Devanie.com

Zach is almost 1 and 1/2 years old. Thankfully he hasn’t found much around the house to get into major trouble with. This morning I started putting him in a pack-n-play in front of the TV with his favorite trucks and a sippy. He’s pretty content to hang out there until my shower is over and sometimes longer. It’s very helpful when I have to nurse Aurora or make dinner. His highchair has also been a pain saver. That is how I am able to read blogs and post today. Love the buckles. I’ll even buckle him in his car seat when I have to load the car/get ready for church etc. before we need to go and leave it in the garage with the car door open (it works for now but the weather will be too hot soon)and let him watch TV for a few minutes until we are all packed and ready to go.

He does have a black eye now from his tonka dump truck. He fell into the back corner of it(from a sitting position). It left 1 dot under his eye that now is a little more blueish purple now.

I’ve also considered trying to fit him back into that excersaucer if all else fails.

When we are outside I have to be sure it’s when Aurora is sleeping and have the portable baby monitor with me to hear her, but I have to be able to pay attention only to him so he doesn’t run out into the street or find other dangerous things to get into.

I gave him his first mowhawk today. It’s time for a haircut, again.

Lately I have been able to ask Sierra to hold Aurora and put her to sleep without any trouble:

During dinner prep last night I left Sierra holding Aurora on the sofa.

Things were at that awkward silent point so I called Sierra, no answer I tried again and again. I walked over to the sofa knowing she had fallen asleep and I worried that she might drop the precious bundle named Aurora to the floor. I saw that they were both sleeping but OK, so I ran downstairs and came back up with the camera snapped some shots. Sierra is not well, her ear infections are back along with a nasty cough and runny nose. Aurora is OK. I took the pictures, and pulled Aurora from Sierras lap. Sierra’s arms in turn sprung forward stabbing me along the way. She was startled and afraid that Aurora was falling off her lap. That made me smile. Even though she was sleepy her motherly instincts were shouting out loud and clear protecting her little baby sister.

As I took the pictures Sierra’s head would bob from up and back down again. As she fell asleep and tried to stay awake. It was a precious moment. Zach ran around like nothing was happening and played and had fun. The girls slept right through it.

We had elaborate plans last night to make a fruit salad, deviled eggs and bring them and the neighbors chick down to Grandma and Grandpa’s for Family Home Evening. I had to get Zach to the Doctor for his cold and his ears. The soonest he could get in was 4:30 PM. I was still going to try to make it. We almost kept Sierra home from school yesterday. I was able to convince the Doctor without Sierra there (she had fallen asleep on the sofa) that she too had ear infections and I needed him to prescribe antibiotics for her and Zach. Which he did. SO they are on the mend. We have Quadruple ear infections and Zach has a sad zombie-like case of pink-eye. Life is sickly and hard for Zach and Sierra unless they are constantly medicated right now. Poor babies! Aurora will sometimes get congested but she’s pretty good. Hailey has missed the brunt of it so far. But it’s all very contagious and she should be right behind.

Nathan and I are looking for a sense of normal life again. We really don’t know when that will show up.

I have no cell phone. I use it all the time when I need to find a place that isn’t in the GPS, or to call my family, or making arrangements that I couldn’t make at home with kids all over(the car is a great place to get my visiting done while the all watch TV) Last night I tried to use it to call Nathan collect to tell him we weren’t going to make it to his parents because Zach had pink eye, Aurora needed to eat, We had to pick up prescriptions, etc. I had already felt like I had been through the ringer trying to tote Auroras Car seat vicariously on the umbrella stroller with Zach unbuckled trying to sleep below and finagle my way through doorways and onto elevators and in to doctors offices. I aught to get a double stroller for such occasions. I rarely need them though because I just go grocery shopping and they both fit in the cart with all the groceries. I can usually get Zach to walk holding my hand while I carry the car seat. – I forgot to put shoes on him, he was sleeping in the car prior to heading off to the appointment. I also didn’t put the baby carrier (snugli) in the car. Needless to say the evening was all very hard to manage.

I’m trying to set something up with MaryAnne’s family talk to save money on cell phones and use it on occasions when I need to tell Nathan something.

