Things with the house reorganizing are coming along every so slowly doing it mostly by myself.

Yesterday I reorganized all the boxes in the POD outside and brought in 95% of the toys.  They’re semi-organized in our old bedroom, the new playroom/office.  I got completely worn out and sore after moving all those boxes.  I’ve been too tired to do any more today!

I managed to take the girls outside earlier to check out signs of spring.  We also potted some flowers they picked out when we were shopping yesterday.  I was intending to plant some seeds too, but after feeding the chickens and carrying the chicken feed, then walking outside with the kids, and putting a few flowers in pots I suddenly had no energy left.

This pregnancy is really wearing me out for some reason.  My body just stops.  Cannot keep going, must lay down.  Dislike!

I get antsy when I can’t get up and do things.  If there’s no chaos I feel the need to create some, I can’t just sit here. Body, really…I’m not feeling sick anymore thankfully, just worn out sometimes.

Maybe I’m becoming elderly and feeble.  You know, at the ripe old age of 26.  ;)

And my toes are swollen.  Dude! I’ve never had swelling this early in pregnancy before.  June and July might be long, hot swelly months for me.  Yikes.

I am getting cautiously excited about a teeny brand new baby to snuggle and love on.  I’m still paranoid about miscarriage, or I guess now still birth.  He’s not nearly as active as Rosie and Ada were, at least not that I can feel all the time.  My placenta makes an L shape along the side and top, so maybe that’s blocking some of his movements?  He’s down so low too, way lower than the girls.

I’m already in love with him, somehow.  That scares me since he’s not safe in my arms yet.

But a new baby! I might really be having one?  To dress in cute baby clothes, and with a tiny bum to pat.  Soft baby hair to sniff.  Send help.

Hate being pregnant when I feel awful, but I could easily have a million newborns.

I’ll just…post pictures now.

First, here are a couple of instagram pictures from yesterday at lunch.

These pictures are from our time outside this afternoon:

Our strawberry patch got decimated by the ducks.  I wasn’t sure they would come back up, but yesterday tiny leaves appeared and today they’re even bigger.

Rapidly growing!  These little dew looking drops are not dew.  Guttation, maybe?

This would be perfect if Rintoo was sniffing a flower, but instead he’s sniffing dead tomato stalks from last year that I never cleaned out…

Periwinkle is in bloom!

This is the almost actual color of these flowers. They are very dark blue/purple in person.  I’ve never, ever seen ones so striking before! I can’t remember the name of them.

I saw them at Walmart yesterday, which isn’t somewhere I normally buy flowers but I couldn’t not buy them!

Rosie and Ada picked Primrose flowers for themselves.  We put them in clay pots today and since they only need 3-6 hours of direct sunlight per day the girls can keep them their rooms.

Rosie was distressed because the petals on her plant got old and white overnight.  Luckily there are brand new buds down inside waiting to open.

The wild violets are blooming!

I don’t know why people put weed killer on their yards, some weeds are beautiful.  What is our obsession with plain perfect grass??

I don’t know what these are, but they’re so cool!  They’ve never grown under this tree ever before.  We just found a random patch of them had popped up.

They’re tiny.

Leaves: Coming soon to a tree near you!

It’s supposed to storm tomorrow and then turn cooler again.

The past couple of days of 80 degree temps were heavenly!  Can’t wait for summer.

We have a mouse in our house!  This has never happened before here.

It came in the dryer vent hole, stole my collection of saved garden seeds, and made a nice nest behind the dryer in the corner.  I saw no signs of it and had no idea it was there until our dryer broke and we got it repaired the other day.  When we pulled out the dryer, there was the evidence!

I wondered why my cats had taken to sleeping in the laundry closet area.  I thought they just liked the pile of blankets and sheets on the floor I’d put off washing, warm and cozy by the dryer.

I’d found some fairly good sized blood splatters on my kitchen floor several different mornings over the past few weeks.  I thought maybe it was from Abby’s tail.  (My lab mix, the tip of her tail was missing when we rescued her as a puppy and she thocks her big tail into things and busts the tip open sometimes.)  Except Abby’s tail usually leaves bloody swooshes on the wall at her height, not splatters in the floor, and not quite so much blood.  Her tail drives me insane.  It was horrible before we repainted with washable paint.  At least now it wipes right off.

