Weekend Away!

Since the year we first got married, Peter and I have been fortunate to get-away for a weekend near the end of the year! Most years we have ended up at the beach, but we've also gotten away to the mountains in Central Oregon. Having my parents be a part of a timeshare makes getting away in December super cheap and easy!

My parents actually had the timeshare for the week, but my dad got a teaching opportunity for the weekend so they offered to switch out with us and keep the kids while we took the weekend - um YEAH, we'll take it!!!

I just came out of a really rough week with discipline issues with our strong-willed toddler so a little break came at just the perfect time!

Our living room for the weekend:

We usually end up further down the coast, but this year we got to go to Seaside! If you've ever been to Seaside Oregon, then you know the most well known location in Seaside is this roundabout - so the view from our room was the best prime real estate in the city :)

And seriously, the weather was gorgeous and perfect! It was cold but not windy - so beautiful! Driving through the mountains and seeing our coast really makes me feel so blessed to live in the most beautiful part of the US!!!

We did a little bit of walking around and shopping! Peter was quite happy to find his favorite, impossible in the US to find candy bar :) We also picked up a few of the best melt in your mouth caramels - mmmmm!!!

And no trip away is complete without our breakfast staple sticky buns! So simple to make and oh so yummy!

The weekend away was very refreshing! It felt so strange to NOT be chasing kids around. It gave us enough peace and quiet for Peter to complete his last task in becoming a CPA - passing the Ethics part of his Exam!

It also gave me plenty of time to kick back and read some good books on parenting boys and some ideas on disciplining a toddler. We've been having a rough go around with toddler brutality to baby brother. I was beginning to feel totally clueless on how to handle things, but it was great to get an opportunity to sit down and read and realize that I am handling things the way they need to be handled and that this phase is VERY normal for a 19 month old and to just keep pressing forward and do what I'm doing :)

It was so great to just be able to enjoy my husband's company but by that second night away, I was very ready to get my boys back in my arms :) It was a perfect little winter getaway!!!

Theme Song

If your life was a television show, what would its theme song be? What music would be cued at the start of the show or when you entered a scene?

Okay so this prompt was super easy for me and I know it is super cheesy but whenever I hear this song, it totally makes me think of my life: So here it is for you - Enjoy the cheese that is my life :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptkWYhX79N8

10 Months

Wow, we sure are closing in quickly to that First Birthday Party around here! Yes, it is true Mr Eli is now 10 months old.

This has been a huge month of physical development for Mr Elias. The biggest milestone of which is pulling himself up on EVERYTHING, which quickly progressed to cruising the furniture. Tonight he even got up the nerve to cruise from his activity table to the toy box! Wow, he is getting brave fast!!!

Some other big milestones for him are high fiving and he has figured out how to crawl the "right" way. Before he still did a crazy variation of the army crawl, but he figured out that crawling up on his knees gets him moving a lot faster to things like big brother's snack bowl :)
He is still my perfect little angel baby :) He is full of lots of cuddles and snuggles. He still prefers mommy's arms to doing anything else! He remains a great sleeper and an incredible eater. He is turning into quite the little piggy at meal times :) He much prefers people food to baby food so we are cutting way back on the baby food these days. His favorites are french toast, eggs, macaroni and cheese, a bowl of oatmeal, animal cookies, goldfish, ritz crackers, and will still willing take any pureed fruits (veggies not so much right now!) honestly pretty much anything he can get his hands on he loves to eat!

He's fitting perfectly right in 9-12 month size clothes and size 3 diapers! He is on 3 - 8 ounce bottles a day, which we are going to start cutting back on this week and also got his first taste of whole milk in a sippy cup this month which he really liked!

Mr Eli, you are precious to us in so many ways. Your beautiful eyes your gorgeous hair that we are starting to see has a serious wave to it. Your beyond perfect smile! Your melt my heart dimple! We love you so very much and I wish I could make you stay my baby for a little while longer, but I am seeing more and more that you are insistent on starting to grow up!

Guess as much as I want to pretend that it isn't coming, it is time for me to start working on that First Birthday Party......

Special Powers

Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound ... we know you've got one. What's your 2011 superpower?

For those of you going what the what ... stop. Think about it for a moment: what have you learned that you can do better than anyone you know this year? What can you do that no one else can? Don't be shy!

Okay, so once again I needed some help from my husband on this one. What would be my super power? Sometimes I feel like other people can see ME more clearly than I can see myself :) His first suggestion had to do with becoming a mom 3 times in a 24 month period, but I liked his second suggestion more.

So my super power for 2011, was motivating my husband to pass the CPA exam :) As I have explained on here before, the CPA exam has been a 3 year battle for my poor husband. The last 3 years have been the craziest and busiest years for us which doesn't help when someone in the household needs lots of time set aside to study. Originally we had hoped to have Peter done with the exam before Malachi came home. When we got on the plane to fly to Ethiopia, Peter had 2 passed exams and 2 pending exams. So our hope was that he was actually done, but that wasn't how it worked out. So then the goal was to be done by the time Eli was born. Peter scheduled what would hopefully be his last exam for around a month before Eli's birth. Well, as things happened he actually had to take that exam 3 days after Eli was born. Going into a big exam with very little sleep in the last 3 days, no study time, and concern about your sick child do not make for the best exam day. But hey, we had already paid for it and there was no point in him not trying. Amazingly he actually came pretty close to passing it :)

the months that followed held a few more exam attempts before we came into the summer. Over the course of the last 3 years we had put A LOT of money into this exam and we were finding ourselves in a position where it was just not looking like we would be able to afford too many more exam attempts. Much less, we now had 2 children and there just wasn't time for Peter to continue to take these tests. He had 2 exams with passing credit, but one of those would be losing credit at the end of August and that would drain even more money and time from our family. It was time for us to have a huge sit down discussion and make some hard decisions. First off, we HAD to set a deadline for the exam. We could not continue on forever with this over our family. We were both feeling a huge amount of stress over this silly exam and we either needed to conquer it or put it behind us. So the first thing we did was set a deadline where we would put the exam behind us for good if it wasn't passed.

