Random.

My head is all over the place today. Bear with me. We went to see Avengers: Endgame today. Don’t worry, no spoilers here. But, the best way I can explain it is satisfying.

I didn’t have coffee this afternoon and I am FEELING IT. My sweet momma stayed with baby girl so we could go to the movies. I always feel so guilty when I get her out of her routine, but it inevitably happens very often. She loves playing with her granny, though, and I don’t think she minded at all. She does love her routines, however. Tonight we were putting her to bed, and she kept pointing to the shelf saying, “ball, ball.” Her ball was on her bookshelf, and she did not like it. We’re so organized (not), there are places for everything. The place for her ball is in the living room, in the pack and play. I literally had to take it with me after I laid her down and promise her I was going to put it away. It made me think of another time she was particular like this. I wrote it down then, because I wanted to always remember how difficult my child was. Who am I kidding? This will probably only get worse as she gets older.

I wrote this in February: “We’ve gotten into a bedtime routine with [baby girl]: once it’s time for bed, she goes to her daddy, we walk to the bathroom, and I brush her teeth. Then she turns out the light in the bathroom and we go to her room. She picks out her jammies, then lays down to get a diaper and put on her jammies. Then, where it’s so cold in her room, she has a sleep sack that she puts on. Daddy turns on her sound and gets the book while we settle into the chair. After we read Goodnight Moon, daddy turns off her light and we walk toward the bed. She gives her daddy hugs, and then waves to him and blows a kiss as he leaves. Finally, we do our hugs and kisses, and I lay her down, leave, and shut the door
She’s pretty good about going to bed usually, and most of the time is very ready to go to sleep.
Tonight was bath night, so we did that before her usual routine. As I was going to lay her down, she started to fuss and was reaching toward the hallway. I gave her a kiss, but she was being very fidgety and reaching still. I told her to get some rest and sang her Goodnight Someone, then laid her down. She starting crying and didn’t stop after ten minutes or so. I walked into the bathroom, and it hit me that we had forgotten to brush her teeth… we had ruined her routine, and she had been trying to tell us. After a couple more minutes, we went in to get her. We got her up and took her to the bathroom to brush her teeth. She seemed satisfied like that was exactly what she wanted. We went back and did book, hugs, and kisses again as well. After a couple of minutes of fussing, she finally went to sleep.
Don’t. Mess. With. The. Routine.”

My one year old, guys. She is totally my child – she does not deal well with change. If you don’t know me, you don’t know the dramatic extent to which I detest change, but it’s pretty bad. I’m sure I’ll share with you soon about my aversion to change. I could write a novel.

Big stuff.

Yesterday baby girl walked from the kitchen all the way down the hall to her bedroom. Today she has walked as much as she’s crawled. I guess we finally have an official toddler. She also mastered the climbing wall on her swing set. Where did my tiny squish of a baby go?

I keep thinking I want another baby, but then I realize what I really want is her to be that tiny again. The thought of having a toddler and a newborn is just ridiculously scary. How do people do it? I’m genuinely asking. Like, when the baby gets up every three hours in the middle of the night, does the other child wake up too? I can’t imagine wrangling baby girl while trying to breastfeed an infant. Good gracious, it sounds scary.

Christmas in April

I’m not super great at writing on cue. I’m not going to promise to post daily, or even weekly for that matter. This past week, after starting all this craziness, every time I think about writing, I get really nervous. Add to that the fact that I’ve actually had a couple of visitors to my page, and my anxiety takes over; I have no idea what to write about.

In keeping with the “my sweet husband” theme [I’m probably going to talk about him a lot on here, I kind of think he’s great], I thought I would publish the first thing I actually typed out on my phone with the slight intention of doing something with. It was before last Christmas, and I was overwhelmed with all sorts of emotions: baby girl was going to be one soon, we were working on weaning from breastfeeding, the holiday season stresses and obligations, etc. I was laying in the bed and typed this out:

“I’ve been thinking back so much lately to last year, when we were eagerly awaiting the arrival of a baby we were actually terrified to meet. I was working SO MUCH, and we had barely moved into this house that was a torn apart wreck. One day, I worked for hours – like a ten hour day on my feet in a nasty house, getting ready for some auction. I was so exhausted driving home that I didn’t know whether I wanted to cry or just fall asleep. I pulled around the corner in our subdivision and saw that [hubby] had put up the outside Christmas lights. They were turned on and beautiful, and it instantly made everything better. Inside, he had set up the tree as well, so all we had to do was decorate it. Pregnancy hormones and exhaustion probably took over at that point. He knows exactly what I need ❤

