I think its good to laugh out loud sometimes.

A friend just sent me this. It’s semi-ridiculous in some parts, but if you don’t at least smirk at some parts of this, your funny bone is definitely broken, yo.

I think I personally lost it at the “if you’re catholic, there’s even more” part about halfway through.

I am still processing a lot, and yet, life marches forward. Meetings and agendas and emails and planning – it doesn’t slow down just cause I don’t feel like dealing with it right now.

the girls are having a lemonade stand right now – I finally relented to the daily onslaught of requests for this privilege. They have made a dollar. Thank God for kind-hearted FedEx Home Delivery drivers who stop on a hot day to make two little girls’ day. It warmed my heart. Maybe I am overly emotional/hormonal. It was touching.

Otherwise – life really truly is good. i wish summer would last forever. I can’t stand to think of July being over.

Thanks for everyone who has contacted me about the Leslie picture project. i think i may have found an acceptable, yet less expensive alternative. i’ll post more details about it as I get them. Because of course i have about 982 other things on my to-do list that all have to be done yesterday. why do i do this to myself???

Anyways – i need to go rustle up some grub for the yung-ins.

hopefully i have more serious blog-fodder by tomorrow.

 

t-shizzle

In the last few days mine has hit me like a cold wet towel snapping across my face.

Some of you may remember the story of Leslie that I posted here a few months back. On Saturday night, in the words of her husband Tyson, she defeated her battle with cancer and went to be in the presence of her King and Savior. And I guess some part of me knew that the end would come for her. But i had a really hard time accepting it. No, we were not best friends, not even close friends. And my grieving for the situation comes more in the form of mom to mom – grieving what she had to leave behind (her almost 3 year old little boy TJ), and her adoring husband. And just processing, what would it be like to say goodbye? I think my refusal to accept her diagnosis came when I found out we were the exact same age. People die who are older than me, and people die who are younger than me. But people my age DO NOT DIE. It just does not happen. Not in my happy little world. So while friends around me would be saddened by news posted on the blog, i blithely accepted and believed that she would make it. that she would beat all the odds. that a year from now they would all be happily sitting back in church like this was just a horrible blip on the radar.

Receiving the news Sunday morning hit me hard. We had to be “on” in Kidstown that Sunday too, which was both a blessing and one of the hardest things i have had to do in a while. Be “up” and “happy” in front of a crowd of children whose parents were all too happy to leave them there in order to go to service. We all just felt – devastated, upset, more like crying than singing loud obnoxious songs. But bravely we put the game faces on and endured it. I really didn’t think I would make it. ESPECIALLY when service went over a half hour. ESPECIALLY when the air-con would not work in the preschool rooms and we had almost 40 kids running around creating more heat with their little bodies! ESPECIALLY when you could see everyone else getting to process through their grief together as a church body and we were left still cleaning up cheerios and scattered legos. It was extremely emotionally draining to say the least.

which is probably why I then came home and started contracting, hard. painfully. for over 5 hours. Nothing was stopping them and they just kept getting more painful. it was just the icing on the cake of an already crazy and chaotic day. I don’t think I slept at all Sunday nite. And I slept even less last nite.

It just makes you think about where you’re at with your own life. What have I done in 32 years here on earth that would be any kind of legacy? Whose lives have I impacted? What difference have I made?

And then I get a call from the Bone Marrow Registry. I signed up to be a bone marrow donor about 10 years ago when another good friend of ours was figthing leukemia. I have been called 2 or 3 times before, but it was more as an initial step for both of those patients and they ended up not getting transplants at that time. This time its a 30 year old man, locally. and for me to give up part of that which gives me life would save his. And yet my body is growing another life. So I am unable to donate at this time. There’s so much emotionally packed up in this that I am having a hard time getting it out. So much I don’t understand – may never understand, but have to come to terms with. Fit it into my mold of that which I know, and that which I believe.

How is this for an upper of a post?