I guess the cats have been catching and killing the mice every time they tried to venture beyond the laundry closet area.  Earning their keep!

We blocked off the dryer vent hole temporarily, but I think we must have blocked another mouse inside.  Last night Willow, my long haired tortoiseshell maincoone-ish kitty, had her head stuffed behind the set of small plastic drawers next to the washing machine.  I said to Tyler, “Quick, look, it’s the mouse!”  Willow was completely still except for a tiny tick at the tip of her tail.

He rolled his eyes and claimed he wouldn’t fall for that.  (I’m always trying to scare him, it’s so easy!)

I waited until he was standing nearby and then I quickly flung the bottom drawer open.

The mouse shot out jack-in-the-box style and Tyler screamed and screamed while Willow chased it behind the dryer.

Excellent entertainment.

Unfortunately the mouse hid somewhere back there and I don’t think Willow caught it.  When I got up in the middle of the night to get a drink three of my cats were sitting in there staring.

I’m debating whether to set a trap.  Willow will probably get her long fur caught in the trap!  I can close her out of the laundry closet, but she’s sneaky and I’m sure one of the kids or Tyler will leave the door slightly cracked and she’ll get in.  The last thing I need is my cat stuck in a mouse trap behind the dryer where I can’t reach her with my pregnant belly.

I’m going to give the cats a few more days to kill it before I try anything else.

The stupid mouse got in my drawer of cleaning rags in that plastic set of drawers!  At least it hasn’t been able to get to the cabinets or anywhere else, there’s no mouse poop anywhere but right behind the drawers, washing machine, and dryer.  Mouse knows it will be swiftly murdered as soon as it ventures into the open!

It’s only a matter of time, rodent.  Only a matter of time…you chose the wrong domicile to inhabit.  Four cats live here.

 

Tyler and I both have the cold Ada and Rosie had a few days ago.  Ada is FINALLY getting better from it.  Rosie is, of course, fine.  This feels like the exact same cold I had a few weeks ago.  On its way to sinus infection, pounding cheeks that nothing helps.  Low grade fever, gritty throat, horrible feeling head.  General misery.

I just cannot take being sick any longer.  I haven’t felt like a regular human being since November.  That’s way too long.

It seems like spring is never going to come.  It’s usually somewhat warm here by now.

It was 70 degrees and sunny yesterday. Bliss!  But it was just a fluke.  Today it’s 35 degrees with rain/snow.  The entire ten day forecast is between 30-50 degrees, mostly in the low 40′s.  Crappy.

I NEED warm weather and good health for my sanity. Totally losing it over here.  I could use a beach vacation right about now, but I feel to sick to travel. (Not to mention lack of time and money, hahahaha.)

Where is spring?

 

Here are a few pictures from our random spring tease yesterday.  They’re watermarked now because I have found the stolen on the internet randomly, not to mention that entire fake Facebook account someone made once.  People are messed up.  I decided to set the gallery to watermark them all automatically.

Speaking of Facebook, I get a lot of friend requests.  I’ve had to start only adding people I know in real life for the most part because I cannot keep track of who all these people are.  I look at my feed and I can’t find my actual real life friends on it.  It’s too much to handle.  People take it personally, but it’s nothing personal.  I just can’t add everyone in the world to my account and still actually use Facebook.  That’s what the blog and this diary are for–to share with more people.

 

Anyway, pictures…

It looks a tiny bit like spring.  Buds on trees exploded yesterday!  Too bad they’re getting frozen today, and all week.

Something was thinking about actually blooming.

The runny nose and chapped face, and breakfast on her shirt.  Keeping it real again.

I could edit all that out, but it would be way too much effort.

Very tiny snail in my palm.

We dug up little earth worms.

I think you can see its intestines full of worm poop!

Ada enjoyed holding worms.  Rosie isn’t afraid, but wasn’t that interested.

Don’t ask me what my marker covered child is wearing.  She wanted to leave on her baby legs and wear shorts.

