Stop the ride, please, I'd like to get off...

This past month has had a lot of changes for us. I know--it can't possibly be as many as we'd had this summer, but David and I often get to the end of a day asking each other, "How come this state makes me so tired?"

Carver is now in school full swing, after a week's delay due to flooding from Hurricane Irene. It has been a little bit of a rocky transition for him and for us. While the past two weeks have been a little better, we have spent a lot of time doing homework, working on things like formatting your paper to take the spelling test correctly, and learning how to follow basic directions on the vocab test. He does not have good handwriting, and that is meaning that he has to redo a lot of stuff and make corrections. He has been up till 10 many nights finishing up homework, which is making him pretty exhausted by the end of the week. I saw some victory today, though, when he wrote a postcard to a friend, and the finished product (without my help) was neat and mostly in complete sentences. Success! And, lucky for us, he LOVES school, and doesn't seem to notice that he's doing an insane amount of work. We're really hoping that as he continues to figure things out, the homework will let up a little bit.

David is loving his job. The students are great, and he's getting some really good chances to interact with them and push them on issues they haven't thought about. I think it's fair to say that he's becoming known as the guy who will talk about Biblical manhood and womanhood without apology. We got the chance to go spend a Saturday out in PA at a retreat center with about half of the student body, and he taught a breakout session titled, "Why We Hate True Community." I spent the day getting to know some of the girls, and getting really excited about spending time with them. I will be going into the city every 2-3 weeks to participate in their Bible studies, and can't wait to get started!

Thanks to dear friends, we were able to get a 'stay-cation' without our kids last weekend. We spent the weekend eating out and exploring the city. It was so, so relaxing, although much too short. From that weekend, I've got a few pictures of Hope, which are the only Hope pics I've got for you today (sorry!):


It really was fun--we basically spent 3 days pretending we were tourists who didn't live in the suburbs with 4 other kids. We got lots of comments about how cute our baby was, and we'd always walk away laughing about how they'd have been so disgusted if we'd been trooping around with all of our kids (which we have done several times, and are getting much better at).

Ellie turned 6, and I don't have a single picture from the entire day. We decided to go meet David in the city and get Chipotle, but due to traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel, the 45-minute trip in turned into a 2 1/2 hour bummer. Fortunately, Hope was asleep most of the time, so it wasn't nearly as stressful as it could've been, but we learned an important lesson about trying to go into the city in the evenings during the week.

I've been learning my way around Morristown Memorial, meeting different specialists. I took Hope to the neurologist last week, and came home with a glowing report. She was so upbeat, she didn't want to see us again for 6 months! How sweet is that? We will be going to have our 6-month checkup with the neurosurgeon this week. But I'll continue my Hope update in a minute. The other specialist we met was a pediatric ophthalmologist, who gave Rosie some glasses ("gasses" she says). Rose has been crossing her eyes for about 6 months now, but she was finally doing it consistently enough to take her in to the doctor. Sure enough, she's extremely far-sighted, and has earned herself a cute little pair of glasses. They're pretty thick, and make her eyes look bigger than they actually are, but other than that, they're really pretty cute. After a few days of easing her into them, she's now wearing them full-time and doing very well with them. She asks for them in the morning when she wakes up, and doesn't give us trouble after that.




And glasses makers are getting smart--we get one completely free replacement, no questions asked!

Hope continues to do very well. She is now lifting up her head when we put her on her tummy, and attempting to support herself with her arms. Through New Jersey's Early Intervention program, we are now seeing a physical therapist once a week and an occupational therapist once a week. I like both of the women very well, and am excited to see what forward progress we can make with her. We have learned, both through them and the neurologist, that a lot of her wobbly movements are due to the damage to her cerebellum. She has a lot of muscle weakness in her neck and upper back, which has contributed to her tendency to prefer turning her head to one side. This in turn has caused her skull to be slightly lopsided. When I go to the neurosurgeon this week, I'll be asking her about this, and a possible treatment is a helmet. Hope's a chunk--she now weight 18 lbs, 10 oz. I still carry her around a lot in the baby carrier, but I'm not sure how much longer my back's going to put up with that.

The biggest thing that continues to make us feel unsettled, though, is the fact that we do not yet have a permanent church home. We have been going to a church for the past two months, but we are viewing that as a trial period right now, and now sure if we'll stay there. Not to be rude, but I'm not asking for recommendations--but I would covet your prayers on this issue. We are really praying that God would show us where He wants us, and where He wants to use us. Funny how you only realize what you had when it's gone, right? If you live within any kind of commuting distance from ClearNote Church (there's one in Indy, too), go! Don't waste another precious moment! We are so very, very excited about going back at Christmastime for a wedding, and we're even looking into the possibility of me and the girls going a week early to the Christmas concert, and then to spend a week being refreshed by dear friends.