Anyways – to end on a semi-positive note…

The pictures i took of the A family, we want to have printed and preserved in some way. In order to do it in any kind of professional, archival way, its going to be an expensive route, but one I am willing to explore because I so firmly believe in the power of pictures as a means of memory preservation. I want for TJ to remember his beautiful mommy playing with him in their living room, hugging him, just enjoying life the best they could while dealing with the cards they had just been dealt. If there are any of you out there who feel somewhat at a loss of how to reach out, how to help and would like to contribute to this project, email me (terra@2sisphotos.com) and let me know. I am open to ideas and can give you more details in an email.

anyways – at the very least, please pray for Tyson and TJ. They are “taking a break” for a couple weeks before coming home to prepare for the memorial service of Leslie’s life.

May you cherish and love those around you today. Give them all an extra hug or two or twenty. Take a few minutes to just SIT, and enjoy each precious minute of life you have been given.

Embrace the simplicity of a good life, the life you are living right now.

And thanks, to all of you, for being my friends.

May you rest in peace, Leslie.

terra

It has been a good pretty unstressful week. We played with a lot of friends this week, and in spite of that i was able to get most of my MUST-DO work done. Always fun. The inimitable miss clc came over for a cooking lesson/recipe help – good friends who will help you make a meal that wows your husband including homemade cheesecake are PRICELESS. I hope everyone has at least one.

I think we even have a relatively uneventful weekend ahead of us.

All in all – life is good.

I hope your weekends are all filled with fun, relaxation, and all the good things you are hoping for.

 

I can’t get the video to embed, but going to this link should take you to the latest from Karissa. It never fails to put a smile on my face, and in fact, you will hear me laughing in the background near the end of this little video. For some reason it uploaded very small so you can’t read the captions very well – they are mostly just question marks with the occasional actual translation of Karissa-ese thrown in.

http://gallery.me.com/ctc_kidstown#100000

Enjoy!

My poor Karissa has waited SO long to have her very own birthday party! She usually just gets the family barbecue for the 4th, a cake with candles and basically no input into her party. Not that a 1, 2 or 3 year old can or should have much input – but compared to some of Kealey’s shindigs, she was feeling a little left out. So we decided to make it a GREAT birthday party for her this year. I have no idea where most of the ideas started coming from – certainly not from my own great imagination which has taken a long vacation. But anyways – here are some of the party highlights.

We started out with some face painting as the princesses and pirates arrived. Oh I should back up – and state that ben and I were running around ALL MORNING with poor kaylen trying to tie up last minute details, like getting the sand for the treasure hunt, making up clues,cleaning up the basement in case the storms didn’t let up we woke up to that morning, getting the pirate costume, etc etc etc. Who, me? Procrastinate???……………………

Anyways. So we’re already exhausted by the time the party starts. We blew up balloons and hung plastic tablecloths in the doorway to make it seem “castle-ish” – even the neighbors got involved in helping with the decorating. I guess something about a 5 month pregnant woman on the top of a ladder precariously hanging over the edge of the porch does something to spur on  chivalry. That and me trying to nail something into the mdf soffit board which was NOT going to accept a nail…I dunno. It was interesting. Anyways, it got hung up, and the look on karissa’s face when my parents brought her and Kealey home from the fishing derby was PRICELESS. She was SO excited to have her own party, and all this decorating was just for HER.

She was of course also enthralled with getting to wear her sister’s fancy Easter dress as her princess ball gown. So all the little princesses and pirates arrive, we paint faces and then its time to come inside for the princess and pirate story. i had originally intended to have this all written out, with the plot line actually matching the clues i had to make up for Pirate Ben to “drop” when he stole the treasure. I only had time for the clues. For which I had to take pictures of everything and print them and then number them so Ben didn’t get confused. I  still have NO IDEA how I got everything done that morning. Anyways, the kids all sit down for the “story”. Which i made up TOTALLY as i was talking. I am not even sure it made sense. It basically was something about Karissa getting to be crowned the Princess that day and making sure that no pirates ever stole the family treasure and some little rhyme about keeping pirates away. The point being that when we talked about seeing pirates, out Ben was supposed to jump, come steal the “treasure” Karissa was entrusted to guard, and go hide it (coming back every new activity we moved on to to give us a new clue/activity). this was a great plan in theory – until we got to the part where at least half of the kids were scared CRAPLESS by ben dressed up in pirate garb. He did sound pretty scary, and the all black menacing face complete with lots of black eyeliner (grrrr baby!) – all in all, I am sure it made for a more scary birthday figure than your typical clown. Great. So now I am responsible for warping the dreams of half the preschool group at church. Sorry!

