I couldn’t just leave with this tiny blurb, though, so I thought I’d show you the new “me,” too. I’m chugging along at seventeen weeks pregnant with my third munchkin (sixteen in the picture) and I’m happy as can be.

I’ve been looking for things for all these kids to do this summer so that I can corral most of my energy for taking care of my very expanded garden.

A few weeks ago, Aaron found an old sand box on someone’s curb. We’ve gotten quite a bit of furniture and equipment over the years from curb donations. I figure with a bit of disinfecting and some sand, we’ll have a great play thing for the kids this summer.

Picture taken from and linked to Step2.com website.

This was only the first step, though. A friend of mine had mentioned on Facebook that she had purchased a water table for her child. I’d been wanting one for my kids for years, but since I typically make everything (or rather, design it and make Aaron build it), the idea had sat on the back shelf since so many other things needed done. Finally, her recommendation sparked the thought that I just needed to buy one. I typically don’t like buying plastic toys for the kids, but I made an exception.

Picture taken from and linked to Step2.com website.

While this is the essentially same table as the one I bought, ours is a different color and ours came with a shark-shaped cup instead of a measuring cup.

Over the past two days, despite it being rainy and cold, the kids have spent multiple hours playing with the water table and the watering cans I purchased. Between the sand box, the water table, bubbles, bikes/ride-on toys, kids garden, and homemade playdough, I’m hoping to keep these kids entertained for most of the summer.

Knowing how kids can be really into something for a few weeks and then be tired of it, I’m already considering putting some water dye into each of the two water pools (after the appeal has worn off) so that the kids can “mix” the color. At some point, I’ll probably drop some ice cubes into the water, too, so they can watch them melt. I’m also going to start holding back some jars, buckets, and corks from the recycling bin and trash for use with the water table and sand box.

I found this link to an article about water-based learning units which had some additional ideas for fun.

Do you have any ideas for other fun and imaginative play for the passel of kids I’ve got hanging ’round?

Much TMI

In late January I quickly figured out something was up when my body stopped doing it’s usual thing. We’d been trying to get pregnant for multiple months with little to no success, but something just didn’t feel quite right. The last week of January I took a home pregnancy test and it was negative. I was very disappointed, but figured I would wait it out. When by February 1st I still hadn’t received my visitor, I took myself in to the doctor. I requested a blood test and told them I was nervous something was wrong.

On February 2nd the results came in that I was pregnant. It was estimated that I should have been a little over six weeks pregnant, but my test results were showing something closer to three or four. With my first two pregnancies I always had so much hCG that there was worries I might have twins. I started worrying that I did not have a viable pregnancy.

February 3rd was my birthday and I rushed one of my kids to the hospital where he ended up staying for seven days. I left the hospital twice for a cumulative total of less than five hours.

On February 14th I had my first OB appointment to gather my history. I informed them that I wanted an ultrasound to verify that I had a viable pregnancy. The nurse told me that I had no reasons to have any concern and that she did not think it was necessary, but if I absolutely had to, I could pay for it myself since insurance wouldn’t. I went to the front desk and outlined my concerns (minimal pregnancy symptoms, low hCG, pain and cramping, and bleeding). They scheduled an ultrasound for the next day.

We returned the next day. We were very excited, but also very nervous. First, the tech did a on-the-stomach ultrasound. No embryo was found. I should have been eight weeks. She told us that the embryo might just be too small so she did a transvaginal ultrasound next. An embryo was found, but it was just barely five weeks in size. No heart beat was visible (the embryo was too small).

This was heart breaking and soul crushing. The doctor said that I may have just ovulated three weeks later than I should have, getting pregnant on the day I was actually supposed to start my period, or that the I may have had a missed miscarriage three weeks prior. There was no way to tell unless we came back in a week for another ultrasound. If there was growth, then we would change my projected due date. If there was no growth, we’d have some choices to make.