Hope Update: 5 months

Hope is 5 months old today! Can you believe it?

She had her first physical therapy evaluation on Monday. It went well, and I liked the women that I was working with. The people who do the evaluation are different from the actual PT who will work with Hope, but even the evaluator gave me a few ideas of things to do differently with her.

Hope is a couple months behind, which is about what we were expecting. She came in at the physical and cognitive level of a 2-3 month old. However, the therapist made a point of telling me that she thinks Hope's cognitive delays are due to her physical limitations, and will go away as soon as Hope gains better muscle strength and control. In the picture above, she is reaching for a toy, which she has just started doing in the past few days. Her movements are very jerky, which the therapist said is to be expected with damage to the cerebellum.
Hope loves people and faces. She is very expressive when you sit and talk to her. She's vocalizing, and will make noises with you. She loves Ellie, although she responds differently to Ellie than she does to me. I think she somehow knows that Ellie's a firecracker who might explode at any moment :)

While her neck control is getting better, it was by far her lowest scoring area on the evaluation. She's just starting to hold her head up when you hold her to your shoulder, and even then she's pretty wobbly.

While it is clear that she's seeing us and able to track, her eyes cross a fair amount. The therapist thought that this might just be due to muscle fatigue. She looks at something for a little while, and then after a bit, her head goes down and her eyes cross. Poor kid--she's tired!



One area where she's clearly excelling is eating and growing. She's a chunk, weighing in at 17 1/2 lbs. I love carrying my babies around, but she's so heavy and so floppy that we're starting to think about stroller options that will work for her. If you have a stroller that you love that would work for an infant (since she is still so floppy), but doesn't involve a snap-in car seat, let me know!

Hope is a super sweet baby. She is by far our easiest baby, which is the Lord's mercy to me! She is happy in her car seat, she loves a bouncer that I've been borrowing from Delene, and she's happy to sit in her baby seat and listen as I do school with the big girls. While we still don't know what the days ahead look like, we're so grateful to God for giving her to us!

Home Tour: The Dining Room

The dining room is still one of my works-in-progress. Things I love? The table. The rug. The huge windows. The chandelier. The picture rail.

Things that need some work? The pictures in the frames on the picture rail. Storage. And something to absorb sound.



You can see the trunk at one end of the dining room. It's housing pantry items that I can't fit into the pantry--mostly baking goods: sugar, flour, etc. I think I'll probably center it along that wall, in between the windows. Along the wall with the big window in the middle, I would like to put two of these on either side of the window. I think they would break up the wall, add a splash of color to a room that's very blue-and-gold, and provide some much-needed storage space for china, canned goods, and other misc. items. They would also give me a horizontal surface to put some decorative accents on. But, I've got to convince my husband first :) He's not sold on the red yet. And for sound-absorbtion, I'm going to add curtains at some point. I'm not sure when that'll happen: it's not really high on the priority list, both for decorating funds and my time. But I did find some fabric that I would love to use for curtains, if I get to them any time soon. This would make wonderfully graphic curtains and be a strong counterpart to the yellow walls.

Home Tour: The Kitchen

Here's the room I should've started with: the kitchen.

As you can see, the kitchen is beautiful. It has great brown tile which hides an abundance of dirt and kitchen debris, lovely stainless steel appliances, and beautiful cabinets. As far as functionality goes, it's great there too--it has a gas oven and range, which I LOVE, and big fridge, and even a teeny-tiny bathroom tucked in one corner (it's on the right-hand side of the last picture, next to the door out to the backyard). It was a little lacking in space, though, so we had to get creative to figure that out. As you can see, one of the cabinets is missing a door. It was one of those in-cabinet trash cans, which I abhor. They are disgusting. The grime on that thing was super thick, so thick that the drawer wouldn't open smoothly at all. So we pulled it out, cleaned up the cabinet door, and are still working on installing the hardware to put it back on. Doing that gained me an extra bottom cabinet, which helped, but we still needed more.

