I’m not the praying kind until there’s a tragedy, so I feel like a hypocrite. But we need prayers right now. Turns out, everyone was worried about the wrong person in the accident and my cousin is in very bad shape. We need a good 72 hours. Please pray for Sam.
I think his friend is stabilized, but we don’t really know. So K needs prayers too.
I can’t believe this.
My extended family had a rough day today, and because of my closeness in proximity to my cousin who had her phone turned off at work, I had to receive a frantic, upsetting phone call and then deliver the news to her. What happened isn’t my story to tell, but the impact of the situation is still unknown and I’m very worried about my youngest cousin (the baby between both sides of my family). Being a mother myself, I’ve learned that even if your kid walks away from a bad situation mostly physically unscathed, that the impact of his actions to those around him can be just as hard, or even harder, to handle than most physical harm that could come to him.
Oh the things we learn and lose sleep over once we become parents.
So after a very mentally exhausting day that ended with no peace of mind, I just wanted to go out with my family for dinner. Dinner was great, until it wasn’t, but watching the boys befriend ducks and geese and bunnies at our little town center ended the day as well as it could be ended. You can always count on nature for that! 😁
I sometimes post stupid shit on FB because what’s stupid to me might be awesome to someone else.
One time (random FB sale #1), I sold a spinning shower brush for $5 within 30 seconds of posting it, and people lined up for it. That remains, to this day, my fastest ever sale.
Another time (random FB sale #2), I sold a hideous Santa doll that Hottie had found in a random tub… For $5. It was complete with an “authentic reindeer skin” robe. How creepy is that? He sold within 2 hours.
Tonight, I posted this little random treasure that Hottie, once again, found in a random tub that he has no idea where it came from. I sold it for $5 within 26 minutes, and currently, 5 people are in line for it.
You just never know… And because of that, I say…. “Post it!”
(While writing this, a 6th person requested this gem!)
These boys of ours are something else. One minute, they’re best friends and the next, they’re pounding on each other. And then, once time-outs are started, they won’t let the other one sit alone, because they don’t want the other to be lonely. This is the daily cycle in our house.
Love-dislike-love.
That’s better than dislike-love-dislike, to be sure. But it’s still exhausting!
We’ve had way more happy moments together than angry moments lately, and no matter what the mood, Matthew wants to go nowhere without his brother. “Bryce, do you want to come to school with me?” “Brycie, want a bite of my cookie?” “Bryson, want to lay with me?” It’s ridiculously cute.
And the love and adoration goes both ways. Bryson is lost anywhere without his brother. Parks and play areas are a pass without Matthew and Bryson insists on getting Matthew up to play with him once he’s up in the mornings or after naps. I love watching him walk around the house calling out Matthews name.
They’re best friends.
My SIL told me today that we’ve done a great job making them best friends, but we didn’t do anything special.
We got lucky. That is all!
Matthew finished up 3 year old preschool this past week. This school year finale was much easier on me than last year, when I cried and cried because I couldn’t imagine him having different teachers the next year. Getting new teachers is a fact of life and I’ve accepted it… And also worked hard to get him into the Pre-K class with his favorite teacher from this year as the assistant. 😁
Yes… I’m that mom. I make no apologies for it. I want my kid to be comfortable with the people who know and understand him. He has a lot of energy, and we’ve worked hard on that this year, learning to not push and hit when frustration sets in. Mrs. M helped us with that and also “gets” boys, so he’ll have her again next year. Yay!
We’re not sure if we’ll hold Matthew back until he’s 6 to start kindergarten our not, so I’m looking at this as Pre-K round one coming up. We’ll see… A lot can happen in one year!
My goodness, it’s been FOREVER since I’ve checked in here on my fitness. I was doing another 10 weeks of fitness challenge with myself, but quit after writing this post because, well… it was very eye-opening and I thought it was time for a break on weekly logging of stats. I didn’t even announce my departure from Fitness Staturdays – I just departed.
And it’s felt good.