So at the end, here is what the kids had done: facepainting, story, craft time of making their treasure boxes with foamy letters and stick on jewels to “treasure chest” boxes. They then took the treasure chest boxes outside for the pinata (and i mean the old skool whack it with a stick kind, none of this sissified pull on a ribbon and open a trap door stuff!) They stuffed their little boxes full of candy and then were directed (via a note found by Uncle Nate, who “beat up the pirate for us” so we could stop creating large therapy bills for the childrens’ parents), to come inside for cake and ice cream. After the sugar rush, they played freeze dance for about  minutes while the final “treasure” was prepared. And would you believe it, of ALL the planning I did, when I asked Karissa what her favorite part of the party was, she says “FREEZE DANCE!!!” (the five minute interval of quick-entertain-the-kids-randomly-to-fill-the-time-gap….) Awesome.

and then it was time to find the real treasure.

We had borrowed a neighbors wading pool, filled it with all the “treasure” (trinkets from Oriental Trading like necklaces, rings, bubbles, crayon boxes, bouncy balls, nail polishes, etc.), and poured sand over the whole thing. Each child got a bucket and shovel and was told to go at it. Some got the concept of actually just taking the treasure out of the sand and putting it into the bucket, others just filled their buckets with sand. It was in the garage and luckily remained pretty contained. I think for the most part the kids had a lot of fun doing this…apparently not as much fun as they had doing freeze dance, but hey, you live and learn.

After this we opened gifts and then parents started showing up to collect their kids. We had scheduled it for right at two hours, because I think four year olds are in that total in between time of “do the parents stay? do they leave?” – there is no real etiquette for it, but I wanted the moms and dads to be able to feel like two hours wasn’t TOO long to leave them, or to have to endure the craziness of a four year old’s birthday party. i do’nt know, what did you think those of you who were there? Too long? Stay or don’t stay? I never understand the rules for myself at other people’s parties. I digress.

More pictures:

All in all, I’d say she had a blast! Big sister Kealey did a GREAT job of just letting this be Karissa’s party, I was very proud of her. Although maybe having a couple of her own friends there helped with that…

Either way – it was a great day, a fun party – perfect for a princess.

Ben – you made a GREAT pirate. It was a birthday she will surely remember for the rest of her life. i couldn’t have pulled it all off without you!

Hope you all survived that horrible revisit to the pirate day.

 

puffy heart,

moi

move along move along like i know ya do.  Man, those all-american rejects are deep. And yet the words of that song have been so true for me in more than one circumstance over the past couple years. On a completely random side note, when Ben and I went to the AAR concert in Dec. 06, everyone had started to clear out and leave when they came back onstage for their second encore. You guessed it, it was this song. Ben pushed me to the very front of the upper level to stand there and hear it and let me tell you – its an amazing live performance. I’ll never forget it. I realize there are probably millions more spiritual songs that could have the same significance to me, and  yet this is the one i have latched onto for now. welcome to my world.[/end tangent].

So anyways – that is today for me, moving along. Moving past last week, moving forward to a very busy fall season ahead. Planning for MOPS starting and Kidstown kickoff, and changes to schedules and new babies. Lots to plan for. Lots of meetings to schedule. but if i think about too much of it at once it starts to get overwhelming. So I am trying to break it up into bite-size chunks, plan a little at a time, and have the plan fully in place, so that none of it is too stressful all at once. Seriously, if I could just clone myself or get four more hours into a day, life would be good. I do not know what i would be doing without the thyroid meds; at least now i have the wherewithal to get out of bed in the morning, and have the energy to last past the girls’ bedtimes. I feel like this is one of those battles I have been fighting my whole life (cramming 28 hours worth of activities into 24 hours, 7/365), but I feel, i dunno, somehow better equipped at this time to actually tackle it in the way it needs to be tackled. which makes no sense. I mean, my life could not be any crazier than it currently is, and yet i have the most sense of calm about what is to come. And it’s not even 4:20 yet!!!! (you gotta holla in the comments if you get that. i know at least one of you will!!!)