 

 I took Ada back to the doctor today. Her throat is still infected, worse than before.  We had to miss homeschool co-op because she was awake all night with a fever yet again.

Rosie is as grumpy as she’s probably ever been in her life!  Her nose is still stuffy, which is unusual for her.  Must be an extra crappy cold.

Ada still acts cheerful, despite being sick and never sleeping.

Here she is on her bird watching perch this morning.  Her shirt is off because she spilled grits all over it a few minutes prior to this picture.  They are also all over her pants, but those hadn’t been ripped off yet…

We’ve had one small bit of spring cheer.  My grandma brought us some bird seed cakes and a big metal hook to hang them on.

My grandpa, who just died in October, loved bird watching.  I used to watch birds with him in their backyard all the time as a kid.  A few months before he died he gave us his bird books, three of them.  Special memories.

We haven’t ever had any luck with bird feeders at our house here before because the squirrels always monopolize the whole thing and scare the birds away.  Rosie recently saw an episode of Curious George where they feed the squirrels peanuts in the shell, so she decided maybe if we feed the squirrels every day then they will leave the bird seed alone.

Wouldn’t you know, it seems to be working!  Rosie has named the squirrels and now feeds them a handful of peanuts every day.  Well she actually thinks there’s just one squirrel and she’s named him Cyril.  I’m not sure if it’s one squirrel or several that look alike.  Anyway, she sets out a pile for them, then returns throughout the day to count the peanuts to see how many the squirrels have eaten.  We now have very happy squirrels in our yard.  Or one very happy squirrel named Cyril.  Happy at least until my cat Andora beheads and eats it.  That will be a traumatic day.

The squirrel(s) haven’t bothered the bird seed any longer!

Today the girls spent every hour we were home glued to the window.  This morning every time a bird would land they would scream with excitement.  Finally I convinced them (and by them I mostly mean Ada) that this was scaring the birds away.

We saw three different types of bird today, which is a lot considering it’s still freezing cold outside.  The first type of bird I didn’t ID.

Rosie didn’t see that bird, so I didn’t look it up.  It only stayed for a split second, I could barely even get a look at it!

The second visitor was a black capped chickadee.  We saw two together at one point, but usually just one came at a time.  Our bird book told us that they live here year round, and that when they fly they look like they are riding waves in the air so you can always pick them out in the sky based on their unique flight pattern.  We were able to easily see them flying way off in the distance after learning that fact!

We also read that chickadees like to fly up, take one seed, then fly up to the top of a tree to eat it in a safe place.  That explained why the chickadee kept coming and going quickly!

I took these pictures through my living room window.

This afternoon we saw a bird I’ve actually never seen before.  It took us a few minutes of looking through the bird books to ID it.

It’s a tufted titmouse!

The bird books told us that the tufted titmouse means “small bird” and the like to hunt with black capped chickadees!  They don’t migrate, they stay here year round like the chickadees.  I wonder why I’ve never seen one before.  Maybe I just never noticed.

The tufted titmouse is very inquisitive.  When it heard Ada it climbed down on the ground and peered up at us in the window and peeped hello.  Apparently they will also take fur from a sleeping cat to use in their nests.  That would be a funny sight to see.

We were also able to hear both of the bird calls.  The tufted titmouse says, “Peter, peter, peter, peter!”  We’ve been hearing that one a lot first thing in the morning and never knew what bird it was.

Tomorrow, if Rosie is less grumpy, we’re going to draw and water color the birds we’ve seen out front in our nature notebooks.  Rosie is keeping a check list of them in one of the bird reference books.

I’ve been trying to get Rosie interested in The Burgess Bird Book, but so far she’s been bored by it.  I was hoping to read through it with her this spring.  Hopefully this bird feeder will make it more exciting to her.  It’s a fictional story about a bird couple, but it has true bird facts in it.  It’s a very good book!

I am so incredibly ready for nice weather.  Despite being sunny today it was only 35 degrees out.  I keep checking the 10 day forecast hoping for something good, but all I see is a lot of rain and 40′s-50′s for temps.  Depressing.

I can’t start a bunch of seeds right now because I don’t know if we’re going to move or not.  I guess if we don’t move I will just buy started plants from the Amish later in the season.  More expensive and sort of less fun, but not a terrible option.