But it is time to ramp things up again because my half marathon is next weekend and honestly, I’m ready for a change of pace. Running on a schedule is no fun at all and this time around (I’ve run 3-4 20K’s or half marathons in the past – I can’t remember), I told myself that I will not be doing this again. I had a pretty serious foot injury that should have side-lined me for at least 6 weeks, but a solid week of no running got me ready to run again (my doctor agreed it was OK). The injury (a ruptured plantar fascia in my left arch, meaning that it is forever severed and will never heal back together) should have been way more painful than it was, but my family’s insane pain threshold has been passed onto me and I healed up as quickly as I healed from my C-sections – so I’m out running again. BUT, the same thing could happen to my right foot, and that arch is burning a bit here and there, so I’m pretty nervous about the race. I’m doing a trial long run this weekend (10-11 miles) to see if I can do it without upsetting my arches, and I’m staying close to home. The longest I’ve run so far is 9 miles (which is when I ruptured it) so I know I can squeak out 13.1, but I’m not sure I want to. I’m not sure that I want to risk a similar, or worse, injury. It is more important to keep running for the rest of my life than to cross a particular finish line and have an injury that could side-line me for weeks to forever.
So I’m not sure.
Anyway, back to the point of this post – I’ve been running 20-30 miles a week both indoors and outdoors and it feels great, but I need a change. I need to get back out to the garage to do some kickboxing, I need to do INSA.NI.TY again, and I need to get back to ab and strength work. I’ve gotten a bit soft. Before you go on and say, “no you haven’t – etc. etc.” check out my stats from the last time I checked in:
And compare them to now:
This isn’t horrible by any stretch, but see what I mean? A little soft. It turns out that Bryson was a pretty serious little cardio machine and I didn’t even realize it. I plugged 200 calories a day into MFP for nursing, and I’m thinking it was much higher. I believe that 5 of the added 6.6 pounds is from weaning – that kid was keeping me trimmed down. Not counting his calorie usage correctly means that I shorted myself probably 100-150 calories a day, which explains why I dropped more than 1.5 pounds a week back then and was starting to look a little gaunt in the face (I can admit it).
So – once this race is or isn’t done, 😉 I’m going to take a week to figure out what I want to be doing. I REALLY love running, especially outside, but I need to get my strength up and my abs toned again. Man alive, I loved my abs back in January. Unfortunately, those aren’t easy to maintain (well, they actually are if I just do ab work while Hottie reads books to Matthew each night). I have a feeling that on the days I don’t run (I skip to rest my shins – if they didn’t hurt, I’d run every day), I think I’ll do some kickboxing since Matthew is OUT OF MY ROOM FOR NAPS and the bag in the garage won’t wake him now.
I’m not at all bothered by my current stats – I’ve never maintained 140-145 pounds in my life and I’ve maintained it since before Thanksgiving, so that’s awesome – but I need to mix things up a bit. And I need to stop eating sweets. Now that my period is back, I have a serious sweet tooth. Who knew?
I’ll check in with starting stats in a couple of weeks!
I created a page on my blog (like I did last year) to track tasks for planning the big birthday party. You can find it in my main menu, and here, if you’re interested!
I can hardly believe it, but I have TWO birthdays to plan in the next month! We’re making it easy this year – the boys are sharing a party. They’re best friends and honestly, all they care about is that they have each other at their parties, so we’re combining them.
And it’s more for us than for them.
Not really.
Well… really!
We have not had one of our big parties since before the kids came into our lives. We used to have epic parties – the types of parties that people would ask us when the next one would be so they could be sure to be in town. And we LOVED throwing huge parties! The bigger, the better… and we like to go BIG. Well, we’re not going HUGE, but it’s going to be big and it’s going to be FUN, goddammit!
Real food.
Real drinks.
Great cake (I always have a great cake because cake is my favorite thing).
Fun friends.
Babysitters for the kids.
I’m whipping this up and I feel like I’m pulling the kid-friendly aspects of the party (theme, invitations, banners, favors) out of my you-know-what (really, I’m just pulling them out of Et.sy), but I want to focus on the real details. I want to focus on the food we’ll make, the drinks we’ll serve, and the cake I’ll construct.
Here I come, birthday season 2015!
You’d think that after selling every last piece of baby gear, that I’d no longer have any emotional attachments to the past.
But I do.
