the dorable girl

olive has been pretty cute lately, i must admit. aside from all the disobedience that comes from this age and all the suffocating of personal space that comes from just being olive, there have been times recently that i've been struck with her specialness and i feel the need to dwell on it a bit.

she's really been taking the big sister role a little more seriously now lately. the other night she had her friend, gracie, from church over to play and when lucy started climbing up the ladder to the swing set fort right before i could get it out myself i heard her say, "gracie, will you make sure lucy doesn't fall?" it was small but a big moment for me. their slim age difference usually makes for more of a peer interaction than that of one where olive feels protective or responsible for lucy. and while i know i can't expect much more than that, it's so refreshing when it does happen.

before their morning school started, i began to pump them up for it. i explained that they would be in different classes since they were not the same age. olive said "no, lucy needs to be with me. i need to make sure she doesn't fall on top of anybody". now i'm not sure who she was more concerned about..lucy or the victim of these falls. but she was caring about somebody and i'm celebrating it!










here she is with jamie and tim's aubrey one night after we all had dinner together. i can hardly wait to see what she thinks of her new brother. she can't wait for him to see her hair in a ponytail. i'm not positive he's going to appreciate the effort...maybe ever.
she loves babies so much (finding them "so dorable" as she puts it) and is so helpful and good with them. well usually helpful. last week when we were changing lucy's diaper upstairs, i asked her if she could go run and get the baby wipes for me downstairs and she said "i really can't right now. i have a baby growing inside of me." and when i replied that i did too, she said "well i actually have two babies growing inside of me." we're not ready for the talk yet. i went and got them myself.

i knew it was on its way and boy has it arrived....potty humor. to be specific this is where it began.

lake lure. july. with cousin elijah. they are 2 months apart in age. pretty sure she started it. you have no idea (or maybe you do) how much fun it is apparently to yell "POO POO" when someone else finds it funny. eventually a booty shake was added to the chant and the giggles g0t uncontrollable.
when we got home, she seemed confused to learn that no one else was quite as amused with the performance. until lucy one day replied "PEE PEE" to olive's "POO POO" and its all been over since then. this...cracks...them...up. and while i don't exactly get it, i do love to see them crack each other up.

but that's all. just wanted to share a little about olive. there will be more to come. she's hilarious. like this morning at 7am i here boots stomping towards me. before i can even see her i hear her "i've dressed myself". there she stands in a silk snowman pajama top, panda bear pajama bottoms, lucy's winter hat barely on her large noggin, her scarf wrapped around her neck, her winter coat on, and yes...snow boots. my camera battery was dead. oh well.

8 month pregnant slacking

things i haven't done lately. let's just go ahead and make a numbered list.

1. documented our lives in any fashion (blogging, baby book updating, journaling)
2. brushed my hair (i actually can't remember the last time i did this)
3. returned most phone calls (sorry, but i do love you anyway and please keep loving me)
4. gone more than an hour without dropping something
5. consistently picked up things that i drop (i do however try to kick them all into a pile at the end of the day for robbie - love you too, babe)
6. slept through the entire night
7. made it through a whole day without crying
8. gone half a day without complaining
9. remained reasonable
10. maintained control over my children
11. rolled over in bed without grunting and panting or needing a push in the desired direction
12. shopped with the girls without bribing them with candy or gum (i rock)



13. worked a normal work week at open hearts.
(thank you ladies for picking up my slack. i promise you it won't always be this way!)





14. gone a few days without changing in utero here's name...today it is finn. and robbie and i did stack hands over it and say "100%"...our way of saying, "let's stop talking about this and make up our freaking minds" sorry mom and nat if you hate this one too, but it really does feel like that's his name. middle name is charles FOR CERTAIN after you grandpa, a most inspiring man that we hope *finn* will aspire to be like.
15. keep scissors out of my 3 year old's room during nap time. (i aim to inspire mothers everywhere) wish i had a picture of the bangs that she cut herself. they are actually really cute on her. i haven't even had to touch them up.

and i will leave you with pictures of some beautiful girls that i have once again been too slack to photograph. 'up, add it to the list up there. thank you, sonia, for loving my girls enough to capture their funny little spirits.

line drying and other changes

so i'd like to get honest here and tell you just how cool i really am. instead of blogging in my free time about all of our family happenings and scrap booking our life like i intended to be wisely doing. i have been spending that time on a new obsession. this is my cycle by the way. i always have something that i am over thinking, overdoing, over loving. this is usually something that is entirely wasteful of my time and brain space like britney spears' mental condition (thank God she seems to be doing well now - i was so worried) or for a month too long for comfort i would spend from the time the girls went to bed till i went to bed, happily and therapeutically crying while watching ryan adams on you tube and drinking red wine all the while. but really, how can you not?



