Crash course in parenting - Life as a foster mom

I was looking back through my old blogs and trying to remember exactly what happened with all the termination stuff for our kids...there were so many court dates that didn't get finished, or got continued, etc. that it is hard to keep it all straight! I stumbled across this:  http://crashcourseinparenting.blogspot.com/2012/04/infertility-awareness-week.html And all I can say is HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. God is seriously so funny.  What in the world.  About 3 months after writing this I was approximately 2 weeks along with our first biological baby.  Or four weeks, if you go by the normal way of counting pregnancies. Which makes no sense to me considering I wasn't actually pregnant for those first 2 weeks.  Whatever! I'll still reiterate that adoption is NOT a cure for infertility, all I can say is that this must have been His plan all along.  I mean I know that is how it happened, that I got pregnant like seriously a week or two after bio dad's rights wer...

Not much is going on, really.  Our new caseworker lady still hasn't come to visit. She asked if she could come at 5:15 on Thursday, but I told her D will be at football practice and I have to leave to get him at 5:30 so that wouldn't really be the best time (I had already told her that during the week only after 7 p.m. would work for us due to his schedule...I guess she didn't read THAT part of the email).  She has not responded. Not that I'm surprised, I haven't heard from her even one time (other than "Can I come Thursday at 5:15?") since she took over the case. If our adoption is delayed I am going to be one angry pregnant lady! Nobody wants to see that, right? I have entered what I think is the nesting phase.  Today I cleaned out our kitchen drawers and labeled and alphabetized our spices. We previously had 3 different spots where we stored them; now we have only one. Yay!  I also found that we have at least 4 or 5 different spices that we h...

It is getting bigger. Last night was the first night I felt uncomfortable sleeping on my tummy. I am a big tummy sleeper, I always have to fall asleep on my tummy. Last night I was up for probably a good 2 hours in the middle of the night, and it was not fun.  I have kept my weight gain still around only 5 pounds though I already feel fat - my shirts are getting tight across my chest and definitely aren't as loose around my belly.  Some of my pants will zip up still; most of them won't.  The good news is, tomorrow I'll be 12 weeks!  Almost 1/3 of the way done!  I have a feeling the next few weeks will find me in a local maternity clothing department.

So yesterday my husband had a class at church, thus I was on my own for the evening with the children. For dinner I made pancakes, and a mish-mash thing of scrambled eggs and sausage and onions, which turned out very well despite the fact that I had no recipe and was flying by the seat of my pants. (Side note: My inspiration for the egg/sausage/onion dish was the fact that D made dinner on Sunday, and we had green bean casserole, and one of the ingredients of course was French's french fried onions, and he apparently thought that meant that he should chop an onion, so he did, then when Brian showed him the err of his ways, he stuck the onion in a baggie and put it in the fridge, and it stank so bad I couldn't even stand it. So I used it with dinner last night.) When you are cooking all these things at once it's a little crazy as I'm sure you know. Whilst I was flipping pancakes I heard the *stomp stomp stomp stomp* of a child running down the hallway, and Y shouting ...

I'm 11 weeks and a few days, and starting to feel human again. Like, I still sleep 9 hours a night and also take naps during the day (ok ONE nap, that's it!), but the rest of the time I'm awake I actually feel capable of accomplishing something, instead of just dragging myself around like a pitiful lump of human being and trying to do the bare minimum to get by. This week I might even (wait for it!)....sweep and mop the kitchen floor! Scrub my kitchen sink! Oh, the joy! It's also my last week of school. Not sure that I've mentioned it, but basically we never bought the maternity rider on our health insurance so we are paying cash for this baby.  Since we are self employed we pay our premiums 100% out of pocket and have a $5,000 deductible per person.  But since we don't have maternity coverage we are paying cash for the whole thing, so no more school for me until ...well, until I don't know when. Definitely not probably for another year until we are in our...

So I have to tell you. Before I knew I was pregnant, I was -getting 6-7 hours of sleep on a nightly basis -running a LOT of miles - 5 days a week -drinking coffee every single day without fail I looked up the estimated date of conception and then looked at my training log.  Here are some snippets of things that I logged in the 3 weeks before I knew I was pregnant: "I have blood in my urine..." (after a TWELVE MILE RUN) "Blood in my urine again..." "I am so freaking tired. Physically I am just wasted. Worked at the farm today and it was awful... " " Just not feeling good overall. No complaints in particular...just unmotivated I guess. I rarely have that problem...." " Easy 8 mile run. It was pretty close to 80 degrees, I was roasting. Water fountains were turned off at the lake for some stupid reason, so I didn't have hardly any water the last 3 miles...." "14.6 mile run, got 6 hours of sleep last night..." Af...

Heard the heart beat today on the doppler. I can't even tell you how happy and relieved I am - it's so comforting to know that everything is OK!  My midwife said she could hear the baby kicking in there too. We didn't get to listen very long because as soon as I heard the heartbeat I was just so happy I started laughing and of course the doppler moved when I did that. :)  Next appointment is not for a month so I will have to be patient - it seems like such a long time! Squeeee! Thank you all so much for your kind words and encouragement! Now back to our normally scheduled broadcast: I just bought all 3 of the little kids' winter outfits including coats, hats, shoes, and clothes. And it was expensive. But I am so thankful that they don't care that I buy used stuff. When they get to be teenagers buying new clothes is going to be a train wreck...yikes!  And I bought all 4 of the little ones (including tiny baby!) new Husker outfits at their dad's request.

Alright, I think I'm ready to share. I was going to wait a few more days for more confirmation, but honestly I feel like all of you that follow my blog are my friends, and so if this doesn't work out then I am going to be on here crying and everything about it so I might as well just tell you, right? In July I started feeling really ill. I was having a hard time with getting out of bed in the morning. I was also training for a 31-mile race which takes place in October, and I noticed that physically I was just falling behind.  I religiously time my runs and I could see that my paces were getting slower and slower, and in the mean time I felt like I was working harder and harder.  I never felt well; in fact I felt downright awful. I just wanted to sleep all day, or at least just lay on the couch and watch TV. I had another symptom which made me very suspicious. My boobs hurt like nobody's business. Usually this is a sign that I am about to start my "surprise" pe...

...Please get the stuff to our adoption attorney so that we can get this thing finalized before the end of the year! Please!  I think we have waited long enough! Apparently our attorney is stilllll waiting for caseworker lady to send her stuff regarding their efforts to find D's dad.  It is hard to be so helpless to do anything, all I can do is keep checking to see if it's done yet.  We are still shooting for December 1 but our attorney said in order for that to happen she needs to file no later than November 1, and it sounds like she needs a lot of time to get all the paperwork and whatnot filled out. Ugh.

I guess I can go ahead and write another blog.  :) We are working as a family on being more thankful.  So at dinner (sometimes, not every night) we just go around the table and all of us say something we are thankful for.  It all started because the little boys every single day ask "Can we go to Adventure Land? Can we go to Lost in Fun? Can we go to Granna's house? Can we go to ______?" Then if we are just staying home, they are "Why? But I LIKE to go to _____! Why can't we go there?"  I just don't feel like we need to do awesome things every single day.  And it really bugs me that every single day they ask to go do stuff and act like it's the end of the world like we NEVER do fun things. I'd say we do something fun on at least a weekly basis, either going to the zoo, the museum, park, or any of the above mentioned places.  So, let's try being thankful that you have all these great toys to play with at home, and that we can ride bikes outsi...