I was inventorying the nursery decor that will be sold when we convert the nursery to Bryson’s big kid room, and I’m having a hard time imagining handing those things over to someone. The perfect mobile, the original artwork, the deer prints, the garland I made from leftover first birthday decor, the bookends shaped like animals. My heart is in each of those items.
I’m keeping them, most of them, and putting them up in the kids’ reading nook. My heart can’t take letting them go right now. I know my emotional limits.
For now, they stay.
As anyone who knows me knows, I’ve been crazy busy selling things on FB. It started as my way to put the family building days behind us. I had been re-thinking my thoughts on having a third baby for obvious reasons (life is easy with two, sleepless nights, frustrating days, etc.), but when Dr. H advised against it due to my uterine situation, I went into purge mode. I saw no reason to keep those things around because they’re just taking up space for no good reason. I’d heard about selling stuff on FB, but I had no idea how it would go.
It’s gone great. You should see my house!
In February, my aunt asked me if we knew of any short-term leases in our city because her daughter was working hard at acquiring an awesome internship for the summer (side-note, my cousin is insanely talented in design and art, and is highly regarded so we knew she’d get the gig). Of course I offered up our basement because duh – I’m not letting them spend a dime on rent if they don’t need or want to. It was February, so we figured we had “lots of time” to get ready. I was already in purge mode so we figured I’d just keep on going and eventually, the 5th bedroom would be cleaned out and ready for her by summer.
It’s summer. She’s moving in next Tuesday!
My cousin is staying with us for 8 weeks, and the day she leaves, my Australian comes to spend 10 days with us – so 9.5 solid weeks of having a house guest begins next Tuesday. Needless to say, we knew we would have space for them, but we also knew it would take a lot of work to get things ready. This work fell solely on me because the crap in that room was all mine. We had a huge “chicken before the egg” situation because we needed to free up space to move my crap into, but how were we going to free up space when we weren’t sure what all had to go and where it had to go?
The baby clothes tubs were already out in the living room because I was prepping them for sale, but so many other things had to go too. Because my FB sales were going great with baby clothes and gear, I decided to tackle the pantry first (odd, I know, but it was a serious problem and I needed to know what from there, had to go downstairs or in the garage before I could figure out what from the basement would have to be sold/tossed out or kept). The pantry was easy – the big things sold in minutes (bread maker, fryer, cake pans) and it’s been in tip-top shape for months now, with no new accumulation of junk in there. That’s a HUGE win!
Like I said, baby gear was flying out of our house so the garage shelves were being cleaned out almost daily. We had my grandma’s old silver sitting out there so I figured, let’s sell that too. (All of the family had already gone through it and I was tasked with taking care of the rest.) The silver didn’t sell quickly, but the biggest piece sold and the rest takes up a box, so we’re good with that! We delivered the last of the things my family members wanted, so that freed up about 2 Rub.berm.ade 14 gallon tubs. The rest of the garage is Hottie’s job – I’ve done what I can do!
I started tackling the 5th bedroom and sold all most of my craft stuff within hours of posting them, and that freed up 2 tubs of stuff. Slowly, the room was cleared out and I finally went through the filing cabinet to decide what to keep, and what to shred, last week. A huge filing cabinet’s inhabitants were reduced to just one tub of things to keep. With that done, Hottie said, “sell that cabinet.” It sold within 5 minutes for $20. Oh, the space!
We have a sofa sleeper that we have in our basement that guests sleep on, but we just couldn’t expect these ladies to sleep in a living room for 9+ weeks, so our goal was to get that 5th room cleaned out and move the sofa sleeper into there. As I was doing all of my work, Hottie was remodeling our bathroom in the basement so that the girls had a nice place to shower, clean up, etc. BOTH ROOMS ARE DONE and we moved the sofa sleeper in yesterday! It is never coming out of there! (That’s my treadmill folded up – that’s going to be a pain in my ass, but it’s only 10 weeks!)
The cherry on this sundae, though, is the kids’ new play space in the basement! We have had dreams of them having their own space if we could just get rid of our stuff. Well, we got rid of a lot of crap and now they have their space where the sofa used to be! It’s awesome!