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Hailey’s class.

Hailey’s teacher had a baby a couple days before I did. She is on Maternity leave.

The kids in Hailey’s class are “out of control” according to substitute #2 and they are replacing(firing)this older sub with a new sub starting Monday.

Hailey has been so involved in her own thoughts and collecting her playground treasures that her desk became a cause for concern, so the Sub and Hailey went through it after school causing parents to wait longer than necessary to get her home from school. Hailey lost school assignments and a couple pages of homework. We had to ground her for not paying enough attention in school and the evening she came home with 15 pages of homework I set her down with a timer and gave her 10 minutes per page to finish. She got almost all of the pages done that night. She thrives on the timer and it helps her get her work done in a reasonable amount of time. She stays on track when she has a goal to set. However she still doesn’t understand the concept of time. She wastes a lot of my time when I ask her to get ready for bed and I later find that she got “off track” again and ended up playing in her room. She wastes a lot of time in general for just about everyone around her. I sent her to school with The timer on Friday and told her she had 8 minutes per page to get her work done at school. The Sub said it was a great idea and it helped her so much. Hailey later reported that it only bothers 3 students in her class.

So now I have this issue I need to figure out. It’s hard enough moving into a new school. But to get the teacher that takes maternity leave, the “out of Control” class with bad examples all around her, and a third and possibly 4th substitute teacher before the regular teacher returns to school poses this concern. . .

Shall I request a move in classrooms and get her a settled class with a real teacher?

Or should I leave her there and let her mix with the bad seeds and be dispersed with them through out the rest of the school next year?????

I don’t think she has any super duper close friends in the class. She seems to play in her own little world when she is on the playground. She is very outspoken and creative when she plays with the kids in class and they make “clubs” and she joins them and wants to be the best member of the club. . .the latest club was the bug catchers club where they would all go out and collect living insects and show them off to their friends. And she plays business with them and they exchange jewels and coins for items they create with paper and such. Somehow it seems that that may be all she’s learning/doing, like she is in preschool or Kindergarten again and they had more free-play time than necessary.

What do I do? I’d like to be an assistant in the classroom, but that’s just not possible with 3 other kids at home. Plus I don’t have the training to control a classroom of 19 kids let alone a house of 6 people. There is something to be said out loud about Connecticut schools, they are awesome and the teachers really pay close attention to their students. Which in turn helps the parents guide them in and out of school. I’m noticing the same in Sierra’s class. Too much play and not enough personal connection from her teacher to her to really find out what she needs or how to help her thrive. The Conference we had with her teacher last said the only thing Sierra needs to do is “Have more fun.” which is total opposite when it comes to school. She gets frustrated because she’s never had a teacher really sit down and make her do her work. Her preschool was pretty much free-play and her kindergarten seems to be all free-play too. Just because Sierra doesn’t know “how” to draw a cat when asked doesn’t mean she needs to play it means she needs help figuring out where to start to make it look like a cat. HUMPH! Teach her don’t just ask her and tell her. Help her!

I’m going to start doing more at home since things are starting to clam down a bit more with Aurora’s newborn schedule. I have quite a few great books to teach from and worksheets for them. Instead of Hailey spending all her time in her own little world I’ll fill it with knowledge. The hopefully she will be more like Daddy when she is older. She is very smart and will retain what she is taught, but I think she continually needs something to learn.

I’ll set you free now. I’m babysitting a neighbors 3 kids in a few minutes and later tonight they will take all of mine then Nathan and I are going on a 4 hour date to the amusement park to ride the grown up rides and actually enjoy ourselves there =)

This morning.

Nathan thought it was worth getting the camera.

Hair Don’t

I have plenty to say about the kids but I won’t because yesterday I spent about 4-5 hours working on my hair. I made an appointment to have the ends permed so I would have cute little curls – as though I used a curling iron on it so when I flip it up and it dries only cute curls would appear. I finally found some salons willing to perm just the ends. I really spent from 10 AM to 4 PM working things out.