And now we come to the portion of this blog post where I stop whining and talking about meaningless stuff and get to the cute kid pictures. there are a lot of them. i have a lot of catching up to do on activities! we missed 4th of July/my birthday/kaylen’s 1st birthday, and then karissa’s big not-to-be-missed social soiree of the year birthday party. It may not all fit in one post. And if it does your eyes will be at least a hundred diopters worse for all the reading. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. But maybe I will have mercy and save some cute stuff for tomorrow. since, you know, tuesdays are just so….tuesdayish.

first up, let’s see what pics I have edited from the 4th…

oh this was fun. I woke up to this birthday morning surprise from a good friend. It was a good fattening breakfast, my favorite creamers which I drink with just a little coffee flavoring, my favorite flowers, and just in general, a great big smile all wrapped up in a big bow on my front porch. this was the first birthday I could remember in YEARS that i actually had more than just my family remember it was my birthday. I was SO BLESSED by all the e-cards, emails, calls, and cards i received from all my friends for my birthday. Truly, I felt very special the whole day!

and, as any good birthday would have, Ben and I spent a few hours blowing up BALLOONS – lots of them- for Kaylen’s party. She loved them. and thank the party gods for helium tank rentals. I had tried to go with the cupcake theme for Kaylen’s birthday, but there was surprisingly no cupcake themey stuff at Party City. Go figure. i don’t think she’ll notice though. she was, however, pretty enthralled with the actual cupcake she got to consume as her birthday cake. i thought i’d be wiping up pink frosting for all of eternity after this. Luckily, she managed to actually consume most of it.  Her reaction to getting handed a whole cupcake was PRICELESS. She instantly picked it up and devoured it, of course, face-smashing frosting first.

She was NOT, however , a huge fan of the precious little “1st Birthday Princess” crown headband I had bought special for the party. At one point she tried to pull it off her head and ended up succeeding in only snapping it back into her eye. I had to laugh. Isn’t that so typical of our lives even as adults? the more we whine about something and try to get out of it, the more it just comes back to bite us in the tookus.  Overall, she did great throughout the day, even taking a quick nap before the big fireworks show so that we could all enjoy going down to the park and watching the “show to rival downtown Chicago’s”. Hey, we’ll let the man dream. And the airshow before the fireworks was pretty cool, I’ll give the city that much credit. 

 

And then there was the pyromaniac “I like to play with fire” Atkinson display at good ol’ 1587. Someone went a little nuts in Indiana during a business trip with the BOGO deals on illegals. at least he kept all of his limbs and digits. And in a house full of soon to be 5 women, the man deserves a little “let’s blow crap up” downtime. it was a good pre-cursor to the big show for some of the little kids i think. plus its always fun to play with new settings on the old DSLR-aroo.

And now in the interest of trying to get this post to actually post to the web, I will leave you with a few pics, with many many more to come tomorrow.

Happy 4th of July from the Atkinsons!!!

 

The cupcake cake for Kaylen. Thank God for the meijer bakery.

 

Blue frosting – even worse than reddish/pink. it’s the birthday gift that keeps on givin’

Three words for you:

Portillo’s.

Chocolate.

Cake.

 

i swear the stuff could cure cancer if they would conduct such research. you absolutely cannot be unhappy while eating the stuff. Ben bought me two. Cause, you know, i totally need the extra fluff. But you just can’t get enough.

i still have some if anyone wants a slice. Come on over.

ok – much more to come tomorrow. including Ben’s escapade as the SCARY Captain Jack Sparrow. (Max, you may not want to read tomorrow…)

Have a great rest of your monday!

me.

Let’s just say that perhaps the stress of this week is getting to me, or maybe its just the normal chaos of dealing with three children and their various medical issues. Or maybe its this god-awful heat zapping what few brain cells I have left, but in any case, the issues which have prevented me from posting have been dutifully fixed by my amazing GENIUS brother once again, Josh Read of Ainsworth Studios. Although I typically can pride myself on being able to fix MOST computer/web-related issues that I run into, this one was a doozy. Ok, it was really just idiotic, but it was hard to unravel. I changed my admin password so that i could remember it, and then i promptly forgot it. There. I said it.

