Since I'm procrastinating (I'm supposed to be organizing for a yard sale this weekend) and a friend sent me her blog post today, I'm going to update this. I hope you enjoy it!
Winter 2014 was a rough one for us. After sweet little miss was born I had a terrible time recovering. Four babies in four years has been hard on my body even though I wouldn't trade it for the world. After getting out of the hospital from my c-section I developed post-surgical pneumonia which gave me two visits to the ER and finally some really great IV antibiotics knocked it out. Struggling to breathe is no way to spend the early days of having a baby. Thankfully that's long behind me now and December was a lovely month.
We continued to love on sweet little miss. There's really just nothing like having a tiny baby around, is there?
We put up our tree. I love this little prelit tree with its lights and our ornaments. I'd put it up in October if Brad would let me. I just love having it up and the kids love decorating it. I remember when I was a kid that we had a big tradition of decorating the tree each year. We all had our favorite ornaments and we'd love to hang them. Then the next school day my mom would go through and re-arrange the ornaments. We used to give her a hard time. I totally understand now though. If I didn't rearrange the entirety of our ornaments would be on the bottom half of the tree. :o)
...and here's the best of the photos we tried to get of everyone in front of the tree. Sometimes you just gotta get what you can get.
We stayed in love with sweet little miss. She will definitely not suffer from not having enough sibling attention showered on her.
Sometimes, even I got to hold her. :o)
...and like they do, she grew so fast and started to grow into her features. We just tried to enjoy the stage we were in.
Mister W sang in his program at school.
Miss L received an award for being one of two students of the month in her class. Way to go Miss L! School just really agrees with her. She loves going and apparently she does okay there! :o)
Obviously we still had to do the daily grind. I took this photo in the grocery store because I couldn't resist. They both have their fingers in their ears. They are only 20 months apart and sometimes I forget how close in age they are. They are becoming good playmates though. Mister W is still used to playing with his big sister, but the boys make their own mischief too.
Christmas morning came and we celebrated and celebrated and celebrated.
Everyone was well pleased with new toys.
It was nice to have Brad home again, too. My mom came and stayed with us for a lot of the month of December which was HUGE. I couldn't have done it on my own and then Brad was there for the end of the month. We had a lot of fun just having family time with one another.
We stayed in our pajamas a lot.
...and we played toys.
It snowed! At the time we were so excited because we didn't realize that this would be the winter of lots and lots of snow, but with a new baby, we didn't mind staying in too much.
So we pretty much just carried on. There's always so much life around here.
One Sunday we were dressed to go to church and it seemed like we ought to just try and take a family photo.
We managed to get one!
We even managed to get a few of the kids and each other too.
We built awesome train tracks.
We played LOTS of Mario Kart.
The baby slept.
...and then we celebrated a little boy's birthday. It's always a hard one for me. There's mister W who is here and so full of life and all kinds of amazing things and on special days like this I'm so acutely aware of the sweet boy who is missing. The little guy who should be here celebrating and opening gifts and making the day doubly special. I miss him so much, but especially on the boys' birthday.
I have always wanted to be that mom who makes awesome cakes. Sometimes I get it done. Mostly I don't, but for this birthday mister W wanted a dragon cake. He's way into knights and castles lately and we looked up a tutorial online and made this guy.
We opened some gifts. It was a lot of fun and I know that mister W enjoyed his day.
Then just a few days later mister W tripped in the basement and fell on a piece of something. The poor guy ended up with stitches in his hand. That's no way to enjoy the first days of being four!
...and then mister W had his party. It was the first time we've ever had a not-in-our-house party and I'm never going back. It was awesome. The kids played and played and played and the staff cleaned up! Yay!
Sweet little miss grew out of her clothes. I took this photo because this one was starting to get too short and was one of my favorites. It goes so fast!
This is just silly. :o)
Sweet little miss started showing those smiles more and more.
Then things started to get hard. In late January I started having lots of heart palpitations. I started feeling more and more anxious. I saw my OB who thought it was probably my thyroid and then I saw my endocrinologist who wasn't sure that it was. A very long story made much shorter is that I developed postpartum thyroiditis. In my case it was a period of hyperthyroid which lasted about six months followed by a hypothyroid phase which will last forever since I was hypothyroid before this started. It was really brutal when the hyperthyroid started. I had heart palpitations, crippling anxiety, panic attacks, the world's worst headaches and other awful symptoms. It gradually got better and better but the winter was a really hard one this year. I didn't take a lot of photos because we mostly stayed in and I didn't feel well, but I got through because I have an awesome husband, a wonderful mom who came to stay with me, a sister in law who didn't mind 800 texts a day, friends who brought meals and brought my kids home from school and lots and lots of chamomile tea. I am so so thankful that the time is over. I feel really grateful that when things got really rough for me that God put so many helpers there for me. If there were ever a clue that it was time to stop having kids... I think that was it!
We did take some photos though because this was the winter of snow. After a few years without much snow to speak of we finally got some wear out of our snow pants and boots!
My favorite part of snow days is the fact that Brad usually works from home. Yay!
Here's the path down our front steps on the 13th of February.
Brad, being the fun and awesome dad that he is, built sort of a luge/slide chute in our front yard (the olympics were on after all). The kids loved it. It made me nervous...
...and then miss L lost another tooth! Gotta love that grin!
