haynes was there, and he even elicited and ever-rare Hannah-picture-sighting.

Cindy

Gabby

Elizabeth (the other Elisabeth)

or maybe this is Gabby, I'm really not sure!

And Hannah (whom I sometimes call Hannah-belle, incidentally),

holding Annabelle.

The Magic Word

We have been trying to teach Sariah manners of late.  It's working.  Sort of.

Her favorite thing to do is to make demands.  My favorite response is to say, "Ask me nicely."  And she always replies, with the most intense and sweetest smile you've ever seen, "Nicely."

We've learned the magic word ("Please"), and she uses it, but she's also learned the art of charm, apparently.

The Big Day

Friday was the Big Day. We'd gone back and forth several times about whether to find out the baby's gender, but finally decided to go through with it. It was so much fun having Hannah be a surprise, but I really wanted to paint Sariah and Baby's room appropriately. So off Bob, Sariah, and I trekked to the ultrasound office.  We found out.

We wanted to tell the older kids all at once, and we wanted to do it memorably.  Apparently it's all the rage right now to have a little pseudo-shower with a mystery cake and everybody's finds out all together what the baby is.  But I'm not cut out for that kind of surprise.  So here's what we did, just for our kids:

When all of the kids were home from school, we told them they had to make a guess. They guessed boy all the way around, but only because we told them if they didn't guess they'd have to clean the garage. They really don't like the possibility of being wrong.

I don't know where on earth they get that from, but none of them were wrong.

At the doctor's office, we asked Sariah what it was. She said a boy. She's varied from boy to girl for awhile, but she has always claimed we were having a baby "brudder." After she confidently proclaimed that it was a boy, the sonographer said, "Well, I don't even know why we're doing this. They're always right." And then she told us it was a boy.

Now you know. He appears to be healthy and doing all the things he should be doing, and his due date of April 12-13 was reconfirmed for the 3rd time--just remember that my babies never come on time unless they are forcibly evicted. There is an issue of low amniotic fluid. Apparently I need to drink more water and eat more protein, and have another ultrasound in a month.

After my efforts in that direction this weekend, I told Bob, "I feel like all I do is drink and pee." He told me I might consider rephrasing that, or I'd be visiting my bishop soon enough. Ha ha.

Help in the Kitchen

Thanksgiving at our house was good this year.

How could it not be with this kind of help in the kitchen?