Eight days of sobbing myself to sleep, nightmares, and minimal pregnancy symptoms. Aaron bought me a stuffed lamb to cuddle at night as soon as heard I was pregnant. Those eight days I spent with the lamb curled in my arms for every second that I could.

We went in for our next ultrasound. Aaron clasped my hand and I tried to remember to breathe. The second that we saw the tiny heartbeat flickering, I started silently crying tears of relief. But this had introduced a whole other element of worry and concern into my pregnancy that I had not experienced with my other two. Would Baby G make it out of the first trimester?

Soon after this I started to experience some intense pregnancy symptoms such as unending nausea and retching – not vomiting, just retching. It was hard to move about and I battled dizziness as well. I didn’t read and I didn’t write. I rested on the couch like a lump and watched season after season of BBC television shows.

At eight weeks, I was already starting to poke out and show.

More time went on and I was still feeling really ill – even worse than before.

At ten and a half weeks, I looked monstrously large. Similar to what I looked like at six months pregnant with my other children. (See above.)

At eleven:

At twelve weeks, I started to shrink somewhat in size. As the nausea and bloating left, I was able to eat wiser choices and get up and move about.

Last Friday, we went in for the first official check up and to hopefully hear a heart beat. Baby G should be about thirteen weeks along. We were lucky enough to hear a heartbeat: 144 bpm.

With all that was going on, I did not feel comfortable writing about what was proving to be a very emotional time for me. However, it was all I thought about and I couldn’t concentrate to write on anything else.

Now, though, I can share. Baby G made it out of the first trimester. We have a long road ahead of us and something bad could still happen, but I’m finally ready to share with everyone else.

I’m pregnant.

I’m due October 12th.

I can’t wait to tell you more.

I’d hoped that I’d get a lot more posts up this past week and this week, but I have to be realistic. While it is important to me to talk with you all and feel connected, I’ve got to prioritize my family first and this little kid needs me. I hope to write this week about things that are going on, but I make absolutely no promises.

It’s actually been kind of relaxing. Reading books and watching movies together, playing with toys together, and I’ve poured over seed catalogs. It’s time to get my order in. So far, I’ve got 134 varieties selected and I’m only to letter “R”. Does that actually surprise anyone? Any suggestions on how I can winnow down the list?

A Facebook remix:

As kids we don’t understand that when we are heartbroken, our parents are twice as heartbroken. I had the chance to experience that this weekend when my son entered into the local pinewood derby. He’d spent hours dreaming and planning and designing – thinking about his ideal car. He and Aaron worked on it, although Aaron mainly let Nate run the show, and Nate was really excited. His face when his car didn’t even make it across the finish line in all four heats?

He sat there like a stone, silently allowing tears to stream down his face. My son is not normally a quiet crier. He will let you know when you’ve done something wrong. He’s sensitive to sounds, textures, and too much visual stimulus. He’s got buttloads of anxiety to the point that after meeting a doctor three minutes earlier, she was already asking if I wanted to medicate him. It was excruciating to sit there and watch as the tears just slid down and he didn’t move and didn’t make a sound.

By the end, we’d convinced him that he had four more shots to make a better car. He has four more pinewood derbys.

This was a very good learning experience for him. He’s not normally able to control emotions or frustration. This was definitely frustrating for him – watching weeks of work culminate in a car that couldn’t even make it to the end. He had been so anxious prior to the event, asking what he was supposed to do if he lost, and saying that he’d better not lose because he would not be happy. That’s code for he would be uncontrollably upset.

He wasn’t. He held in the noise and let out some tears. But he was dejected. He was devastated.

We could have designed the car for him so that it had a better chance at winning, but we let him design it. Learning to handle disappointment is such an important part of childhood…

…But man, it hurts us both. My heart is sad, even as I laugh, knowing that he won’t remember in a few months how devastated he was.

This is on its way.

I received an e-mail yesterday and it set me to musing.