You may now take my geek license away.

Not to be restored until I have reached the pinnacle of technology, owning an iphone and making it work with mobileme. Someday….someday.

It’s been….a week. You know, just one of those weeks. The kind you hope to not have to repeat again for a long long time. Ben left early Monday morning. I don’t recall him leaving because it was so early in the morning that it was during my comatose sleeping time. Did I mention yet that we were up ALL NITE with karissa puking? yes. fun. From the time we woke up on Monday till….now, still, actually, it has just been non-stop bombardment of my energy, mom skills, sanity, you name it. 

Had early dr. appointments for Karissa and Kaylen monday morning. They were also supposed to go to the chiro but i knew that wasn’t happening in the short time frame we had. So we moved the chiro appts to the afternoon, and made it to the ped’s office in time. Started out the morning in cute new matching outfits. Karissa promptly puked all down the front of her shirt within about 13 seconds of me putting it on her. Nice. Got told that Karissa is “technically” at the overweight level. I asked her to please stop looking at the chart on the computer and to actually put her eyeballs on the waif-like child standing before her and explain to me exactly WHERE was she overweight at. I said,” this child cannot possibly GET more active. What other activities besides dance, gymnastics and running around outside for hours on end every day would you like me to have her do? SHE’S FOUR!!!” The dr. did concede at that point that not all charts were perfect and that perhaps Karissa is just getting ready for her upward growth spurt. Lord help us if she does, her and Kealey will be in the same size clothes! As it IS, I did not realize until monday afternoon that Karissa’s feet are actually two sizes larger than the shoes I have been buying her. No wonder the child wears flip flops all day every day! I thought she was an 8, but the new shoes we got the other day that fit nearly perfectly? Size 10. Bad mom award badge number 1.

So on to Kaylen’s appt where I was told she has croup. At least there is a reason why she was hacking up a lung and acting cranky and being a snot machine, but honestly? CROUP? in a 1 year old? in the middle of the hottest summer I can remember?!?!?! Only my children I tell you. Other than those two random factoids, it was a relatively uneventful visit. Kaylen got three shots and screamed bloody fricking murder the whole time. She had already been at her breaking point with tiredness because the appt’s happened to be during her naptime, but this was just the icing on the cake.

Anyways – we make it home, rest a little then get back out to hit the chiro’s office and shovel down some fast food before making the mad dash to VBS. Which is at Naperville Christian Church. Which, if you have never been to, is like, the singularly most impossible church to get into and out of. Its on the far side of 75th street, and you can only get into the parking lot if you are headed west on 75th. this requires a LOT of pre-planning, or being hella handy with the turning radius of your gigantic beast of a truck. Which I happen to be. On a dime, baby. Anyhoo. We’re sitting in traffic waiting to get to the church and i watch a fender bender happen right behind me. Just random. Thankfully the dude right behind us had stopped a decent amount of space away from us or he would have then ran into our back end and I think I would have just started bawling right then and there and given up on the rest of the week.

We make it to VBS, I endure the chaos of driving home with a tired kaylen who i can’t really put to bed because I will just have to wake her up in an hour anyways to go back to pick up the girls. We survive our semi-quiet time together and head back to get the girls. VBS gets out at 8:45. I don’t really have an alternative plan for an evening VBS, because if you start earlier then people aren’t home from work and can’t eat dinner, but if you make the time shorter then you’re kind of gypping the kids out of important stuff….but oh my lord. a whole week of them getting home at 9:15 and in bed between 9:30 and ten – I cannot believe they are still functioning. I barely am…