Also thinking back on last year, I just remembered something else. After we decorated the tree we sat the little elf that used to be granny’s in the window. The living room was still a huge mess at that point, tools and paint everywhere, so we moved stuff around a lot. The next day, the elf was moved, but I wasn’t sure when it happened, and I just figured he was doing something and moved it out of the way. The next day, [hubby’s grandmother] had come over at some point, and after that I noticed that the elf had moved again. I just assumed that she had picked it up and put it down somewhere else, I still didn’t think much of it. The next morning, the elf was in a completely different room, and I got suspicious. I texted him and asked if he had been moving the elf. He acted totally surprised and denied having done any such thing. Every day after that, the elf was in a new place when I got up every morning. The fact that he took the time each morning before he left for work to move that elf, just to make me smile, is one of the best examples of how sweet and thoughtful my husband really is. I love him so very much.”

A little backstory for those who don’t know us – we moved into my granny’s old house while I was pregnant with baby girl and have been fixing it up pretty much ever since. It looks a lot different than it used to (thank goodness, because I used to not be able to walk in without crying), but every now and then I still get emotional about an item that used to be hers or a familiar smell. The elf I’m talking about always used to sit in a coffee can that someone had crocheted a stocking for on my granny’s hearth at Christmastime. It was really old when I was a kid, so I have no idea how old it is, but I like to call it the original elf on the shelf. It’s really old.

Anyway, basically, my husband is great and I’m really sentimental. Also, my love of Christmas is present all year and I don’t apologize for it. It’s only almost May and I’m SO ready for cooler weather again. Yeah… how do you end these things again? I’m so awkward.

Love.

Guys, silly post here, but can I talk about how much I love my husband for a second? He made cookie dough a few days ago (yes, he made it), and I thought we needed to use the rest of it before it got too old. So, while he went out to get our usual Friday night takeout, I baked the rest of the dough. I baked the batch on the bigger sheet the normal amount of time, and made the smaller batch a little bit less done, because I really like them gooey in the middle. We have this long-running joke that he likes things burnt and I like them raw. After dinner, I went to the bathroom and he went in to get us each a cookie. When I come out of the bathroom, he’s putting the cookies away and proudly says, “I even labeled the bags!” I look and this is what I see.

This is real life, right here, y’all .

This seems like such a silly thing, but guys, I don’t know about anybody else, but it’s the silly little things in life that keep me sane. It’s also these kinds of things that bring me back to life after a week of working, worrying, changing diapers, planning, laundry, and changing more diapers. It’s so easy to get lost in your own head with all the “stuff” we think we have to do. It’s easy to be so preoccupied that you inadvertently ignore those around you, or at least take their presence for granted. I try SO hard not to do that, especially since having baby girl. Her demeanor and personality seem to change day to day, sometimes minute to minute, and if I get distracted, I might miss something. Silly little things like my husband did tonight are exactly what I need, like a breath of fresh air, to remember to slow down and laugh.

Hello.

So… I did a thing. I did a thing that I’ve been feeling like I was being called to do for a while. I’ve had all this doubt: why would anybody even want to read anything I write? What will I write about? What if I get nasty comments? It all just gives me major anxiety. But I keep hearing God say, “words.” And I know exactly what that means. I know what it means because I have been affected by words, encouraged by words, and made to feel like I’m not alone by words. Reading other people’s words helped me through some of my toughest times.

So here I am, being super open and out there, two things that make me very uncomfortable. I hope my words reach exactly who they need to reach at exactly the right time. I pray that God uses this for His will, and He uses me as His vessel.

I don’t have any definite plans for this blog. [Can I take a moment to talk about how much I HATE the word “blog”? It takes me back to 7th grade when everybody thought it was cool to write their diary online so everybody could see it. All it did was start a lot of drama. People were usually vague, and then others would be like, “was that about me?”, and they would tell them no, but they wouldn’t believe them… maybe that just happened on TV. I don’t know. Anyway, I hate the word “blog.”] Back to my point… I’m just going to write what comes to me. I might write some new stuff, I might go back and type out some of my old bible devotion writings. I will probably do a little of both. Bear with me, I’m letting God lead, and sometimes that looks a little messy.