maybe this is all just a little too honest.

but this new interest (a much nicer, healthier word than obsession) may prove to be good for my family. time will tell. my new thing is living a more frugal life. i'm not sure if every household feels like this, but the past year we have really begun to see that we can't afford the lifestyle that we had acquired. i admit that a big part of this was our own doing and just being plain careless and self-satisfying and bored really. we had slowly started eating at restaurants with more frequency when neither of us had a dinner planned or simply because we just felt like it. nothing wrong with that every now and again, but it was becoming often. or if i was running errands with the girls, instead of planning ahead and bringing snacks or packing a lunch i would run through the drive through. oh and our beloved grocery store, amazing savings, is not so much when you're stocking your freezer up on every single amazing (for organic) deal. and in our recent efforts to see what we are spending more money than we can afford on, these are just a couple of things that we have run across. but some things have felt a little out of our control...like gas prices and food prices rising. we all know about it, i don't need to go on and on. something had to give or we were going to see ourselves in major debt.

so we have begun the process to make a change. we have dreams for this house that we'd like to afford. a remodeled, modernized kitchen for one that i would love to be able to enjoy the conveniences of while i have little ones and things can get so chaotic so easily. do you know how often all of my sippy cups come crashing down on me from their tiny space that i cram them into?

i read a lot of blogs (oh my gosh, i just counted them on my favorites - around 50- ok that's embarrassing - but you know how one leads you to another), devoted to this exact subject. every day they will give you tips, finds, inspiration on how you can cut back somewhere or save money some place. and i think it's really working or helping at least. they are mostly just blogs of stay at home moms. these women have the art of saving money down. it's a game and they win every single day. i'm not lying when i tell you that these women have found a way to get tons of groceries for free and close to free (oop stands for out of pocket - these ladies even have their own language). and while i'm not so crafty with the deals yet, maybe someday i can be and could honestly learn to feed my family for $200 a month. and i can't quite subscribe yet to the idea of a budget or a price book or stockpiling up on 20 tubes of toothpaste while they are dirt cheap. but i can't say it hasn't gotten a little nerdy around here. i did spend an entire saturday night constructing a coupon book made out of a photo album and about 30 tabs indexing the different aisles in my grocery store. yeah, i'm kind of getting into this.

one of the many things we are doing differently is coordinating and consolidating our trips past black mountain. no more heading to asheville for just one stop. we have to at least need to go to two different places and turn the whole thing into an event for the morning.
but i really don't want this to turn into something that i focus too much on. we all know someone that never seems to stop talking about the prices of things, managing to bitterly work it into every conversation. so do stop me if this becomes me. i just want to be more intentional about where our money goes, so that we can have money for things that we can really get excited about. so what about you? have you guys had to make changes or were you already working it with your bad selves?

i will leave you with some pictures of our frugal, little lucy bea. she really gets into saving money. she practically forced us to start line drying our clothes.

a nest undone

i am 28 weeks pregnant with this baby boy and there are still so many undone things. i am feeling less of the need to physically nest as i did the first time or two ago and more of an understanding that the nesting that needs to take place is more in our heads. a mental, emotional nesting, if you will. mental nest #1... what were we thinking having 3 this close together!? did we lose our minds? we must have just been at an easier spot when making this decision.


yup, that must have been it. look at how angelic they are pretending to be.




seriously, how do you keep them all well-fed, accounted for, and safe? yesterday in the church parking lot as lucy was crawling up into the mini-van, she lost her footing majorly and dove head first into one of the weird-o exposed mechanisms on the sliding door. the sight of blood gushing from your baby's head is a very unnatural one if you haven't discovered yet.

the doctor was able to glue it closed since it had cut her perfectly horizontally. you can kind of see it on the left side of her forehead, just up from the watercolor paint on her upper lip. this happens to her accidentally, olive usually paints a body part on purpose every paint session. anyway, scary stuff for parents that have been second guessing the soundness of their own minds lately. but he is on the way and according to God's plan so it will work out. and things will get done and settled eventually.

i know now that he doesn't need his room all set up and just so like i thought the girls did. he just needs clean clothes, a blanket or two, a safe place to sleep, a source of food, diapers, and a family that wants him. third babies don't even need all of that stuff in designated places and in cute little baskets that 3 and 1 years olds will dump out and use for their baby dolls crib or something. sometimes its best just to let things find their home as you go.


