It's the end of the world as we know it.....

And I feel.... TERRIFIED!




Last weekend we were at some friends for dinner. We were sitting around their living room talking afterward and Kynden just started crawling...we knew it was coming.

And now, over this last weekend she's gained speed.

This weekend was my sisters wedding. (I will blog with pictures about that later) We went to the beach for the weekend and had friends come to our house to take care of the girls. It was an eventful weekend for the girls. Ellyanna started crawling (I haven't actually seen it yet, but I've heard the rumor) I also noticed this morning that she cut a tooth. The first for any of the girls. And Kynden can now stand in her crib completely unassisted. I have seen this. As Heidi said (the friend who was taking care of the girls) she is the rambunctious one! Well spoken, Heidi!

Oh, how our world is about to change! Man, oh man!

At the park

Last night we decided to walk to the park. We went after dinner around 6pm. I have never gotten bombarded with so many stupid questions about the triplets at one time...Ever. Josh and I were laughing so hard about what people asked. I am not kidding you, these are some of the questions/comments..granted some where from kids around the age of 10-12, but still...

*Are they all girls?

*Are these all your babies?

*Were they all born together?

*Were they all born on the same day?

*Were they all born at the same time?

*Were they born with their heads stuck together? (I'm not kidding)

*Are these from fertility medicine?

*Boy, you have your hands full! (2x)

*Group of teenage boys: "Whoa!" "Dude, that's hardcore" "Good Luck"

There were others, but I'm blanking at the moment. There were also several people who trekked across the park because they saw our stroller from a distance and wanted to check it out. And there was more than one mother who saw us and had to go find her son/daughter to show them our freak show. We were there for less than an hour. I wish that we would have brought our video camera with us and hidden it somewhere in the stroller. I don't know if any of you have seen the triplet video on YouTube. But if you have a couple minutes, check out this link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GE6zQ8FWok

This video demonstrates exactly what it is like every single time we go anywhere in public. Although, I have not ever gone home and cried after like the woman in the video said she did. =)

Welcome to my world.

Embracing my inner gardener

This spring marks the first time in my 28 (yes, 28) years where I have become obsessed with flowers and gardening. I'm not exactly sure what clicked with me.

I think I've always mildly enjoyed flowers and gardening and everything that goes along with it. Most of my attempts have been a lot of trial and error. Mostly the latter, I'm sad to report. And then came the magic ingredient....weed barrier and bark dust. I completely underestimated the importance of those two things in the garden! They have completely changed the landscape of our front yard. Now our flower beds in the front are able to retain moisture which is of course a key thing when trying to grow flowers or anything else for that matter.

This month we will have owned our house for 3 years. Here are some pictures of what our house looked like three years ago when we bought it:


Okay, so they're not the greatest pictures and I can't get the layout to do what I want, so it kind of looks out of place and funny. Anyway, here is a picture of what our house looks like today:



As you can see, there have been some improvements over the years! I remember the former owner telling us that it was impossible to get grass to grow in the front...but check us out! It's not the prettiest grass in the world, but as long as you stay at a distance, it's not bad. I have a grandma who's backyard is literally a paradise. As long as I can remember, she has always had a beautiful garden and she works hard at it. I have always enjoyed the results of someone's labor in the garden, but I've never (before now) enjoyed the process. Here is my very first "baby" garden...it doesn't look like too much in this picture, but once the bulbs come up, it's gorgeous. This is the first garden I've ever made from scratch. When we moved in, it was literally weed barrier and river rocks.



When I was growing up, I had 3 full sets of grandparents. Each of my parents had their whole set and I also had a whole set of great-grandparents. The aforementioned grandma (my mom's mom) with the great garden lives in Idaho, so we only saw her once a year or so. My other grandma (dad's mom) lived in Boring, so we saw them more often. A few months ago my grandpa died (dad's dad) and for some reason, I have felt the strongest connection with him and my grandma since then. I keep thinking about them and having dreams about them and their house all the time. I don't know what's up with that! Anyway, my dad's mom wasn't really the gardener that my mom's mom is, but she had hummingbirds. I remember sitting on her patio and watching the hummingbirds come to her feeders. I remember helping her take them down and make the sugar solution and refill the feeders. It was magical. I have always loved hummingbirds because of this. But over the years I have forgotten. Until this year. I don't know where it came from, but out of the blue, I decided I wanted hummingbird feeders. I checked online and thought that I maybe had missed their migration because I didn't have feeders out before they came. I was so bummed. But God sent me a hummingbird! I saw one even before I had the feeders out. I bought and hung feeders that same day and now we see them often. Isn't God great? So, now I have found that I have a little bit of both my grandmas in me. I'm looking forward to seeing and exploring more and more of my heritage. Here is a picture of our backyard where the hummingbird feeders are, although I can't remember if you can actually see them or not.



Yeah, you can see one of the feeders at the top of the pic.