So with all of my hard work (even Hottie credits me for this all being done), the kids have a new play space, their book nook is ready (yay!!!!!! Another dream of ours!), the store room is only inhabited with things we REALLY want to keep, the garage has space for things that actually belong in a garage, we have a proper guest room which is also an awesome den for us when we don’t have guests (and I still have my treadmill in there – a requirement!), AND we’ve made almost $5,000 ($4,844 to be exact, but we’ll cross that $5,000 line easily with selling 18-24 month clothes, the breast pump, and some more furniture pieces).
I am so happy, I can hardly contain myself!
So what all did we get rid of? Here is the LONG list (“tub” means a Rub.berma.de 14 gallon roug.hnec.k tote):
So 44 tubs and then all of these things:
Hand breast pump
Boobytubes (2)
Medela shields, connectors, valves, and membranes
Lansinoh storage bags (125)
Pregnancy Wedge
JJB Messenger diaper bag
Monitor
Bottle sterilizer
Baby picture frames
Hamper
Baby Tub
Sippy cups
Pregnancy pillow
Nursing Cover
Bumpers
Carseat with 2 bases
Diaper Pail
Pail liners (2)
Planetwise wet bag
Kushies wet bags (6)
Bottle warmer
JuJuBe Be Prepared diaper bag
Petunia diaper bag
Pearhead frame
Hallmark recordable handprint heart
10 Sleep sacks
Aden and Anais swaddle blankets (15)
Moby Wrap
Bright Starts Portable Swing
Brica mirror
Itzbeen Timer
Bumbo
Aden and Anais Burpies
Vtech sing and discovery story piano
Red envelope frame set
JuJuBe Be All diaper bag
Graco sweet peace swing
Bouncy chair
Jumperoo
Boppy with liner
Boppy with liner 2
Bright Starts Running Table
Ergo sport with newborn insert
Pack and play
Pooh twin bedding set
Pooh bath towel set
Pooh switch cover
Pooh 4 picture frame
Pooh cupboard frame
Pooh wooden doll
Pooh piglet frame
Pooh swing frame
Pooh bookends
Mens 4 golf shirts
File Cabinet and Stuff
Animal ring holders
Wedding book pack
Spinning shower brush
Wine racks
Willow Tree Heart and Soul
Mens running shirt
Mens running tights
Mens Flight Running shirt – Red
Mens Flight Running shirt – Teal
Mens Flight Running shirt – Black
Mens Flight Running shirt – Gray
Mens Flight Running shirt – Orange
Jim Shore Waterball
Second fondue set
Cupcake pan
Chevron skirt – 10
Black sweater skirt – L
Womens camo pants – L
Mens fitness stuff
Mens running shirt
Non-china china
Fitbit in box
Fitbit (used)
Grid shelves
Fondue set
Bread maker
Fryer
Chafing Dish
Wine appetizer wood plates
Pasta machine
Pie plates
Flash Blast Super Soaker
Weird Santa
Cake pans
Bead box 1 (premium beads with wire spool and headpins)
Bead box 2 (with glass animal and fish beads)
Bead box 3 (bigger beads)
Bead box 4 (tons of beads!)
Sterling stuff (3 chains, seed beads, jump rings, two clasps)
Pewter charms (charge at retail of $1.15 each then 60% of that)
Vintage R Rogers Silver Co 1883 Georgetown silverplate ice bucket with handles
Caterpillar frame
Glass firefly ornaments
New Baby Starter Kit
LS earrings
Silver blue/gray earrings
Gold Tone Jewelry
Queen bedding set
Silver onyx ring
Silver frog earrings
Silver ladies bracelet
Blue notecards and envelopes
Various small stamps
GIVEN AWAY FOR FREE:
Nickel bathroom set
1X nightgown
Wine box
Tree Topper
Bifold diapers
Similac
Mens pants
Juicer
Wine box and trivet
Party decorations
Ankle weights
Three hole punch
Car shades
Pom toppers
Eyelett setters
Scrapbook
Snowman photo album
Martini set
Striped album
Red album
Green jungle album
red cloth album
Half pans
Animal cards
Mens Running shorts
Cat food
Similac bottles
Cake deck
Baby Monitor
gold tone necklace
silver tone earrings
My house is clean!
All the Sun For You 