Our Family – Page 128 – Andelin Adventures

Half Way!

I’ve reached the halfway point of the pregnancy, 20 weeks. Of course our last three babies were born about 2 weeks early which means that if this one follows suit I’ve already past the halfway point! CRAZY! Of course the first part of the pregnancy always seems to go by faster than the last half. I had an appointment last week, at 19 weeks. My check-ups are every 4 weeks at this point and in the four weeks between my last visit and this most recent one, I have only gained two pounds. Valerie (my midwife) says she wishes that I would eat. But I DO eat. She wants me eating 6 small meals a day, which I try very hard to remember to get them all in and it makes me feel like I’m eating nonstop. But having five little ones means that I am very active, and so I just haven’t gained very much weight, but there’s still plenty of time for that.

In taking my blood pressure (which was really low) she looked at me like how could I possibly be alive? Then she asked me if I get dizzy. Uh actually I do. It’s always been something that happens to me while I’m pregnant. When I stand up too fast I will get dizzy, and the room with start spinning and my vision will become dark and then I feel my body shaking and I just have to sit down. I remember the first time that happened to me when I was pregnant with Ethan I sat down so fast to keep from falling over that when Kyle saw me he thought I did fall. I remember being conscious enough to have seen Kyle come into the hallway right as I was rounding the corner right before my eyes went dark and I was shaking so bad that I purposely sat down on the hallway floor as fast as I could. The dizzy spells must have stopped after my pregnancy though because I remember the next time I had one it was the first indication that I was pregnant again, and sure enough I was. I have talked with my midwives over the years about my dizzy spells and I have never been given an explanation for them, until my last check-up when she just saw my blood pressure and asked if I get dizzy. So now we know why I get dizzy spells, and Valerie wanted to know if there are any stairs in our house because, obviously she is concerned about me getting dizzy and falling down them. I told her that we do have a basement, but we don’t go down there much since it’s not finished. But I do go down there to do the laundry, so her fears of me falling were heightened. So I’ll just have to be super careful about carrying laundry up and down the stairs from now on. 🙂

When people ask how far along I am and I tell them that I’m halfway they just look at my tummy and say that I don’t even look pregnant. Kyle likes to say that I start out concave and need to fill in before I can pop out! So here’s a picture of my belly at 20 weeks:

Yes I know, really not much there! But at this point in the pregnancy the baby is supposed to only be about 10 inches long and 10 or 11 ounces, so baby is still really tiny and it’s ok for my belly to be tiny too. 🙂 Actually Valerie says that I have a really large pelvis and most of the uterus is down inside it so the belly that we see is what has grown up beyond the pelvis. 😉 I’m still wearing my regular clothes but I’ve filled out the waistline of my jeans so it won’t be long before I’m going to need to break out the maternity pants. I tend to always need the maternity pants first and LONG before I need the maternity shirts.

Chloe

Chloe is almost 18 months now. She has gone to nursery a couple of times. Last week, just because she wouldn’t sit still in our Sunday school class, and this week since we figured we would let her practice before she becomes an official nursery kid. Last week Kyle just took her and stayed with her. He said that she just stayed on his lap for most of the time. This week I took her (since Kyle is a big softy, and I was planning on LEAVING her there for the last part of class). When I took her in I just walked past all the other kids to get out of the way of traffic, and I set her down on the ground. Then I walked away from her to go get her some toys. I wasn’t going to have her cling to me the whole time and make this transition take forever! Anyways she did REALLY well. She came over to the toy bucket on her own and sat down and played. Other kids would try to take things from her, but she just grabbed everything that she was playing with and horded it. I stood a few feet away just watching her. She only looked up to find me a couple of times. So I stood there debating on if I should just leave her alone for the last half hour, or if I should just leave her for the last hour, and she was doing so well that I decided to just leave her for the last hour and go to Relief Society. I told the teachers that I was leaving and I asked them to PLEASE not bring her to me unless it was absolutely necessary. I really wanted Chloe to learn that mommy or daddy WILL come back to get her, and I don’t want her to learn “If I cry they take me to Mommy!” Well when my class got out I passed Tyra, Ethan, Jeremy and Dinah’s classes and went straight to go get Chloe because I didn’t want her freaking out that all the other mommy’s and daddy’s were picking up their kids but hers weren’t coming, but Kyle had already picked her up. I guess she had just fallen asleep in there and one of the teachers was just holding her, but other than that she did really well in there. Next week she will be an official nursery kid! Crazy.