We decided to use on of my antique dresses as a DIY island in the middle of the kitchen. We bought $10 Ikea butcher-block cutting boards and put them up-side-down on the top of the dresser (with a layer of carpet non-skid stuff underneath) to add more counter space. I use the drawers for storage of spices and kitchen linens. But the back is the best part:

A couple of evenings with some chalkboard paint, and I've got a kitchen kid-distraction that they all love! The back of the dresser was painted a hideous pink, so it was not hard at all to start swiping away with primer and paint. And the kids LOVE it. And I'm super excited that I had the gray matter to come up with the idea :)

Here's the view looking down from the pass-through that leads to the living room. The step-stool is the same one that's up in the blue room (I have two), and it's the perfect size for kids to pull over and help with dinner prep.

The door in the back leads out to the backyard, and the pass-through to the dining room has been wonderful. I'm still working out the bugs of learning new appliances, but we're getting there. Today I was cooking grape jelly (from real grapes!) on the stove and home-made refried beans in the crockpot--both ideas from Delene :) I'm looking forward to making applesauce here in a month, hopefully finding some peaches for peach butter, and super-excited about Thanksgiving! We're hoping to rustle up some stray college students to fill our table up, and I'm guessing we won't have any trouble!

Home Tour: The Blue Room

I'm finally getting started on my house pictures! In part, truthfully, these room tours will also be my catalogue of things not yet done. Sigh. Such is life with kids :)

I must also start with two confession and one caveat:
Confession: Over the past three years, I have come to love decorating my house. I love design blogs, DIY blogs, mommy-craft blogs--all of it. While I try to limit the amount of time that I spend reading such blogs, it has been fun over the past few years to get lots of new ideas, learn new things I can put into practice, and start transforming my house. I have been thinking about how I wanted to decorate this house for the past 5 months--ever since we made the offer on it. I have had to learn in the past month, though, that putting it all together the way I want it is going to take more time than I thought. So, some rooms are more finished, and some rooms are more works-in-progress.

Caveat: My house never actually looks like this. I have staged these pictures while my big kids were watching TV in an attempt to get some of the cool design-blog-type pictures you see out there. But seriously? Never looks like this. Ever. Maybe for 2 seconds after I've cleaned it. But then I leave the room and it's back to chaos. (You can partially see this in the last picture here--the train that is supposed to be neatly in line on top of the bookcases is jauntily awry. Now the question is--who did it? I honestly don't think Carver could reach up there to mess with it, but I'm also pretty sure David doesn't go around the house messing things up just to see how long it takes me to notice...) But, it's also true that I'm a bit of a neat-nik. We do have set clutter-control times around here (before lunch, before dinner, and before bed) because when it gets too crazy I get crazy, but it still never really looks like this. Only when I've been the one doing all the cleaning, and that's very rarely the case.

So, on to the blue room!

As you can see, the room is very, um, blue. We did no painting in this house. While there are a few rooms that I would prefer to be a different color (including this one), the paint color in those rooms is not bad enough to justify the work needed to paint them. This is our homeschool/playroom. Rosie is my child-model. If this were a BHG shoot, she'd be my only child :)

I did the silhouettes of the kids several years ago. I need to buy another silver frame and actually do one of Rose and Hope. And, I haven't quite figured out how to hang pictures on plaster walls. This attempt involved some spackle and paint. They're almost straight.


The wall behind the couches will be our bulletin board wall. I have three boards, which I still need to figure out how to get on the wall (see above problem).

These are cheap-o Wal Mart bulletin boards. I painted the frames white, used spray adhesive to glue some cool fabric on, and then lined the edges with ribbon to hide my not-so-straight fabric edges. They really are cool looking, and they'll help break up that wall.


Next is the toy corner. The pictures above the kid's kitchen are pages from a used copy of "One Morning In Maine." I cut up the book, saved the best pictures, glued them to cheap mat board with spray adhesive, and put them on the wall. Very fun.



And last but not least is our wall-o-books. These are Ikea expedit shelves, which David and his dad and BIL spent a week putting together (along with the Billy shelves in our room). They also help break up the blue walls, and each shelf is deep enough and tall enough that I can put puzzles and games and other random stuff on the shelves. Homeschooling stuff is closer to the top, and along the bottom row are baskets hiding coloring stuff, crafting materials, musical instruments, and our bird-watching items. The step-stool is also Ikea (I've never been this close to an Ikea--they really are wonderful) that I painted a fun color. As you can see, Rose has figured out that the big kids are not the only ones who can climb it to get to what they want.


The one area I did not show you is the little closet in the corner, which houses bins of toys. I like to rotate toys--only have two or three things out at a time that the kids can play with, and every month or so, switch them up for something else. The keeps the toys fresh, and makes rainy mornings super fun when we go switch them out.

