Crash course in parenting - Life as a foster mom

The C monster is a little scatter brained. Easily distracted. I know, he's 5, I'm sure it's par for the course. Every day he takes his lunch box and back pack to school. Usually I remind him, or Y reminds him. There has been at least one time we made it out the door, I strapped Ben in the stroller and put down the garage door and suddenly he remembered, so I put the garage door back up to let him run inside and get it.  We walk right by his stuff every day as we walk out the door, it's not like it's hiding in some secret place or something. This is the third full week of school. Well today we were waiting on C to leave (as per usual everyone else was ready first). He had his shoes on the wrong feet (also as per usual, even though he has an easy way to tell which side is which he rarely takes the time to make sure he does it correctly). I told him to fix his shoes, and he did. And we left for school. We were running a few minutes late because of his shoes but shoul...

Brian knows a guy through triathlon, and is leasing our office from him. This guy goes to a church that seemed like it would be pretty cool. D also just so happened to make a good friend at football, and this friend goes to this church as well.  So, we were pretty excited to try it out on Sunday! On Saturday, Brian was talking to his friend, and the friend mentioned that kids aren't allowed in church. Like, not babies, not any kids at all until they are in 6th grade.  We keep Ben with us still (for a lot of reasons: germs (no offense to the other babies!), Ben still breast feeds frequently, and quite frankly he usually does pretty well through the service, and when he doesn't I have no problem leaving with him to get him settled).  Anyway, I guess they have a "family room" where you can go sit with your kids if you want to, but otherwise kids aren't allowed in the main service. So anyway.  That was a deal breaker for us right away. It just doesn't seem rig...

C's first few days of kindergarten have gone well. He is really tired but I'm sure once he gets used to it he'll start feeling better. He seems to like his teacher and his class so that's good! We are enjoying walking to and from school, except for the one time that Miss M got lost. :) It was only for about 30 seconds but it sure felt like a long time. We got D an iPhone. We have some pretty strict rules with it, but part of me is still pretty anxious about the trouble he could get in to with it. It's one of those things where we'll just have to trust him. He seems to be liking school too. He's a big man on campus already (according to him at least!) So yeah. Story of his life. I'm slowly but surely getting things unpacked. Trying to get stuff done around the house with a baby, 2 and 4 year old with me all day is no joke! And the house is so big that it's almost a hindrance to getting stuff done. Like, if I have to work upstairs then it really has...

Our new house is enormous. I mean I knew it was bigger than our old one, but it didn't really sink in until we got our furniture in here. Just...wow! I actually feel a little bit guilty about having such a huge house. I mean we can afford it, but I just hope we are always grateful for it and don't fill it up with a bunch of crap and then decide we need more room. We're planning to live here for a long long time. School starts tomorrow! Tonight we're going to walk to C's school to get an idea of how long it will take with the kids. I plan on walking him to and from school every day unless it's super cold or rainy or something.  It's only about 1/4 mile away, maybe a little more. Not far, but walking it with a baby, 2, 4, and 5 year old might take longer than anticipated. :) It took way, way longer to load the truck than we thought it would. Part of the problem was that we brought our refrigerator, deep freeze, washing machine, and dryer from our old house, ...

We closed on our house yesterday! It was a whirlwind of phone calls, and we had to pay $8900 to get a new roof on it before we even owned it, but it's done. Whew!  And awesomely, our closing costs for the house ended up being $8,000 less than we thought they were going to be, so that pretty much paid for the roof. God provided for us for sure! Right now a painter is painting, and I am just so excited about our paint colors and I think everything is going to look awesome when he is done. He is also painting the insides of the closets. They are so gross, for real. Saturday we spent the day cleaning, didn't even get all the way done but at least the bedrooms, kitchen, and living areas are done. And the bathrooms were pretty decent, and those will be easy to clean since there aren't any carpets or anything. So a guy is coming to restretch the flooring on the main level, and since our closing costs were so much less than we thought we will get the carpet on the stairs and 2n...