Today Chloe has also started saying two new words! She’s been saying “Mommy”, “Daddy”, “candy”, “jacket” “shoes”, and “doggy” for awhile now (there may be a few others that I’m not thinking of at the moment), but today she picked up “eyes”, and “book”.

We also bumped Chloe to a toddler bed tonight! We knew it was going to happen soon, since we didn’t want to wait until after the baby comes this spring, and have to train her to STAY on her bed while dealing with a newborn. So we figured now was as good a time as any. The tricky part was figuring out where to put the crib in order to make space for the toddler bed in the girls room. So I moved the crib to the center of the girls room, to get the toddler bed in place, then there was no other alternative than to go move furniture around in the boys room and just put the crib in there. We didn’t want to take it apart since we know we are just going to need it for the new baby in less than a year! So after rearranging furniture and putting the boys dresser in their closet under their hanging shirts, the crib fits nicely in the boys room. So it would be really convenient for this baby to be a boy! (But we’ll see what happens.) And Chloe has a big girl bed which she is just thrilled about!

RAD Kids Graduation

At the school the second graders participate in a program called RAD Kids, where they have a police officer and some helpers come teach them about self defense against ‘bad guys’. You know people that go around picking up kids that don’t belong to them? I don’t know very much about the program actually, but Ethan’s teacher called me last night to invite me to the ‘graduation’. So I took my 3 little kiddos and went to the school to see what I could see. The helpers had set up a bit of a course with three points. At the first stop the kids had to block these big soft things as the helper tried to bonk them. Then at the next stop they kids had to beat up on a dummy. The last stop was the most tricky. The police officer was all dressed up in red pads from his head to his feet, and his job was to try to ‘attack’ or stop the kid from getting to their teacher. The kids then had to do whatever self defense moves they could to get away from him. The kids went through the course one at a time and there was actually only one that got past the officer without him catching them. I thought it funny that it was a little girl.

Before going through the course the kids had to get all geared up with helmets, gloves, knee pads and elbow pads. Ethan was doing just fine sitting and waiting for his turn. But as soon as it became his turn he just seemed to become limp and didn’t want to do it. Here he is getting geared up and REALLY not looking happy.

So they didn’t make him go through the course. Here is Ethan’s whole class after they all went through the course. Ethan is still not looking happy….

I must be going crazy!

Or at least that’s what my kids must want me to think. Yesterday, since we were planning on going to Temple Square, I KNEW I was going to want my camera. So while the kids were at their primary activity I started looking for it. I couldn’t find it. So I had to look at my computer and see what the last picture I copied over was. Ok it was the rice stuffing, which means the last time I used it was the other day when I posted the picture of the rice stuffing to the food blog. WHICH MEANS that the camera should still be right here on my dresser, since that is where I was sitting when I had it last. I searched, my dresser and both desks in my room over and over. Ok I admit my house is quite messy, well actually the main part of the house is looking better but my room is still a disaster! I looked behind the picture frames on my dresser and I looked down behind my dresser and under my dresser. I looked under my bed in case it had somehow fallen and got kicked under there. I was starting to wonder if I had left it on my dresser or if I had taken it away from one of the kids and put it somewhere up high. I really could not remember what I did with it. I didn’t want to blame the kids if I just hid it really well, but after looking everywhere that I would normally have stashed it I still couldn’t find it and I just had to wonder. When the kids got back from their activity, we started asking them about it. Nobody seemed to know anything about it. Then later Ethan said that he had seen Dinah with it and took it away from her and put it under the couch. So each of the couches got lifted and then the kids bedrooms were searched. Still couldn’t find it, and when we asked Ethan WHEN he saw Dinah with it, he said back in November. Uh ok that was useless. Eventually I got mad and said we weren’t going to the temple without the camera. Amazingly it turned up very shortly after that. It was tucked down between the cushions of the couch.