30 years and 4 months

I turned 30 last week. Somehow, with all the other things we've had going on in our lives this year, that just does not seem like a big deal. In more exciting news, Hope turned 4 months, and she's still doing splendidly!

For my birthday, David took us all into the city. We left the kids with the officers (all girls) of the house that David will be advising* (one of whom we had on good authority that she's a great babysitter!), and went out to dinner by ourselves. Well, with Hope. That's by ourselves, right? After we picked up the kids, we ran around the 15th floor of the Empire State Building a little, then took the kids over to his office to let them burn off some more steam there. Before heading home, we went to Greenwich Village and found some cannoli. It was a fun evening, and I'm thankful for a husband who can navigate Manhattan!

*To help its students bond, King's has a house system. This looks very similar to a frat/sorority system, except that every student is assigned to a house as a freshman. David will be advising the Queen Elizabeth I house this year.*

In other news, we have had a little bit of a rough start to figuring out Hope's doctors here. While we love the neurosurgeon that Dr. Young referred us to, our insurance situation it not ironed out yet, making the process of seeing more doctors and getting her head ultrasounds done very messy. I did go see a pediatrician with her on Friday for a 4 month check up and immunizations. Unfortunately, this doctor is not somebody that I will get along well with, and I left the office feeling very discouraged. It didn't help that I had all the other kids with me, and Laura had an accident in her pants close to the beginning of the visit. Once we got home, I gave Laura a bath, made a couple phone calls, did some online research, and found a doctor who will let me interview her before becoming an official patient. I will be doing that Tuesday morning, so please pray that she and I will hit it off, or, if not, that I will find a doctor that I am comfortable with. After that, we will be waiting until our insurance sorts itself out a little bit more before seeing any more doctors.

So, what's coming up next? We will be starting school on Monday. Carver doesn't start until a week from Monday, but the girls are pretty bored, so we're going to go ahead and start. We have not found a church home yet, so please pray that God will show us where He wants us here. We are having ClearNote friends come visit over Labor Day, and I'm sure I will be making more trips down to Philadelphia to spend time with the C's. We are getting settled in, figuring out grocery stores and shopping malls and indoor playplaces for rainy days. Slowly it's starting to feel more like home.

Hope has been doing a little better with sitting up and holding her head up, so I'm hoping to capture that with my camera over the next few days to show you. And I am working on a house tour--it's coming, I promise!

Pictoral fly-by of the last month...

On July 4th, Carver turned 8:





Our last week in Indiana, we took a day and visited Conner Prairie. It was super fun.


Carver got to try out his tomahawk-throwing skills:








Rose turned 2 on the day moving chaos started (Friday):


Packing-up-the-truck day (Sunday afternoon and evening). We think we had over 30 people from church show up to help us pack the truck. Except for the circumstances, it was a blast, and I got one last (staged--can you tell?) picture of representatives from our small group, which we have had in our house on Sunday nights for the last 4 years:


Filling up the cul-de-sac with cars and trucks and things that go:

Little house on Fridley Ct, we will miss you!

Grandpa Talcott and Grandpa Bray (who flew out to surprise us with Grandma Bray!) discuss fitting all of my possessions in the moving truck:

As an aside, we are so, so thankful for all the help we had moving. We had no idea how much help we needed until it was too late and we were in the thick of things, up to our necks in mess, excitement, children, and stuff. Talcotts and Brays both came to help, and Grandma Bray spent most of the weekend holding Hope, which was such a huge help, freeing me up. We had people dear to us show up on Monday morning before the closing to help us clean, and to sit and chat with me one last time in our house. We love all of you, and miss you all terribly.

Hope hanging out with Dad:


Laura turned 4:


Rose reads to Hope:


Hope listening to Dad sing hymns, in the absence of our piano (which we believe is still sitting in storage in Bloomington, hopefully coming to us soon!):


Sisters.


Bob, Ben and Thomas came to visit us this week. In all fairness, they did the hosting, taking David and Carver into Mozart at the Met and feeding them dinner in the city. We had them over for dinner Friday night, and then went to church with them on Sunday morning. Before Hope was born, we were told that she had a very high chance of having cerebral palsy, which is what Bob has. Bob has been a huge encouragement to me as we have thought about what life with a handicapped child could look like.

Today, we drove down to Philadelphia to spend the day with the C's. What a fun day, and so refreshing to me to be able to spend the entire day talking with Delene. Thank you, Lord, for friends.


I know, I know--there are no pictures of our new house. But they will be coming, as I finish getting rooms set up. I can't wait to show you our house, in the hopes that you'll come visit!