Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Symptoms so soon?!

I realize that the last date of my last post was around when I conceived this pregnancy according to the online baby due date calculators. Since finding out, at about 4 weeks, I have been nauseas from the start but it only came in waves throughout the day. When I hit 6 weeks, the nausea turned into non-stop day and through the night. I haven't thrown up yet, but the inability to smell or even pass food by my mouth comes in sporadic moments that I must steal in between.

Then the day before Christmas Eve I come down with a terrible cold. A fever insued and broke on the same day, thankfully. Christmas Eve was still pretty bad but not as bad as the day before. Today is Christmas Day and I must say that I must be over the cold because the morning sickness is back in full force. So my body must be well enough to be over the cold.

Ahh, let's review the symptoms shall we? We've covered the morning sickness neverending. The hunger is besides itself. After I make myself eat something tolerable, a half hour later its like I haven't eaten in days and must eat now before I get even more sick. It's crazy! Oh the tiredness I feel as of late. I can sleep at night and still need one to two naps during the day. I must need the extra rest since coming down with this cold. This pregnancy is entirely different from my previous pregnancies.

What does all this mean exactly? God will reveal it in his own time. I am merely here to enjoy the journey. (But I suspect twins. Dare I say it out loud?)

Friday, November 16, 2012

 


 I have a ton of things I should be doing around the house today. But I think I should just take today and relax and rest my body. Today isn't a Sunday, but it sure has that Sunday feeling about it. It's nice outside for a change. I may wash the dog outside and let the kids play outside while I get that done. Some fresh air and sunshine does amazing things to us!



I wish I still could be carefree like my kids are when they are outside. I usually have like a gazillion things going through my head that I should be doing instead. Even though my body and soul cry out to slow down and to take it slower in my life, my mind refuses and it is wreaking havoc on my body. I MUST learn to slow down and NOT feel so guilty about it.



I'm spending my time searching online for a knit pattern. I'm not sure what I want to knit. I have the yard. So I've been searching through ravelry's pattern database. Lovely ideas. There are so many. Lots of them have taken me to blogs. I love blogs. I find it hard for myself to blog regularly, but I love to sit every now and then and get inspired by what everyone in blog land is doing. There are some really creative people out there! I'm so amazed!

So I sit here with my laptop in my lap, my coffee with Pumpkin Spice creamer next to me, a movie on for the kids, and my trusty rottie lying on the seat next to me on the couch. So far, so good.

Saturday, October 06, 2012

This sense of being at home is important to everyone's well-being. If you do not get enough of it, your happiness, resilience, energy, humor, and courage will decrease. It includes familiarity, warmth, affection, and a conviction of security. Being at home feels safe; you have a sense of relief whenever you come home and close the door behind you, reduced fear of social and emotional dangers as well as of physical ones. When you are home, you can let down your guard and take off your mask. Home is the one place in the world where you are safe from feeling put down or out, unentitled, or unwanted. It's where you belong, or, as the poet said, the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. Coming home is your major restorative in life.

these are formidably good things, which you cannot get merely by finding true love or getting married or having children or landing the best job in the world- or even by moving into the house of your dreams. Nor is there much that interior decorating can do to provide them. Making a home attractive helps you feel at home, but not nearly so much as most of us seem to think, if you gauge by the amounts of money we spend on home furnishings. IN face, too much attention to the looks of a home can backfire. And going for nostalgic pastimes- canning, potting, sewing, making Christmas wreaths, painting china, decorating cookies- will not work either. Ironically, people are led into the error of playing house instead of keeping house by a genuine desire for a home and its comforts. Nostalgia means, literally, "home-sickness."

What really does work to increase the feeling of having a home and its comforts is housekeeping. Housekeeping creates cleanliness, order, regularity, beauty, the conditions for health and safety, and a good p lace to do and feel all the things you wish and need to do and feel in your home. Whether you live alone or with a spouse, parents, and ten children, it is your housekeeping that makes your home alive, that turns it into a small society in its own right, a vital place with its own ways and rhythms, the place where you can be more yourself than you can be anywhere else.

Despite these rewards, American housekeeping and home life are in a state of decline. Comfort and engagement at home have diminished to the point that even simple cleanliness and decent meals- let alone any deeper satisfactions- are no longer taken for granted in many middle-class homes. Homes today often seem to operate on an ad hoc bases. Washday is any time anyone throws a load into the machine, and laundering skills are in precipitous decline. Dishes are washed when the dishwasher is full. Meals occur any time or all the time or, what amounts to the same thing, never, as people sevre more and more prepared and semi-prepared foods. And although a large, enthusiastic minority of home cooks grow more and more sophisticated, the majority become ever more common in the middle-class homes than they used to be. Cleaning and neatening are done mostly when the house seems out of control. Bedding decreases in refinement, freshness, and comfort even as sales of linens, pillows, and comforters increase. It is not in goods the the contemporary household is poor, but in comfort and care.