Anyways, pick them up monday nite and get talked to by karissa’s teacher about the fact that Kealey mentioned to her that Karissa had been throwing up all day. Had a nice friendly discussion with kealey about the fact that certain medical facts can be kept just among family and don’t always need to be shared with everyone in church. Truly, I thought Karissa was just reacting to the heat. She wasn’t, at that point, really acting sick, and had stopped puking that morning around breakfast time. Granted, she didn’t eat or drink anything after that, but really, I didn’t think she was SICK. Plus she WANTED To go to VBS and was acting fine that nite. So I let her go. Here’s where I earn bad mommy badge #2. That nite at about midnite, she comes crawling into bed with me. Now this child does this with quite a bit of regularity and its VERY hard for me to find that balance between immediately taking her back to her own bed, and enjoying the fact that she is still my baby and wants to sleep near me. AFter two hours of getting kicked and punched and breathed on though, I had had enough. I made her a bed on the floor and put her down in it. She asks me in the most heartbreaking voice “Why I has to seep on da fore mommy???” oh, it still stabs me to think about it…Come to find out the next morning, she obviously has a RAGING ear infection. I mean, green pus-like stuff oozing out of her ear like I have never seen or hope to see ever again. ( I know you needed that detail to make your life better today.) So I called her ENT doc, whom I love. He is the most endearing soul at a time when you are ready to rip your eyeballs out from dealing with children who have ear infection after ear infection and are just constantly sick and nothing is helping. If you ever have need of an ENT, I can heartily recommend Midwest ENT Specialists, mostly Dr. Kaszuba. So anyways, I call. I explain to the 5th person I am transferred to, finally a triage nurse, that she has been puking for two days, now her fever is spiked high, she is totally lethargic and there is green pus coming out of her ears. Have you seen that part of Tommy Boy where the airline lady can get him to Salt Lake City by 3:00 tomorrow afternoon? (except he is trying to get to Chicago right NOW) – that was the communication breakdown I was having with this kind soul. She offered me an appointment in their Wheaton office for next Thursday. Ummmmm…..green pus. Fever. Puking. How about NOW??? I mean, any first year med student could look at this ear and tell me she has an infection and give me Amox. That isn’t what she needs. So again with the momma bear routine, and we get an appointment for later that afternoon. AGAIN across town. AGAIN right before VBS. Which by now, Kealey is IN LOVE with. Bad mommy badge #3. My own daughter has never been to VBS and is now the world’s biggest fan, just soaking every minute of it up like a sponge.

So in the ENT we go where he takes one look at her ears and says, “well mom, looks like its time for some outpatient surgery!!!” Except he doesn’t say this in a doctorly somber tone. He is like excited about this. he says it in a “oh my gosh let’s take all the kids to the circus today and have a blast!!!” kind of tone. sometimes he scares me. he DID do me the sanity-saving favor of first checking Kaylen’s ears for me. Her tubes are firmly in place and no infections loom on the horizon. I think if I had gotten news that she also had an ear infection, I would have immediately dropped to the floor under the chair and started sucking my thumb and rocking. So anyways, Happy to do Surgery doctor and nurse head down to outpatient surgery unit, and I am left to follow with Karissa on one hip because she is so sick by now she can hardly stand up on her own, pushing Kaylen in her stroller, and Kealey knowing that something bad is about to happen. We get in and they’re like “yeah, she’s probably not going to like this, and its just easier if you lay on her to keep her still vs. strapping her down.” Ya think!?!?!?  So no local, no straps, no nothing, just me, smothering my daughter with my weight while she endures having her tubes removed via miniscule devices and large vacuums in her ear. Just me, pinning her to a table while she wants nothing but to cling to me and make it all stop. Me, doing what moms do, which is anything we have to do, whatever we have to do, to make our kids better, to relieve their pain, wishing we could absorb their pain as our own, even as our own hearts are breaking. By this point Karissa is frantic, Kaylen is now crying watching me hold Karissa down (oh yes, we were all in the room together!!!) and Kealey, bless her little firstborn, full of responsibility heart, is doing her best to be so strong, to be a good big sister and helper for Mommy. She is shushing Kaylen and holding her while I am trying to say calming things to everyone, mostly for my own sake, as I can feel my already tenuous grip on reality slipping away quickly.