This morning as we were getting ready to leave for church, I went to grab my little hand held computer. I always take it to church with me so I can jot down any announcements that I haven’t received an email for, and so that if I sign up for something I can make a note of it. When I went to my dresser, it wasn’t there. So I thought that maybe I had taken it out to the kitchen and set it down out there when I fed the kids. But it wasn’t there either. I was walking all over the house looking in the usual places that I would have set it down. I saw it this morning which means it would be on TOP of the rest of the mess right?! Well I wasn’t finding it, and I was getting really frustrated. Of course this made me feel like I was again, losing my mind, since I THOUGHT it was on the dresser and now it’s nowhere! I went out to the van where the kids were all loaded up waiting. And I asked them if any of them had seen it this morning. They all looked at me like I was crazy and said that they hadn’t seen it. I looked at each of their faces, and as soon as my eyes met Dinah’s I KNEW where my little computer was! As I looked at her I knew that if I ran in the house I would find it under my bed. I had gone down the hall earlier this morning to find out why Dinah ‘disappeared’ and I found her crouching on the floor on my side of the bed. She quickly bounced up and came out of my room with me. At that point I had no idea what she was getting into, but I didn’t see any sort of a mess so I figured she was just playing hide and seek with me, but when I looked into her eyes later when asking where my computer was I instantly knew that that’s what she had been messing with!

Ok so maybe, my children just like playing tricks on me to get me to THINK I’m going crazy, but really I’m not crazy yet! 🙂

Temple Lights

Last week when we went to the temple to see the lights with cousins we didn’t get out of the car. And that made some of our children very unhappy! So we told them that we would come back and get out of the car next time. 🙂 All week we’ve been talking about going to the temple to see the lights. We decided to make a night of it by leaving early to go out to eat first. We went to Chuck a Rama since Ethan was very disappointed that it was too late to eat there last week after our temple trip. The kids were CRAZY. Our usual routine for a buffet is to get everyone seated and situated, then Kyle will take a couple of kids at a time to go get some, then it’s my turn, and then it’s Kyle’s turn. Every time Kyle left the table, ALL FOUR KIDS that were not strapped in a high chair, insisted on going with him. I had to sit there and guard the inlet to our booth to keep all the kids at the table! Dinah ended up not eating the food she told Kyle she wanted (actually I think he was kind of silly for believing that she would). I think we need to switch things up and *I* take the kids to get food. I mean I feed them every other day of the week, Kyle is never home, he has no idea what they will actually eat and won’t eat!

Tyra ended up spilling her slush (she is ALWAYS the one to spill). I looked at her and asked her why the lid was off the cup. She said “I was stirring it”. I just had to tell her that the lid was there so that if the cup fell over, the drink wouldn’t spill OUT! Jeremy only asked for a slice of ham and a roll, and he did a pretty good job of eating that. Ethan actually finished his first plate of food and Kyle took him back for a second plate. Tyra ate SOME of the food she selected, but really not enough to call it a meal. All in all the kids were also very rowdy. Kyle made the comment “I know we don’t take you guys out very often, but when we take you out, you remind us WHY we don’t take you out very often.”

Anyways an hour and a half later we were finally ready to leave the restaurant! We walked across the parking lot to the See’s store, and got chocolates and lolly pops for dessert, then we were on our way to Temple Square. There were actually a LOT more people there this week. Huge amounts of people everywhere! We drove around looking for a parking spot for at least half an hour. Dinah kept asking why we weren’t getting out to walk. We had to keep telling her that we had to put the van SOMEWHERE to wait for us! We finally just decided to suck it up and pay to park in an underground parking lot. At least that way we were able to finally get out and walk.

So pretty. It wasn’t super cold out, but it was drizzling a bit and we did get wet!

Dinah was SO happy to get to get out of the car and see the lights up close. I think she was the most upset last week when all we did was drive around the temple block twice.