Well, after 1 1/2 hours in the salon and having to make Nathan run pick Sierra up from school because I was having a hair crisis and my hair was in really BAD shape. The perm didn’t take. It crinkled my and singed and chemically burned my hair. The ends were shredding off. I figured, when I went to get it permed just at the bottom if it didn’t look good, I could just get the curls cut off it was long enough to be fixed and still have a reasonable amount of hair to pull back in a pony-tail or french twist.

We trimmed 2 inches off and it still looked and felt REALLY bad. It felt like mush when you touched it when it was wet and when it dried you couldn’t even brush it or run a pick through it. It looked like carpet. I ran home and washed it and conditioned it about 3 times then put in some anti-frizz serum. All those didn’t work. Jen at the salon was more than willing to re-cut it if it didn’t get better. So I headed back to the salon (after dropping off and picking up Sierra from a play date). I took Sierra and Aurora with me. We chopped off a bunch more. Jen had never had a perm Horror Story to tell until my hair today and she is in her mid to late thirties. Now she had a horror story to tell.

The reason my hair didn’t take the perm and singed was the Sun-In spray I highlight my hair with once in a while. Although it was my fault for using sun in and getting a perm ~ which I didn’t know would lead to this(see pictures). I was not charged for the shampoo, perm and 2 haircuts. THANK GOODNESS! It turned out pretty cute I think, so did Nathan’s brothers when they came over for Boys Night Out to play computer games. Nathan was unsure for a while and decided that he still likes long straight hair best. I think he likes it OK though.

The kids and I went outside and took some pictures. Hailey and Sierra are getting a lot better at taking pictures so I have been handing the camera over to them more often.

I think, although I still have 20 pounds of baby-fat still lingering to loose, since it has only been 4 weeks I think. . .The pictures turned out OK!

How Aurora spent the day in her car seat.

Hair Do

A whirlwind.

I haven’t had a moment to sit, let alone blog.

Grandma and Grandpa Lay came out for a Whirlwind Visit and to spend Easter with us.

Saturday We took Grandma and Grandpa lay to Taylorsville, UT to visit my Grandma and Grandpa Lay’s grave. We put tulips in front of it. I was able to get a few pics with the camera. I have no idea when I will have time to post those. We Spent a lot of the day in Downtown Salt Lake City, UT and walk through Temple Square, walked to the front of the new conference center and then we walked across a number of blocks to get to the Gateway Open Air Mall. We sent the kids and Nathan through the water fountain that shoots jets of water periodically, and we got to watch the Bunny Hop parade in the center. We also hit a bookstore and picked up books for the kids. Went to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shop and headed back to the car. While we were in Taylorsville we had a picnic at Taylorsville park. Sierra and I played in the sand while Grandma Grandpa Lay and Daddy took Hailey and Zach to the swings.

I delegated Easter dinner to Grandma Grandpa and Aunt Suzie. I made dessert. I made an Easter egg cake – I didn’t even have 2 seconds to take a picture of it before it was eaten and the day was over. Nathan spent hours afterword cleaning the dishes an the rest of the mess. I let potato peels go in the garbage disposal and they clogged it so he fixed it.

The kids dyed eggs with Nathan and Grandma Lay – I hung around a little.
We went on an Easter egg hunt Saturday. We got there just as the kids started running across the lawn. The girls got “donation eggs” from some young girls about 10 years old that had huge baskets full. We had a wonderfully huge one Sunday afternoon with Joe’s kids and mine. It didn’t take 2 minutes to clear the field because Grandma Lay and I are good at hiding eggs.

We all went to church Easter Sunday. Then Nathan and I went to visit with the Bishop of our church. I’ve now got a visiting teaching list as well. My parents and Uncle Aaron and Aunt Alice stayed with the 4 kids.

I gave my dad a haircut while they were here. The second adult male I have ever given a haircut – it worked!

I also showed my Dad how to upload family pictures onto his PAF – Personal Ancestral Files He was able to scan in some pictures he had and save them to his portable drive. He saved everything he has on family history to my computer. He spent quite a bit of time working on geneology. I had some pictures of pictures that my sister Janika has all the originals of.

Monday we went to Big Lots to shop and Tuesday we got to Bukoos to get some bargains. The I took my Dad to the Bountiful, UT Temple.

