Because I Love You

Dear Elijah,

I bought these at the store last week because you asked for them. I paid $3.99 and didn't even have a coupon. They are full of bad sugar and artificial coloring and flavors.

I just wanted you to know that sometimes I'm a REALLY good mama.

Love,

Me

Belated Christmas

Today I finally filled up the memory card on my camera which means I was forced to download all the pictures from Christmas at last. And so, a month after the fact I'd like to share my favorite moments from Christmas with you.

Anyone else only just now getting around to seeing their pictures?

Why I'm Not a Nurse

*Warning* If you are squeamish like me or prone to preggo-nausea, you may want to stop reading now. It's your call.

But really - maybe you should stop reading.

We had a lovely three day getaway in the mountains this past weekend. My favorite in-laws watched our children and B Daddy and I snuck up to a cabin with my parents and sister/brother in law to relax, play games and eat. This was our 8th annual trip over MLK weekend and it was perfect.

B Daddy brought his bike. He never used his bike. But he brought it. Along with two fishing rods and a paddle board. The man has never happened upon an adventure unprepared in his life.

So after the kids were in bed late Monday night, we were busily working to put away the mountain of outdoor gear that we had taken up with us. I was stowing the fishing gear and B Daddy was pulling his bike down from on top of the car. He was fiddling with the front wheel, trying to lock it back into place when I heard a loud CLANG! followed by a deep sucking intake of breath and turned in time to see B Daddy awkwardly drop his bike, grab his hand and groan as blood dripped down onto the garage floor.

B Daddy is no wimp (and clearly I'm no hero) so I gave him a minute or two before addressing the situation. Hey babe....are you ok? Do you need something? You look kinda pale. (I'm thinking he cut himself - like a paper cut - like a really bad paper cut.) Paper towels, he grimaces.  I ran into the kitchen, grabbed a wad of paper towels and prayed my nurse duties were complete for the evening as I hustled back out to the garage. He grabbed the wad I extended and it was my turn to suck in my breath as a gush of bright red blood pooled at his fingertips and soaked the towels quickly.

I am not the nurse in the family. My sister is. And for very good reason.

As I type this I'm sucking my breath in through my teeth and shaking my hand back and forth in the classic ew-ow-oh-my gosh-yuck weak stomached person kind of way. Never mind actually being on the scene. God help the person in need who has the unfortunate luck of my presence as Good Samaritan.

He came in to the sink and ran his hand under warm water until we could finally see what happened. (And by "we" I do mean "he"... I was on the floor in the corner, hugging myself tightly and rocking back and forth.) It was not exactly a paper cut. More like a disc brake slice. Across the tip of his finger. Straight through his nail. As in - he now had two very distinctly separate index finger nails. (Pause - frantic hand wringing - full body shiver.) 

I asked from my corner, so what do you think? Is it deep? Should you go to the ER? Do I need to drive you to the hospital? B Daddy dismissed me (after all - not a nurse) with a speculative, what are they going to do? I don't think you can stitch this. He's busily prodding the tip of his finger with a steak knife (oh my gosh we are SO not medical people) and determining that he still has feeling and can move his finger.

Phew. A wave of "no big deal!" relief washed over me and I bravely offered to bandage up the nail, which was accomplished by squinting my eyes and singing This Little Light of Mine to myself. Then I got the man a beer. (I may not be a medical professional, but I'm a VERY qualified wife.) Before turning in for the night B Daddy texted a picture of the nasty finger tip to my sister (always wise to get a second opinion!) and I made sure we re-bandaged the finger so he wouldn't bleed all over our nice white sheets.

Tuesday morning my sister determined (via highly graphic severed nail text message) that B Daddy should seek medical attention. And we discovered some nurses and doctors and hand specialists had slightly different opinions of the disc-brake-sliced finger than we did.

You're shocked.

I was too.

Wednesday morning (aka yesterday) B Daddy went in for SURGERY to remove his nail, clean up the sliced bone (!) and sew back up his nail bed. Is this too gross? It turns out that if you cut your bones, there's a good chance they might get infected. And that, my non-medical professional friends, is a VERY bad thing. Also, sever your nail bed and your nail will never grow past that point. Who knew? Clearly not us.

And so yesterday I had a drugged up hubs at home and two kids who were really excited to watch movies and eat cookies on the couch while climbing on top of Daddy. I was excited B Daddy finally got to see what I do all day.

And today I am once again EXTREMELY grateful for those in our community who did go to medical school. Thank you for the years you spent learning to look at grossly severed body parts. Thank you for putting better-paying jobs on hold so that you could work at urgent care clinics and take care of the lesser-medically inclined.

And most of all, thank you for not disdaining your family members when they text you graphic images at 11pm to ask for a medical opinion. There will be more to come in the future, of that I am certain.

No One Puts Baby in the Corner

Or the closet apparently.

Back in August when B Daddy and I found out we were expecting child #3 in as many years, I cried. Many of the tears were shed because it meant no more wine and impending heartburn, but then there was also the fact that we had no room for a baby. No. Room.

Then I cried because I was finally skinny again and being pregnant would mean getting fat.

But back to the room thing. We live in an adorable little three bedroom ranch house. We bought it in 2005, with the assumption (like everyone who bought a house in 2005) that we would live here for a few years, decide to start a family, bank $30K when we sold the home and move on up a la The Jeffersons.

Side Note :

When we went to get a loan to buy our "starter home," our mortgage broker practically called us everything but losers for not taking out an interest-only 5yr ARM with 0% down. She was 30 and had her own mortgage company and a really shiny car. I mainly remember walking out of her office feeling like a naive country bumpkin for asking about 30 yr fixed rate loans.