I am going to do a few 2 liter green houses with the girls if we are ever well enough to plant them.

Some early flowers are starting to sprout outside despite the cool, wet weather.

Maybe one day it will actually be warm out, and we’ll have some kind of plan for moving, and we’ll no longer be stuck in this germ filled limbo land.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me.  I feel sad lately.  Weary.

Depressed maybe?

I want to be pregnant SO BADLY.  Yet I’m not.  Everyone else I know is pregnant or just had a baby.  Even my best friend is pregnant now.  I am overjoyed for her.  I love talking about pregnancy with her.  I am extremely excited to find out if her baby is a boy or a girl, what the baby’s name will be, the baby’s personality, everything.  I just wish I could shut off my brain.  I want to be pregnant too.

I don’t know why my fertility has taken so long to return to normalcy.  I had my first real postpartum period a week ago.  Maybe I will ovulate this coming week.  I hope.  I keep remembering those long eight months it took me to get pregnant with Ada.  I don’t want to wait eight months again.  I haven’t used any birth control at all since Ada was born and I had hoped to be pregnant before now.  Maybe part of my depressed feeling is the complete fear that it will take months again.  I also have a terrible, horrible, quaking terror of another miscarriage at 12 weeks.  I still haven’t emotionally healed from that.  (It happened before Ada’s pregnancy.)  Everything seemed well–growing belly, heartbeat on the doppler of 163 bpm, loads of nausea, sore boobs.  Then one day right around 12 weeks I choked on my glass of water and coughed hard, and red blood started gushing out.  No warning, no cramps, no spotting at all prior to that second.  The placenta detached.  I pray every day that it never happens to me again.  I wouldn’t wish the physical or mental pain from that experience on my worst enemy.

I guess I just feel like so many things in my life are beyond my control at the moment.  I mean, things in your life are always beyond your control to some degree, but even more so now than usual.  Waiting to get pregnant is hard for me.  I want to have a large family, and I don’t want my children all so far apart.  I’m not willing to wean Ada over it–I loved child led weaning with Rosie.  But at the same time I keep wondering what the plan is here.

One reason I like the idea of faith in God is the security of knowing that something greater than you has a plan.  We aren’t just stumbling around blindly all over the face of the Earth.  Sometimes, like now when I feel as if things are out of my control, I have lapses in faith.

Then I think to myself that it really doesn’t matter–what if,  WHAT IF, I die and find out there is no God?

What if I find out that I lived my entire life believing in something that wasn’t real?

What if I die and that’s just it, there is no afterlife?

What will I have lost by having faith?  I can’t think of anything, honestly.  I will have gained reassurance, purpose, and direction, love, humility…and when I think of it that way I see no reason to let that doubt take over.  I have nothing to lose by having faith and instead everything to gain.  My life is going somewhere important, even if it doesn’t seem that way in this moment.

In the very least faith is reassuring in times of depression, at least for me.

I am also having a lot of anxiety waiting to see if Tyler will be hired on at his job.  His three years of being a temp are up in October.  The countdown is killing me.  It’s like waiting for Christmas as a five year old, only worse.  It’s so much more important than Christmas.  It’s…essential.  It’s everything we’ve been working for during the past three years.  It’s the future.  This should tie in with faith, I suppose.  I’m just afraid he won’t get hired on for some reason and it will be hard, and scary, not to mention disappointing.  I should just not think about it, but in addition to be anxious I am extremely excited about it.  He will finally have a real permanent career job, where he can move up to better paying positions and have job security knowing he won’t get laid off, good insurance, and a retirement plan.  Like a real grown up.

And moving, oh I shouldn’t even get started on that one.  We went to look at another house that seemed WONDERFUL on the website listing. We only saw the outside of it, but that was enough.  It was another vertical driveway leading down into a holler between two steep hills. The five acres had no flat or clear space.  People that don’t live in mountainous or hilly areas don’t seem to understand when I describe this on my blog–imagine having no where to put your swing set.  No where to ride bikes.  No area flat enough for chicken coops.  The house is on one cleared bulldozed patch and that’s it.  The rest is just vertical earth.  You walk out your front door and aside from your narrow gravel driveway there’s nothing unless you want to climb the side of giant wooded hill by holding on to tree branches and pulling yourself up.  Yeah.  Disappointing, again.