I had all kinds of extravagant plans for making meals. We ended up eating take-out or fast food almost the entire time they were here. I don’t think I have ever been so completely saturated with busy in my life. The girls are in school too they had 1 1/2 day Easter break so we have been making the trips to and from school 3 times a day as well.

We lost the camera – in the toy room – during the egg hunt and I took some pictures on my phone but those are a bit harder to download.

Tuesday my mom picked up the kids – Great Grandma Leavitt 76 years old 3 1/2 hr drive to Idaho and back to our house. They all left by 9 this Wednesday morning.

Last Friday morning we had a baby chick delivered to our door that I have had to take care of like another baby too!

Holy mole. . .You have no idea. Grandma Lay did take Aurora from me at 3 AM and kept her for the rest of the night so I could sleep. It was very nice. I feel better now that I have had sleep. Now my cleaning lady is here with an apprentice – I’m about ready to let her go because I am able to keep the house clean on my own a little better now. Nathan and I are ready to have our house back.

Life is so much different when you are nursing baby 4. Or holding baby 4. I had more help this past few days than ever but I still felt overwhelmed and flustered with all the things that had to be done, were being done and needed to be put away, cleaned diapers to be changes babies to rock to sleep. It was all so crazy busy it’s almost like the grandparents never even came. How can that be? Nathan was working his hands off taking care of tons of my usual work – laundry some trips to the school, some meals for kids, and a ton more, how can I have felt that I had so much going on. So much that after the weekend I feel like I
didn’t really See Hailey and Sierra. They spent a good part of the vacation watching StarWars movies. How can I feel like I missed out on something? Why do I feel like I burdened Nathan with a million things yet, I also feel like I hardly did anything when I know I worked my butt off. Why do I feel like that? Is it the piling on of the 4th kid? I felt like I had 8-9 kids to take care of and 4-5 of them were grown up. . .That’s probably true. I think we were all taking care of eachother. Did I do an OK job this weekend and couple days being a chauffer, Mom, Easter Bunny, Wife, Daughter, Granddaughter, cleaning lady, farmer, wet nurse, good member of the church and actually reading some scriptures and saying some personal prayers? Did I do and OK job? If so. . .why do I feel lacking? yet at the same time overworked? Why when I had all the help from my folks and my loving husband and even my cleaning lady? Where did I go wacko?

I used to feel bad for moms that had 3 kids when I had 2 and wondered how they did it. The I felt bad for people that had 4 kids when I had 3. Now I feel normal – well sorta wacked out crazy. I guess that’s pretty normal when you have 4 kids. My wonderful mother in law whom had 9 kids 8 living said after her 4th living that’s when she thought it was a bit much. But still went on to have 4 more. I couldn’t do that. I’m totally done. I’m not sure if my parents or his were insane and liked the caos or if they loved every minute of the fiasco. cuz I know far too many people that have 4 kids that are more overwhelmed than they would like to admit.

I cannot believe I actually have time to write this. Gotta run get Hailey though. Sierra went on a play date an the babies are sleeping.

Things are going well.

I’m so happy to be un-pregnant! I can actually move around!

I’m grateful for being not-pregnant!

Nathan is busy with meetings but we also get to see him a lot. He likes to play Nintendo games and the girls love watching. We’ve moved from Animal Crossing – which I play on an occasional basis to Star Wars Lego II.

Nathan is also encouraging us to be better members of our church. We are working on doing more Food Storage, Family Home evening and we have incentives to do those and finish the last 8 books in the book of Mormon by the end of the year. If we finish getting 3 months of Food Storage we will get some Movie Accessories for the basement. If we remember to have FHE at least 3 times a month we will get to take a trip to Boise, ID. If we finish the Book of Mormon By Dec/ 1st we each get $100 to spend on other people for Christmas.

Nathan has also helped re-instate the Goal Books that we started with the girls in 2004. Now they have set new goals and some of those goals are going to help us get the other things done. For each goal they finish they get $5 – they aren’t very easy and some things will take weeks and weeks to finish. One example is to plan FHE with Dad 5 times and teach the lesson – which they will have to rotate with their sister whom also has the goal to complete. So that could take 2 or 3 months to finish.