At last he freed both tubes with minimal damage to her eardrums (one tube was splitting the ear drum, her GOOD ear, and in the bad ear it had become lodged in something on its way out and had created just a MESS of infection in her entire ear canal as far back as he could see. I love it when a doctor, in all honesty, can turn to you and say, ” I have no idea what caused this infection, where it’s source is or where it ends, and I wish there were something I could give you/her for the pain, cause she’s in a lot of it and will be for a while. So for now, we’re just going to attack it with a bunch of different antibiotics and hope one of them works.” Awesome. At least I know the plan. We go back in 6 weeks, when Kaylen is having her hearing rechecked also. I get to find out if my children are going deaf again, if we need surgery again, if I will lose even more of my mind again.

the rest of the week basically followed suit. Everyone was sick. Everyone was crying. Everyone was too hot to function. Ben is on his way home. I have no illusions that I will not fall into a pile of heaving sobs when I see him. I have no idea how I have managed to hold it all together this week. Getting a break with my mommy was about the only way I had enough strength to keep going. God bless our moms. They always know just what you need, even if it is just a good plate of IHOP pancakes and some scrapping therapy.

VBS is over.

Ear surgery is over.

This week is finally almost over.

I need to sleep.

Thank you for making it this far if you did.

May your weekend be gloriously calm.

 

T

 

she just up and decided to start this last thursday. I am SO glad Ben was actually home this week to see her first steps! I mean, she has done the quick stutter stepping thing from one solid object to another a few times before, but this was real live actual walking! now she tries to do it all the time to keep up with big sissies.

 

I will post more later – but i was so proud of myself for finally getting this uploaded that I wanted to post it right away before the magic was gone…

I know some of you are thinking I must have gotten horrible news yesterday at the ultrasound or something…and that is why I haven’t posted here yet!

Nope. Just an ultra-tramautic day. The kind i hope to not have to go through again for a very long time. hopefully never. Nobody died or anything. It was just…a lot going on.

I was so blessed to be present with my good friend and neighbor Cheryl Lynn, as she labored to bring Sophia Esther into this world. As of yet I still do’nt have all the details, for in the midst of some intense pushing, she was whisked away for an emergency C-section. Please keep her and baby Sophia in your prayers. She is a true miracle baby – the cord was around her neck once, tied in a knot in the middle, and then went and wrapped around her little leg, essentially tying her to the placenta and firmly in place in mom’s tummy. Recovery for Cheryl lynn is going to be long and hard fought, and that’s why I ask for your prayers on her behalf.

Lots of other little goings on throughout the day, mostly involving shuttling the kids back and forth and up and down and all over chicagoland, but in the end, we all made it to the same place (the hospital) for the ultrasound!

And of course the little bugger was NOT wanting to cooperate AT ALL!  The tech kept having to go poke the baby in the head or the back to get it to kick (therefore uncrossing the legs) and then quick try to scan down there.  so…drumroll please….

 

It’s a Girl!!!!

 

while I am a little teensy bit shocked at this news, we are of course ecstatic also. the girls are kind of “eh. great. another sister to share clothes and toys with…”

but excited also.

ok my font picker thing is going all wacky now.

hopefully this shows up in a readable font for all browsers…

So. at least the unknown is still….unknown for now. We can settle into a good pattern of planning. Room switches, clothing, toys, – no major changes have to take place. And now we just wait.

And yes, we are having a hard time coming up with a “K” name that we like and agree upon. Its got to have just the right balance of consonants/syllables to match good with Atkinson, and yet, must have a different vowel combo than Keee, Kaaaaahhh, Kaaaaayyyyy. That leaves Kehhh (like Kennedy), Ko (like….Korinne?), Koooo (like a name i can’t even fathom), or Kung Fu Panda. or Kiihhhh. Like Kitty. Which is, oddly enough, what i just named our kitty. So maybe it would work. I call pretty much any furry animal under the height of 12 inches kitty. Kitty might be my front runner for a name right now.

Anyhoo.

Got lots of preparations for the big shindig tomorrow. I actually have gotten a TON accomplished already today! Including renewing my license, which expires tomorrow.  I mean, what is WITH the DMV always being so danged busy? its like the mall at christmas in there i swear.

I will be back tomorrow with deep birthday thoughts by Jack Handy.

Have a happy thursday!

 

me