On another note, speaking of gardening, for my birthday the boys went shopping for me and picked out some flower seeds for me. Since I didn't really have a place to plant them, I decided that for mother's day I needed a window box in front of our house. So that's what I got. Josh spent Monday night building me this window box and I spend Tuesday painting it. Monday night I planted all my seeds and I'm bursting with anticipation for them to come up. I'll post another picture when they do! But isn't my window box cute?

Recent conversation with Jayden...

So this morning, I had just gotten out of the shower. Two of the girls were playing on the floor and one was finishing her bottle in her bed. Adelynn was on the floor and kind of whining..not crying really, but not happy either. I looked over and she was on her stomach and Jayden was kind of laying on top of her..

Me: "Jayden stop that, she doesn't like it."
Jayden: "But I be'd careful steamrolling the babies."
Me: (surprise evident on my face) "Are you steamrolling the babies?"
Jayden: "Yeah"
Me: "Jayden, steamrolling is not a good game to play with the babies, you need to be careful with them."
Jayden: "But she's not dead!"


Well....

You know you're getting old when...

As many of you know, yesterday was my birthday. Thanks everyone for the cards and comments on my myspace page! But I think I might be the biggest idiot. I have been talking on my blogs and making reference to this being the last year in my 20's...and about how I have another year until I get my 30th birthday tattoo. Well, I realized the night before my birthday that I'm turning 28. Not 29. This is the first time in my whole life that I have forgotten how old I am! It'll probably only go downhill from here, I'm afraid!

So yesterday was my big day. I have been trying to figure out all day if I would actually call yesterday a good day or a bad day...I think it was both. For the last 3 or 4 years, for my birthday I have requested of Josh that he take the day off and we get to go have a "me" day and I get to do anything I want. This year I decided that I wanted to go to Seattle. So with that being said..I am going to make a list of everything that happened yesterday and rate it with "good" or "bad".

Waking up early...bad.
Stepping on the scale and losing another pound...good.
Getting Coffee for free with my gift certificate...good. (Thanks Allison!)
Driving 3 hours to Seattle...mixed bag. I was still pretty sleepy and we didn't talk much.
Going to the first three places we had mapped out and finding the prices to be be high and one of the stores to be closed...bad.
Going downtown Seattle and driving around for 20-30 minutes to find a parking spot...bad.
Walking around Seattle and Pikes Place Market...Good.
Making the decision to eat whatever I wanted for the day and not to worry about it...bad.
Eating lunch at a 50's themed restaurant...good.
Ordering onion rings, a chili dog and an oreo milkshake for lunch...good.
Finding a really cool antique shop...good.
Getting into a fight with Josh and making me cry...very bad.
My internal system "protesting" to my choice of lunch...bad.
Finding a beach and walking for about 1.5 hours and finding lots of cool shells for the boys...good.
Heading in the direction of home and deciding to go to Old Spaghetti Factory in Tacoma for dinner...good.
Ordering lasagne...good.
Talking on the way home...good.
Coming home to 5 sleeping children, a very tired mother-in-law, but a very clean house...good. (Thanks, Donna!)
Going to bed...good.
Waking up at 11pm with a raging stomach ache and having to get up and throw up all my lasagne...bad.
Throwing up again...bad.
Josh giving me the "bright side" in saying that at least I won't have gained back my lost pound...well, kind of funny.
Spending the next 3 hours in misery...bad.
Finally getting up and walking around and realizing that my stomach actually seemed fine...good.
Finally being able to sleep at 3 am...good.

So..that was my day reduced to list form. Interesting, huh? So looking back, I still can't decide if it was a good day or a bad day. I guess if nothing else, it was memorable!

A dimond in the rough

Wow! 2 posts in one day..although technically if you draw your attention to the bottom of this blog, you'll see that it's actually the next day. I drank too much caffeine way too late in the day and found myself laying in bed for an hour completely unable to find sleep. And since I find laying in bed, not sleeping a huge and frustrating waste of my time, I decided to get up and blog.

I had a deep thought the other day...I don't have many deep thoughts, so I thought I should share this one. Usually I am just la, la, la, going about my day...but sometimes out of the blue, BAM! something falls from the sky that I like to call a deep thought. I have a friend who lives and breathes deep contemplative thoughts all day long, and doesn't understand what it's like to not have deep thoughts every waking moment. I think I actually prefer my way though, because if you have deep thoughts all the time, how do you know when the important ones come? But what do I know? I've never tried to contemplate life for more than a few minutes at a time.