I have been gearing up for Easter. We missed St. Patricks day celebrations and April Fools Jokes because I haven’t quite been on the ball. Last night for FHE I was in charge of the game and treat. I hid Easter eggs with candy in them in hard places since the girls are getting older and I threw a couple on the floor for Zach. Our game was Easter egg hunt – great practice for Zach who figured it out quickly, and the treats were yummy. It was all indoors so we didn’t get chilled =) I have also been doing the usual grocery shopping with coupons and getting deals at the good sales. We have to track wheat we have in our food storage already so we are going to keep food journals and track the things we eat and the things we have to see where we are in that. I’ve also been up a lot at night nursing a newborn, running kids to the park, meeting with teachers, running errands shopping with Suzie and so on.

Hailey has been “Dilly Dallying”

It’s so frustrating – I had a long talk with her after school. She’s had a substitute for 2 days and only knowing her for 2 days she said, “Hailey needs to work faster. Things are just going to get harder for her.” It’s so true. I have tried so many things I sure hope Aurora doesn’t “Dilly Dally” all day when she’s older.

Sierra has just been off the wall talkative. She just has so much to say and she is always begging me to do things with her. Today was no different. I can’t do EVERYTHING she wants because my time has to be split between 6 people. I’ve done easy bake oven with her, taken her to the bouncy houses that were promoting homes for sale in the neighborhood, taken her to the park, I took all of them to McDonald’s, Let her ride her scooter for a while, made blueberry muffins with her, It feels like I’m always making her favorite foods. I’ve finished her math box activities with her – 16 in 1 sitting- and then some other things ALL THIS WEEK. . . Somehow she knows how to get your full attention. but it is so wearing on me lately.(ask Suzie about today) I need her in full time school. 3 hours 4 days a week and 2 on Friday’s just isn’t enough schooling for this little whipper snapper.

Zach is fun. He wrestles, laughs finds things to do when no-one can play with him, he cuddles, he brings me the comb and hairspray when I’m doing the girls hair so he can have his done too, he tries talking, he loves taking baths, he can be a handful too. The minute he sees black asphalt he wants to RUN. I have to carry him and the car seat with Aurora in it anywhere we go to keep him from running away or into cars when we go out shopping. He also loves the cul-de-sac and the driveways and would be on the main road in a heartbeat given the opportunity.

Aurora keeps me up and night and sleeps way better in out bed than anywhere else but I don’t. I cannot sleep well with her in my bed. Last night I gave in and put her in the swing Full blast. I put her in at 4:30 and I think she would have stayed til 9 had I not had to tear her from her Sleeping Beauty sleep to run kids to school and meet Suzie at BuKoos.

Gotta run. Sierra let Zach out of the bath in his wet swim pants and I can just imagine what it’s doing to the house.

It’s too soon for pets. I’m still busy raising kids.

Our Chicky is still alive. I think just barely though. The first day she came home Zach gave her a tight squeeze. And Yesterday without permission the girls gave her a bath. (she is now out of the kids reach and Chirps almost constantly) Last night I hand dropped water into her mouth she loved it! She also pecked at her feed pretty happily. This afternoon I took a glance and she is squatting. She pooped and peed which is good but it looks like she stayed in close to the same place all night(maybe to keep warm? I moved the box and she tipped over feet up). . .Shana or Grandma. . .I’m taking that as a bad sign. What shall I do?

Aurora is still alive. . . there is a reason why I do not want pets and hardly want a garden now. . . We are lucky our kids are all still alive. I heard a quote not long ago and I feel like sharing it with you because I feel the same way.

“If the kids are alive by the time Hubby comes home, then I’ve done my job.” – unknownWe had some fish and they died, I planted some seeds and they are pretty much dead – there are some pea plants still surviving and somehow we got mushrooms that look inside out, growing in the planters. If we had a dog, it’d be dead.

I’m guessing Chase won’t be too far behind. Unless There is a skillful chicken lover that knows how to take care of her close by.

This goes to show that I have 1 job that is taking care of my family. Animals are not a part of my family.