I firmly believe that humans are social creatures. Simultaneously, I reserve the right to decide that I don’t particularly feel like being social at any given moment.

I receive happiness when I’m helping other people, serving my community, and having a positive impact. It’s not a selfless act; in fact, it is all about self. While I’m nurturing others, I’m being nurtured. It’s symbiotic. It warms my heart and my attitude.

Growing up in Des Moines, I hardly knew my neighbors. I was rather anti-social – my mom had to encourage me to leave the house to visit friends. Part of this was because I had severe anxiety about going into any public situation. I discovered computers in 1995 or 1996 and then I was enveloped by the online world. I can remember celebrating my twelth birthday in a chat room for a group I’d created – A Piers Anthony fan club. It didn’t get any better from there and I continued to live my life mainly through a computer.

We moved to Mount Vernon, but I again hardly ventured outside. I wasn’t a huge fan of talking about myself (which people who know me will laugh, because I never shut up – this is from anxiety). The pinnacle of my depression occurred in late 2009. My husband said a few things to me – in comfort and as a wake up call – that really impacted how I viewed myself and my life. I started to venture forth a little more, putting myself out there.

I’m often surprised by my community and how it nurtures me. It’s a small town, but it’s such a connected one. There are fun festivals, cute and useful shops, great restaurants, a nice grocery store, and a small liberal arts college. Even better, there are kind and nurturing people. It took me awhile to want to poke my head out to find these people, but I have started to get to know them.

Despite knowing that there are great organizations and people all around me, I am still sometimes surprised by all the opportunities to connect and nurture others. I’ve met wonderful people through my work at the Sun, through the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Community Development Group, Mount Vernon Blue Zones Project, Twin City Bloomers, St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, and just through everyday wandering and saying hello.

I’ve received the warmest welcomes – one from a woman whose name I don’t even know up at the Methodist church as I slid into the pew years ago with despair. I never went back, but I won’t forget the way she greeted me and asked me to sit with her with a smile and a warm hug. Another was from a lady sitting next to me at the beauty parlor as she shook my hand and asked about who I was.

I appreciate it all.

Image used with permission from Lori and Mike Cranston.

If you’re local and you do use their facilities and warm up with their cocoa, feel free to stop by my place and say hi. I’d love to meet you and make another social connection. After all, Blue Zones research has shown that one of the six ways to boost your happiness is to have a social life. I’m lucky that there are so many opportunities around me to boost that – and I’m lucky that I’ve finally crawled out of my shell to take part.

* As you can see in the photo above, the actual street gets closed down. There is still some traffic (for some reason, in this photo there is a truck on the street), but it is typically only the people who live there. There are cross-bars every other cross street to prevent through traffic. The kids sled and sled and sled and I get to watch it all from my front porch or from my windows.

Today was a busy day for me. I accomplished quite a few things, but sadly writing something to EmSun was not one of those things. I feel encouraged, enthused, and hopeful about the work our community is doing to increase connections, resiliency, happiness, and health. I’m so proud to belong to this town of such amazing and creative people in such an amazing area. It’s not just Mount Vernon, either. It’s also Lisbon and the surrounding communities.

I met with students at Cornell College who are forging ahead to create a school garden with ties to the community and we talked for an hour and a half about their impact on the community and their goals. I have a feeling they’ll go quite far. I spoke with the president (or co-president, maybe) of our local gardening club about the programming for this year. I took photos of Heritage Hall and their over-a-century-old grafitti. I spoke with the library director there about her other passion – community theater.

Then I was lucky enough to meet up with some of the others who are working on the Blue Zones Project. It was nice, as always, to see how invested the citizens of our community are.

The photo above really has nothing to do with this post – I took it with the others of the bald eagles out by Indian Creek Nature Center. But, every time I look at that photo I feel at peace. And tonight, when I’m heading to bed with Hurt Machine in my hands (nothing like a murder mystery who-done-it to put you into a peaceful sleep), I’m there. Peaceful. Happy. Content. What a day.