I've been thinking a lot in the past recent months about high school and what I was like in high school. There's a lot of things that I regret from that time in my life. I'm sure there is for most people. I was always a "good" girl. I followed the rules, never got in trouble, had Christian friends, was a cheerleader, etc. (Which I think, at least in part is why I have decided to get a tattoo for my 30th birthday...kind of a belated rebellion thing.) But there is a few things I wish I could do over. For instance...no one would have probably guessed this, but I was very insecure in high school..still struggle with that now, although it's better. I didn't branch out of my "comfort zone" friendships. One of the biggest things that I still struggle with even today is the fact that I wasn't a good big sister. I am the oldest of four children in my family. During the years that I was in high school, my parents were having problems. My mom went back to work mostly because we needed the money, but I think also a lot because she wasn't happy at home. She also got involved with extra curricular activities that kept her away from home a lot of the time. I won't go into all of that now..that's a whole other blog. But during that time, I had an incredible opportunity to reach out to my younger siblings and be a support for them. But I didn't. I myself tried to spend as much time away from home too. And because of that, I left all my other siblings to fend for themselves and deal alone with their own problems and emotions. Let me tell you, there are a LOT of "if onlys" that play in my head about that.

Anyway, all that to say that I have wondered if I had it all to do over now...being at the maturity level that I'm at, with the life experiences that I now have...what would I do differently, if anything. Am I still the same insecure girl who finds it near impossible to connect physically, emotionally and otherwise with the people that are the most important to me? Have I learned how to do things better now like tell people I love them?

I think my answer is yes and no. I've come up with an analogy that I think is pretty good. I'll pat myself on the back.

When Josh and I were dating and knew that we were going to get married, we started looking at rings. Specifically diamonds. We learned about the cut, clarity, color and sizes. Once I was "awarded" my diamond ring, I spend literally hours admiring it in different lights. Diamonds are fascinating. Have you ever seen an uncut diamond? I only have on tv...but they're not pretty. In fact, they're not much to look at..they kind of look like rocks. I think that each person is like a diamond. When we hit about high school age, we are kind of like an uncut diamond. The basic shape is there, but we're just not that much to look at. As the years go by and we gain life experiences and go through hardships and we learn and grow, God is slowly cutting the facets into the stone. Sometimes cutting away the "ugliness" is painful! But as the ugliness falls away, a beautiful diamond emerges. And what is even more amazing is that the more facets we have, the more able we are to reflect the Light. Even when there is mostly darkness, we can reflect even the smallest amount of light and be beautiful.

So yes, I am still the same person that I was in high school. The same basic shape. But I like to think that God has cut facets into me and now I am "shinier" than I used to be. And someday I hope to be a brilliant cut diamond that reflects every sort of Light that comes my way.

I'm sure that I'm not the first or only person to come up with this analogy, but I thought it was worth sharing.

And by the way, may I remind all of you out there and especially Josh that my birthday is coming up as well as mothers day...and a diamond is a girls best friend, after all! =) Hee, hee.

Another "must read" book review

About a year or so ago, we were hanging out at my in-laws house for the afternoon. My mother-in-law was borrowing this book from a friend and I picked it up and started reading it. I got through the first 2-4 chapters that day and was totally hooked. But for some reason, it took me this long to finally buy the book and own it for myself.

The book is by Stasi Eldredge the wife of John Eldredge who wrote "Wild at Heart". It is all about discovering who we are as women and how God created us. Every time I pick it up and begin to read, it's like my soul is just soaking it up. It is so, so good. I think that every woman should read it, as well as any man who knows a woman especially those who are married and/or have daughters.

Here's a little excerpt from the book that I read today that I had to read over and over for it to really sink in...I'm still contemplating. I know it's probably against copyright laws to put this on my blog, but somehow I don't think they care..I am promoting their book after all! This chapter is talking about how we, as women play an irreplaceable role in our lives.

"It is here, [in relationships] starting in our circle of intimacy that we are first and foremost women. It is here that we must first turn our gaze to ask, 'What does it look like to offer my Beauty, my fierce devotion, my love?' How do they need me to be their ezer? [Ezer is defined earlier in the book- it is the Hebrew word for what God called Eve. It is difficult to translate, but every other time it is used in the Bible it is always referring to God himself when some is in desperate need of Him...so they translate it to be "lifesaver".] You have an irreplaceable role in your relationships. No one can be to the people in your life who you can be to them. No one can offer what you can offer. There are many things God calls us to do, but loving well always comes first. And don't your relationships feel opposed? Of course. They must be fought for.

Satan knew that to take out Adam, all he had to do was take out Eve- his ezer kenegdo. It worked rather well, and he has not abandoned the basic plan ever since. Your place in the world as God's heart for relationship is vital. All the Enemy has to do to destroy people's lives is to get them isolated, a lamb separated from the flock. To do this he removes the ezers in their life. He makes a woman feel like, 'What do I have to offer, really? They're probably doing fine.' Don't you believe it for a moment. You have been sent by the Trinity on behalf of love, of relationships. Fight for them."

Doesn't that make you excited?! Read it a few times. It truly makes me excited to be a woman! There are so many great, great parts to this book. I wish I could write them all...but then that would really be a copyright issue!

Anyway, I just wanted to share. If you haven't read this book, I urge you to do so. It will change your life!