Household activities of all kinds are becoming haphazard, not only cleaning ,cooking, and laundering. Television often absorbs everyone's attention because other activities (such as music-making, letter-writing, socializing, reading, and cooking) require at least a minimum of foresight, continuity, order, and planning that the contemporary household cannot accommodate. Home life as a whole has contracted. Less happens at home; less time is spent there. Like the industrial poor of 1910, many people now, in order to work long hours with rare days off, must farm out their children for indifferent institutional care. People are tired, sleeping an estimated two hours less per night than people did a hundred years ago. There are fewer parties, dinners, or card games with friends in homes. Divorces break up countless households, and even in tact families frequent moves break ties to friends and neighbors. The homes that reemerge are thinner, more brittle, more superficial, more disorganized, and more vulnerable than those they replace. These plagues rain on the lives of both the rich and the poor. Many people lead deprived lives in houses filled with material luxury.

Inadequate housekeeping is part of an unfortunate cycle. As people turn more and more to outside institutions to have their needs met 9for food, comfort, clean laundry, relaxation, entertainment, society, rest) domestic skills and expectations further diminish, in turn decreasing the chance that people's homes can satisfy their needs. The result is far too many people who long for home even though they seem to have one.

--excerpt from Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Shopaholic


Our consumerism and materialism in our society has gotten way out of control! As you read this story that I am going to link, it is sobering to think that people are actually living like this and are not trying to change. This story of this shopaholic mom just says how bad it really is. I know people that are into "keeping up with the Joneses". Our family lives in southern California and it is extremely hard not to get caught up in what other people have. Sometimes you feel that if someone else has it why can't you, but then you take a step back and have a drink of reality. I have to constantly remind myself that people here can't even afford their house and car, much less the extras they charge. There isn't a person I know here that isn't in debt.
I know in our case, we absolutely despised living in debt. The fact that we couldn't pay a lot of our bills was killing our positive attitude on life. We have a handle on it now without going into too much personal detail. Our attitudes are much better now. I just cannot see how people can live in a constant state of stress like that. It's no wonder people are getting sick.
I urge you to read this story. Here is the link again. Just click on the link in blue.

Consumerist.com

Here's the same lady's story on Oprah. It gives a little more detail.

Oprah.com



Public school vs. Homeschool vs. Charter School

Again, this year, we are trying to decide what is best for our family. We've moved into a new school area and have asked around about this school. The consesus is that this school is worse than our previous school. Great. (Insert sarcastic tone here.) The ONLY positive thing about this new school is that it is quite literally across the street from our house.

We've checked out the charter schools in our county and the registration is ridiculously early and already closed. There isn't a garuantee that the child enrolling is even accepted. There is a lottery. Either way, we are MONTHS past the deadline.

So it is homeschooling again this year.
Which to be totally honest, is what I wanted to do the whole time. I did not want to give up on my kid's education. I still want the best for them. In my quest to finding balance in my own life, we are going to keep the homeschooling going for them. We will make everything else work.

It's all about priorities.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Insomnia



Ever wonder what causes insomnia?  What do you do when you have insomnia? How long does it typically last for you?

Some nights I just lie in bed and will myself to go back to sleep. Some nights I lie in bed and read whatever book I am currently on. And on those nights when none of the above will work...  I head downstairs and try to occupy myself until I get tired.

And let me tell you, some of those nights I don't get tired and wind up staying awake all night and all day. I remember having those nights when I was a teenager. I never imagined that I would be an adult, a mom, a wife and still have those nights. I thought that was something only teenagers experienced. I had many of those nights as a teenager.

There would be mornings when my mother would come in my room to wake me up for school and she would stub her toe on my furniture because I rearranged my whole room while they were sleeping. I would organize my closet and my drawers. Or I would just write in my journal and listen to music quietly in my room when I was in middle school. In high school, I would call my friends. Well, the ones that I knew had a phone in their rooms. I didn't want to wake up their parents!

What to do as an adult... some things haven't changed. I still write, read, do something crafty, rearrange, organize... whatever my mind seems to be going non-stop about.

*the above picture is taken at Sea World of San Diego. The penguins is one of our favorite visits.