The second big thing we discussed, is we did not want to end this thing without a fight! We had invested 3 years into this thing and ultimately we wanted to end it with a victory! But we only had 2 months before Peter lost exam credit and we did not want to retake that exam if we didn't have to. A 2 month time frame to pass 2 tests was going to be no easy task! So we had to buckle down. Being married to an aspiring CPA is not the easiest thing in the world easy. His study schedule would affect all of us in the house! I would have to take on more responsibility. We set a super aggressive schedule that pretty much had Peter scheduling every moment he was home for the next 2 months. Sure, 2 months goes pretty fast, but it was still very difficult for all of us. Peter had really hit the burnout point by the end of August and I had been dealing with the peak of morning sickness and pregnancy fatigue, trying to keep the home together while he studied.

So there you have it! I pushed Peter (but in a loving way) to get through the exam. I supported him by giving him the time to study as he needed to do. And because of the sacrifices be both made, we were able to celebrate together that awesome day when I checked the mail and saw his congratulation letter :) We conquered the evil that is the CPA exam together :)

Virtues

On Day 3 of my resound11 project the prompt is Virtues:
What good have you done in 2011? Where do you really shine? What have you done that makes you proud of yourself?


Let's see, what did I do in 2011? I really needed my husbands help on this one and he told me that giving birth counts :P For me, the whole birth experience was pretty awesome! 14 hours of labor, a half hour of pushing - the whole experience wasn't bad or hard at all! I was ready to do it all over again a day later :) After how difficult the whole adoption process felt to get to my son Malachi, the whole pregnancy and birthing experience felt like a piece of cake to get my Elias! Obviously, it wasn't bad at all if I am here, doing it all over again already :)

Another area I feel like I "shined" through was the whole NICU experience. Having Eli in the NICU was the hardest thing I have ever walked through. I felt so hopeless and had to turn it all over to God and trust that he would make Eli healthy. I didn't have the option of taking time to recover from the birth, I just had to get up and get to my son as soon as possible! Regardless of how "easy" the birth process felt to me, I was exhausted and it was still quite a painful recovery process (birth is still birth after all) but I just had to suck it up and press forward and ignore the people who stared at me daily as I walked funny through the hospital to get to the NICU :) It was the most difficult thing I have ever had to do emotionally to say goodbye to him every night and leave him in the hospital. It was so hard to watch being poked and prodded and with all those machines on him, but we all survived it and I am proud of how well we did through that very difficult time!

I know I have failed MANY times as a mother this year, but I am also proud of the things I have accomplished. Having 2 kids, 9 months apart is not something easy to face. I had so many people tell me how overwhelming it was going to be, but honestly it hasn't been that hard at all. (until recently, which I will discuss later!) I have truly enjoyed being a mother to two children! I guess I can't really brag too much about myself because my children also make it quite easy! Malachi did awesome with the transition to big brother! Elias has been a very easy and content baby, so I guess my "shining" as a mother has WAY more to do with them, than it has to do with me :)

So there you have it! I am not a superwoman at all :) I gave birth, which millions upon millions of woman have done! I survived a difficult time with a sick child, which MANY deal with on a daily basis (unbelievable how big the NICU was, and that was just one hospital!) and have survived motherhood with two children!

Vices

As part of my Resound11 Link Up the question for today was:

Did you slip back into any old habits that you wish you hadn't? Did you gain any new habits that you wish you would have walked away from?

I don't really think I have any vices, but my new "thing" in 2011 has been Pinterest. It is a fun little website that you can waste a lot of time on. If you aren't on there yet, you really need to check it out. It has given me lots of ideas of things I want to accomplish around the house, but just haven't had the time to start yet. But I have tried lots of new recipes from Pinterest and am starting to use some of their ideas for entertaining Malachi!

Dec 1st - Resound11 Link Up

Today, I heard about a really fun opportunity to look back at 2011 and participate in a blog link up for each day of the month of December. We will see if I am able to keep up with it (no promises). You can join the fun too by linking up at resound11!

Okay so the first prompt is: What is one word to describe your 2011? Why does that word sum up your year?

The first word that came to my mind when I read that was: CONTENT!

I am finally in the place that I have always wanted to be! We have the home, we have the kids, I get to stay at home with them, and Peter passed his CPA exam - freeing up his schedule considerably! We've reached an incredible place of contentment! We're not in the midst of any big projects (besides incubating baby #3) but nothing like battling our way through the adoption process or anything along those lines.

Our family life is in a decent spot (more on that later!), Peter's job is going well and feels pretty secure (which is a HUGE deal in this economy), our marriage feels like it is in the best shape it has ever been! This pregnancy has been going very well- life is good!

Sure there are things that I still desire. I would love a bigger house, but with home values where they are that isn't going to happen anytime soon. I would love to adopt again, but I know my hands are going to be very full for years to come. I would love to be moving a bit faster on our financial goals, but we are where we are right now and we can't really do anything to change that. God has really been working on my heart this year in learning to be content exactly where we are!

So yes, I am in a very content place right now and it feels really nice! I truly feel like I have been given everything I have wanted out of life and MORE!