Homeschooling can be very hard. Sometimes, I feel very much like a deer in the headlights. Often, though, it seems like things just fly along. Today we tackled some math. We turned our abacus into a bead stair (see My Two Happy Homeschoolers for pictures of a bead stair) and I asked Nate how many beads he thought were on the left side of the abacus. He immediately guessed seventy. I asked him if there could be one hundred twenty beads on the left side. He shrugged his shoulders. I told him there couldn’t be and I asked him to explain why.

“Well, Mom. There are only one hundred beads.”

Uh-huh. So then we utilized some strategies to see how many beads there were on the left side and it turned out there were fifty-five. Then I asked him to guess how many beads were on the right side. Without even one hestitation, “Forty-five, Mom!”

Uh-huh. Duh. Of course, Mom. Then I asked him how he knew. “Well, there are only one hundred beads and there are fifty-five over there,” he shrugged with a sigh.

Okay then. Time to move on.

A few hours later, Nate and I went over to Canton Studio and spoke with Becky Hess about some photographs she had of Heritage Hall. Nate was rather well behaved and seemed impressed to meet a real artist who makes artisan glass sculptures and pieces, but his eyes really lit up when we went over to the Lisbon History Center. Nate had the chance to meet Mayor O’Connor of Lisbon and I took the opportunity to ask her to explain to Nate what a mayor does. A little lesson on civic responsibility and government ensued. I suppose we can chalk that up to an introduction to art and government all in one hour and a half long trip.

Not to mention, even hours later he was found – wide-eyed – telling his sister about how he learned all about the history of Lisbon and this really ancient building they have called Heritage Hall which people drew all over!

I dropped Nate off at school for the rest of the day (he attends the specials such as gym and art with his classmates; he’s dual-enrolled) and went on to a meeting about Mount Vernon’s bid to become a Blue Zones Community. (If you haven’t pledged support, do!) Afterwards, I came back home and we bundled up warm so that we could go out to Indian Creek Nature Center. I had heard from a fellow master gardener intern that there were plenty of bald eagles out that way.

We hopped into Aaron’s truck and he drove us out the windy snow-covered roads. We saw plenty of deer (as evidenced above) – I counted well over fifteen. Then, we saw it. A really big bird.

A gorgeous, really big bird. Nate and Sam thought it was “pretty cool,” but they weren’t all that terribly excited. They asked a few questions, scuffed their toes into the snow, and muttered about it being cold. That’s okay. At least they saw bald eagles in the wild.

Now I sit here in front of my computer, sipping my cup of tea, and thinking that really this homeschooling thing isn’t half bad. My son finished a math lesson, some grammar – he can now recite more pronouns than I can and use them correctly, a few spelling exercises, voluntarily read about the human brain and skin in his human body encyclopedia, met a mayor and had a discussion about the government (and bullying, interestingly enough), learned that people make stained glass, saw wild animals in their habitat and received answers to his questions about them, and did it all with a smile on his face and a hug for his mom at the end of the day.

I’m left thinking that when my two leave the nest, I’m certainly going to miss them and the time I spend with them. So, while homeschooling my son can be very hard, it can also just fly along.

Whatcha think?

I’ve also started two new Facebook pages. One is for the Mount Vernon, Iowa & Lisbon, Iowa gardening club called Twin City Bloomers. The other is in support of legalizing urban chickens in Mount Vernon. Why don’t you take a gander? While you are at it, check out our new Twitter page!

I updated WordPress awhile back and forgot to backup a copy of my website. I’d done a lot of changes to my theme and when WordPress updated, it erased them all. I was going back through and making changes, but I’ve decided I’m just going to have to work on creating my own theme. I’m sorry for any mess in the meantime. Any suggestions on design, style, and ease-of-use things I should and shouldn’t include? I’m going to try to figure out why it’s been loading so slowly recently and fix that.

In other news:

MY TREADMILL IS HERE! SQUEAL!