It seems there are no houses (besides old trailers) on nice useable pieces of land in our price range.  That means we’ll have to wait until Tyler is hired on and then save up money.  I want to cry.  I just don’t want to live here, in this house with its tiny rooms, for any longer.  I am thankful we own our own house.  Don’t get me wrong.  I just long for certain comforts, like a pantry or a room bigger than 9×10 feet, or a bedroom that can fit a dresser.  I am going to resolve not to complain about it any longer.  I just have to continue waiting.  My day to move will come, assuming Tyler gets hired on in October.

I have lots of other things to be thankful for too.  I’m loving this weird early spring.  I’ve been throwing all of my anguish, anxiety, and depression into my garden.  It had better be awesome this year.  I’ve been digging and weeding for days.  I put up fourteen fence posts by myself the other day.  My garden consists of five 4×4 ft raised beds, plus a 17×1.5 foot strip of tilled ground down the middle of the garden area.  I still have to finish weeding from the end of the year last year and the winter–Bermuda grass is horrible and never dies…not even with weed cloth, newspaper, and cardboard.  It keeps popping back up and choking my garden plants.  I also have to plan and build the gate for the fence.  Ducks will not eat my produce before I do this year!!

I can barely type because my fingers are so sore and swollen from digging and weeding.

I’ve also got these two awesome little girls to be thankful for.  I look at them and can’t help but long for more children.

Out of the blue the other day Rosie said to me, “Momma did you know you can talk to God in your head and He can hear you?  I ask him every day for a baby brother to grow in your belly!”

I have no idea where she got any of that from, we haven’t really talked about it at all.  Kids.

This is my mother-in-law’s new puppy Dax.

Ada actually bit into, chewed, and swallowed an orange.  I was shocked!

Rosie is grown up and no longer a baby at all.

These evenings are like June summer evenings.  I don’t know what to think!

You can see a part of my garden in progress here.

The girls found unattached garden hose sprayers and were playing with them.

I love them both so much.

I can’t help but imagine what a third baby would be like.

Today it felt like summer outside.

I love summer.  I love being outside.  Summer weather makes me happy, even when I’m sweating in the blazing sun.

I’ve been looking forward to this summer because Ada is an outdoors girl.  Rosie, well she isn’t…she doesn’t like bugs, or dirt, or anything like that.

Last year in the spring we went on a guided hike up a creek nearby and Rosie sobbed the entire time.  Today we went back to the same creek to play.  I told Rosie that she could sit on the bank with her doll in her sling.  She had to hike the mile down the steep winding path to the creek, but then she was free to sit on the banks.  I didn’t even pack her a change of clothes because she swore up and down she wouldn’t touch the water.  The whole hiking experience in the past has been nothing but her sobbing.  I love being outside so much, I can’t imagine raising a child who absolutely hates it.

Today we walked down the narrow trail and Rosie didn’t cry.  She didn’t even complain on the way down.  I was surprised, but I didn’t say anything to her.

She even…smiled.

And she jokingly fake smiled too.

She looked up in the trees at birds and clouds, which is something she was never able to do before she got her glasses at the end of this past summer.

We got to the creek and Ada got in.  We had friends with us, and my friend’s toddler Alice also got in to splash.

Rosie surveyed the creek and then asked me if she could get in.  I almost fell over in shock, but I didn’t let on.  Of course you can get in, why couldn’t you?  Go for it!

The water was pretty cold at first, but in the shallow spots under the sun it wasn’t too frigid.

I watched to see what she would do.  We were splashing and wading over the loose flat rocks and through squishy Kentucky clay mud.  There were little bugs and minnows, and salamanders too, all tickling over our toes in the clear water.  For Ada and me this was pure pleasure.  For Rosie?  I mean this is careful, cautious, type A Rosie we are talking about…MUD SQUISHING BETWEEN HER TOES?  Are you kidding me?