But that's what we got. And then two years into our marriage Dave came to speak at church and I went home and convinced B Daddy that what we were doing wrong with our lives was having a second mortgage (to avoid paying something called PMI...) and that we needed to pay it off pronto.

And so from 2007 to 2008 we (both making good money with no diaper or formula or OBGYN line items in the budget yet) dutifully plunked down cash each month until that mortgage was gone and we could proudly say we owned a full 20% of our home.

Then in 2009 we brought home our first bundle of joy. And I found there was more than enough room for three of us. I loved that we had no stairs to put baby gates on and that there was absolutely no reason to use a baby monitor when you could hear a whisper in the kitchen from our back bedroom. So in 2010 Sweet B graced our lives with her presence and Casa Leipprandt became fully occupied. Now the plan has always been to have more than 2 kids, but apparently my knack for anal-retentive life planning went out the window with my birth control pills in 2008. So here we are with #3 on the way and No Room.

Which is where I should bring the financial side note on our mortgage status full circle. We could afford to move. We are thankfully not upside down. We bought a small home that we could more than afford and have worked hard to pay it down. We live in an amazing neighborhood where our house would likely sell for a good bit more than we paid for it.

But along the way we fell in love. You know how much I love our house. I don't want to move. Ever. I love it here. I love the scratched up hardwoods that we naively installed thinking they were lab-proof. I love the swing in the front yard and the chicken coop in the back and the big master bedroom and the renovated kitchen. I could go on and on and on.

When I finally stopped crying and we started talking about where Baby #3 would sleep, I thought the master closet was a brilliant solution. It's big, close to my bed for midnight feedings and hey NO windows! That baby would sleep like the dead. B Daddy was totally on board.

And then suddenly he wasn't. Something about not wanting to get dressed in the hallway and having to take silent showers.

So we are back to the drawing board. Sweet B cries out in the night A LOT. I really do love her and want to continue loving her and I'm worried that if she shared a room with The Squirt and woke him up ever I wouldn't love her for a while. But babies cry A LOT as well. So it's not exactly reasonable to expect my angel Squirt to sleep through a newborn's wailings either.

All this to say we're getting estimates on turning the screened in porch into a sunroom/nursery/playroom/guest room. And it ain't gonna be cheap. But it is exciting to think about. I'll keep you posted.

Anyone have sibling room-sharing tales to regale me with?? Or brilliant ideas about where else to put the baby? I'm open to any and all opinions...we have 11 weeks to figure it out.

Mama Monday

This post is exquisitely written and sums up my feelings about the stage of life I'm in so very well. Highly recommend the full read if you're a mom, if you're married to a mom or if you're an elderly woman who occasionally tells young moms that it all goes by too quickly at the grocery store...

I think parenting young children (and old ones, I’ve heard) is a little like climbing Mount Everest. Brave, adventurous souls try it because they’ve heard there’s magic in the climb. They try because they believe that finishing, or even attempting the climb are impressive accomplishments. They try because during the climb, if they allow themselves to pause and lift their eyes and minds from the pain and drudgery, the views are breathtaking. They try because even though it hurts and it’s hard, there are moments that make it worth the hard.These moments are so intense and unique that many people who reach the top start planning, almost immediately, to climb again. Even though any climber will tell you that most of the climb is treacherous, exhausting, killer. That they literally cried most of the way up.

Read the rest of Don't Carpe Diem here - it's been shared over 180 THOUSAND times already on Facebook. That's crazy. Oh and if you're the elderly lady at the grocery store who tells me how quickly it goes by, I appreciate it - I truly do, I need the reminder every day.

On Pregnancy the Third Time Around

The mood I'm in is directly related to the stretchiness of my pants.

Tums are my new favorite dessert.

I get a LOT of stares when out and about with my littles. Not sure if they are meant to express judgment, admiration or sympathy.

Stretch marks DO come back.

I don't recall what it feels like to not be pregnant.

There is only one "belly" picture of me this time around.

I no longer sit on the floor or cushy couches if I can help it. It takes far too long to get back up.

I've become a laissez-faire kind of mama. A lot of the fight has left me. :)

I still drink coffee, eat deli meat and have the occasional glass of wine.

I still love to feel Baby Boy move.

I still make B Daddy put his hand on my belly each and every day to feel him.

I am still eager to meet this new little soul, to hold his tiny hands and smell his yummy head.

It is still a miracle.

Happy New Year!

Today it's back to life, back to reality (whoa...did anyone else just take a trip back to the early 90s with me and En Vogue there??) for the Leipprandt clan. B Daddy is off at work - yes, in spite of all of the college football madness going on - and it's me and the babes holding down the house. Our Christmas tree is already down, which usually makes me sad and unjolly, but this year I think it just makes the house feel cleaner. New year - clean slate.

All across Facebook and blogland I'm reading about peoples' New Year resolutions and feeling less than ambitious. B Daddy and I took a walk over the weekend and joked that our only goal was to survive 2012. Which in all truth is not a joke. If we ran into each other in December of 2012 and I had a baby on one hip, a husband holding my hand and two toddlers running circles around around us I would be well-pleased with the year in review.

But there are a few things that I am going to put on a To-Do in 2012 list that I thought I'd share (for the accountability and because I like lists). In no particular order they are:

1. Finish the slipcover

2. Maneuver two children into one bedroom. Not sure which two, not sure which bedroom.

3. Knock out the rest of my 30 Before 30 List

4. Have the new living room chair re-upholstered

5. Not get pregnant

Ambitious I know. You're intimidated by my boldness, my discipline, my goal-setting capabilities. Astounded that I will attempt to complete all of the above in a mere 364 days. Let's just say that makes two of us.