olive at 3 months in her perfectly organized pink and green room. you should see her room today. less pregnant, nesting, new mom cute and more 3T sized panties on every baby doll kind of cute.





no, he'll most likely sleep in this little basket by our bed for the first couple months like the girls did. and hopefully i'll run across a crib bumper that i like before he's in his crib full-time.





look at sweet little lucy bea, 3 days old. she was so happy in this moses basket. but we kicked her out at 9 weeks so we could all get some sleep. she was such a little lu-bird back then.






yes, he should be just fine there. it's the decisions that need to be made that are stumping us. what will his name be for one? i know that will dawn on us eventually here soon enough. this doesn't bother me that he is unnamed the way that it does robbie. he explains that its part of his nesting process and a way for him to connect to him. to have a name that he can call him until he's here. so that when we pray for him, we can call him by his name. i can see that. he doesn't feel all the movements that i do, reminding me that he's here and coming and forcing me to be aware of his presence several times a day. so i guess we need to get that figured out for robbie's sake. i actually saw the name "lowlife" in our baby name book. can you imagine?

but even more importantly than that is another hot topic in our household. to vaccinate him according to the mainstream schedule or not. so many, many things mulling around in our heads. it seems that a peaceful decision is not out there for us. whatever is decided is truly going to be us being led in one direction by hopefully the hand of God. because at this point, we are frustratingly unsettled on the matter.

we vaccinated these girls. i'm slightly embarrassed to say that we really didn't give it much thought, discussion, or prayer. just did it. it was and is the beaten path and it works out just miraculously for most. there is just a handful of those that it doesn't for and so it would seem that the scientific thing to do would be to assume that we are in the majority. but there is a factor that makes our case different than most. especially since we are having a boy.

this is our nephew, micah, when he was almost 3 and just before he was diagnosed with autism. i love his face in this picture. at this age he could run miles without stopping. it was unbelievable.



here at 4 with his dad. he's a very happy little man.







he's six now. he's the one on the far right. this was just a few weeks ago at lake lure. those are his brothers joshua and elijah. and on a side note, i am so thrilled to have this picture of the three of them together actually looking at the camera. i've never accomplished this before, but i also never tried ice cream either. anyhoo, we love this guy dearly. he smiles and sings and loves to be by himself and loves to line up rocks and shells and study things intently. he's fascinating to watch and i pray as the years go by, he allows us more and more into his world so we can know him even more.

we all know that they don't know why this happens. they argue about it. but i work with adults with disabilities and happen to believe the school of people that insist they know for certain that there child was different after a vaccination. and researches are pretty unanimous that a genetic predisposition triggered by an environmental factor plays at least somewhat of a role. i feel like this time period that we are in is right on the cusp of a wealth of understanding on the subject and that maybe we need to hold off a few years to see what is learned. i'm just so not sure though. neither of us are. are you? what did you do for your children? how did you come to the decision that you came to? or what would you do if you had children? we'd love your feedback on the subject.

boy, son, man...i'm a little scared

so we found out that we're going to have a boy, son, man (someday). it's happy news to this house. i've always been a little tentative about being the mom of a son. i wasn't quite sure what that looked like for a long time. but now i have many wonderful examples of that in my life.


cajes helping his mommy, sonia - my close friend and co-director, cook. he has the most endearing little face. doesn't he?



carrie, here with her middle son andrew and husband steve, now has 3 boys! all 2-3 years apart! and she is the most gentle mom you'll ever meet. i could never imagine her losing her cool. i actually don't believe that she does. if she yelled it would still sound sweet.



tahra, who does NOT own a computer (i don't get it and she can't be convinced) and will never know she's on the www, with her son levi, now has 3 children - 2 are boys.

my big sister, natalie, with our micah. her middle son of 3 boys. yes, another one of those moms! i always look up to moms with 3 sons. they are so tough. all that testosterone under one roof. i can't even fathom it. how do you pretend to be interested in figurines that transform from one ungirly thing to another ungirly thing everyday of your life?



liz and will...loved, dear, and close to this family's hearts. whenever he comes over, he kicks the energy level up a few notches. we went camping last weekend with them and while my girls stayed on the trails. he was blazing through bush wack. am i ready for that? i'm really scared of snakes. what if he brings one home to me someday or something?


just to name a few mother/sons that i know and can glean from. but the point is...all these mothers have survived so far. and every one of them have told me how much fun boys are. at this point, there is so much emotion and drama in my house that i welcome a change.


"i just don't feel like talking about things right now." she tells me as if she's 16 and has problems.
thank God she's cute.

there still are some things that i'm not sure i'm tough enough for. like what about the way that boys don't need their moms when they are men? first of all, is that true? i know independence is a goal in parenting and part of the circle of life, and could happen with daughters too. it's just a selfish thought i've had. what will our relationship be like later? time will tell i suppose.

but i think a boy will fit in just fine with these sweet girls. i just hope he treats their baby dolls with respect. because these girls transform from gentle mothers to fierce, rabid, psycho killers over some babies.


good luck, little guy. and God bless our family, please. we're so happy that we will be complete...God willingly complete.

little mama

despite my warnings against it, lucy bea is growing up at speedy rates.
things are on the brink of change and i feel the need to document this place in time with her. because she will be 18 months in a week and things happen at that point. don't they? the tantrums, although still amusing coming from such a little thing, just ever so slowly start to become less cute. you begin to start plans to change some of their natural inclinations.

after having gone through this once before i can see that at least between the ages of 0-3.5. this short period of time, is my very favorite. this time right between baby and 2 years old.

i just love how they point at everything, trying to give meaning and identity to what they are seeing and learning.










and you can only really make out half of what they are babbling about if you're lucky, so you can only assume that they are trying to emphatically express the sweetest and most loving of ideas.

now robbie and i did not rock our babies to sleep. we followed a book called babywise that recommended against it and were happy with all the benefits of that route. and while i was happy that i didn't have to rock or nurse our girls to sleep, i would have liked to every very now and again. i would sometimes sneak into their rooms when they were still little and heavy sleepers and watch them for a few minutes.


lucy at 2 months.



the other night before robbie and i shut the house down, he insisted that lucy needed a short sleeve shirt on instead of the long one that i had put on her. so i attempted to change her with as little disruption as possible after she had been sleeping a few hours already. she was determined to keep sleeping and was a wet noodle. and pregnant bellies make for difficult interactions with cribs. i ended up having to pull her out to set her on my lap to get the job done. but i found that after i had her there laying against me asleep, i didn't want to stop holding her. and we stayed like that for 20 minutes probably.

my goodness, there really is such a thick peace to a baby sleeping against you. that really isn't a joke. it kind of took my breath away to be honest. so i took that rare, still, quiet opportunity to just stare at her face and study her features. she is unbelievably precious. and that is when i noticed her body. it is literally at that very moment of baby turning into child. and at that moment i just wanted the clocks to just stop for a little while so i can really acknowledge it all in the busyness of our life.
so little lucy, i just want to capture you as you are right now at 17 and 3/4 months, before i start to have times when i'm mad and frustrated at you, before we go through that time period where we have more bad days than good, before i start to wish you a little older, and while you are still the baby in the family. to us you are a joy, our "cakie pants" and "lu bird". at this age you are a graceful twirler, you blow the most desired kisses in the house, you are the most successful olive mood picker upper, and all the baby dolls in the house long to be your pick for the day, because you are the best little mama around to them. you are such a little sunshine to this house and we would burst open if we loved you anymore.

genius peanuts

so those of you that have been around 2 year olds know that this is when they start to say the funniest things and come up with the strangest notions that you've ever heard uttered. and it doesn't stop at 2. it probably never stops because i'm sure i said some gems even as a teenager that were gold. i mean, that really is when you're at your dumbest. can we all agree?
i'm sure that there have been a hundred things that olive has said that i have lost in my memory. i better start getting these things down so that i can remember. sonia keeps a journal of all the hilarious and precious things that cajes has said - and he keeps them coming. i think that's a great, wise idea and will now use this blog as that journal. on tuesday i had a horrible day with olive. she whined (moms, how do you you stop this?) so much about everything so much that i wanted to throw myself off of the roof. she overheard me talking to robbie about it and later asked "i was not good today?" i responded "no, not good at all. your behavior was....(pausing to find the right words)" and she guessed "genius?" oh, how can you stay mad?
our dear friend, will, is 2. he is olive's BFF. well usually. lately they have had some beef though and they may be more like 2nd BFF's lately. but will calls his privates "peanuts". no one told him to name them this. he was told the truth when he asked about it. but "peanuts" is what he heard and peanuts is what they are to him. olive spent the day with liz and will yesterday while i went to work. on an olive potty break, will tagged along to catch the action. when olive pulled down her skirt and panties will said "OH, olive, your peanuts look great!"
now this is not my child's funny to post. but i had to share this story. i have giggled about it off and on since she told me. thank you, liz, for the permission to share.
so i'd love to hear some things that you have heard out of the mouths of babes.