I waited for screaming, hysteria, sobbing, and a swift exit to the river bank where she would beg for a towel to make her feet pristine before putting her shoes back on as quickly as possible.

Instead…instead this happened:

Yes.  She’s splashing.  This is not photoshopped.  This is a picture of Rosie SPLASHING in a creek.

I never dreamed in a million years this would happen.

She is smiling.  Grinning, even.

And then–it gets better.  She fell down.  She sobbed, but then after I dried off her glasses and told her to take off her skirt she cheered up.

What?  She didn’t keep crying and then pout for the rest of the day because she fell in a creek?  This is not right, it’s atypical…Rosie is always very predictable.

Instead she walked into the deeper pools.

I was speechless.  I acted like everything was normal–the entire Earth did not just shift on its axis.  The entire schematic of Rosie’s character did not just explode into bits and pieces.

There was mud ON HER LEG.

Mud.  On. Her. Leg.

Unfathomable.  She didn’t even care.

And you won’t believe this.  It gets even more crazy.

She said to me, “Mom I want to come back and do this again! But next time can we bring my swimsuit?”

Stunned.  Stunned into silence. Completely.  Mind blown.

My predicable Sheldon Cooper-esque child has just deviated from her norm in a huge way.

Send a forklift to get my jaw off the ground.

Tonight when I was tucking her exhausted little body into bed she said to me, “Mom that creek wasn’t the same creek we went to last year on the hike where I cried the whole time.”

“Yes it was.  It was the very same creek, at this very same time of year.” I told her.

“No it wasn’t. That wasn’t the same trail we walked on either.”  She was insistent.

“Swear it was.  Promise.  What was different about it to you?”  I was really curious.

“Last year it was so scary!  Everything there was horrible.  I hated it.  The trail was scary and so was the water.  It didn’t look scary at all this year!” She looked at me and I realized what the huge difference was.

“Is it because you have your glasses this year and you didn’t last year?”  I asked her.

She thought for a moment.  “Yes! This year I could see everything everywhere!  It wasn’t blurry, I could see all  the way down the hill on the trail!  I could see the water really good. It was so fun now that I can see it. I loved it!”

Oh my gosh I feel horrible.  How could I be such an attentive parent and not know my child was unable to see anything? 
I just had no idea.  I didn’t realize she couldn’t see stars in the sky, or the man in the moon, or leaves on trees.  I pointed them all out to her but thought she just wasn’t interested.  I didn’t know she couldn’t see billboards, or street signs, or christmas lights and halloween decorations as we drove through neighborhoods during the holidays.  I thought she just didn’t like them.  She would nod like she was unimpressed.
And the hiking, the outdoors…I had no clue she was so terrified because she couldn’t see where she was going.  I want to cry thinking about it.  She was actually scared because she couldn’t see the trail or where she was stepping in the water.  I just didn’t know.  She didn’t know either, she had no idea what she was missing.

I’m taking every one of my children to regular eye doctor appointments starting at age two from now on.  If any more of them are blind like their father then I want to know right away so they don’t have to wonder around in a blurry world like Rosie did for several years of her life.

It’s kind of fun watching her discover all of these wonderful things she can enjoy now that she can see well.  I just wish she didn’t have to go so long without enjoying them in the first place.

There are so many exciting things out there to show her.  We saw some of them today.

Deer tracks, big ones!

Baby salamanders wiggling inside of their eggs on the underside of a rock in the creek.

And now Rosie can see people’s facial expressions from a distance.  When she got tired of playing in the water she sat back and watched Ada and her friend Alice have a blast skinny dipping and splashing.

Oh, her chipped gap toothed grin…

I love this one.  I want to hang it on the wall, except I’m not sure it would be appropriate since it’s a n*ked toddler booty.

Ada didn’t want to leave.  “Go back water.  Go back.  Water.  MORE!  Please water. Please.”

She pouted when I told her it was time to get out and start the mile long death hike straight up the mountainside.  (During which I carried her 30 pound deadweight, along with our picnic and some other stuff.  I thought I was going to die at the halfway point.)

Now both girls are asleep and every bone in my body feels broken.  Apparently I got out of shape during the winter.  Either that or I turned into a 90 year old woman.  Shew.

Our ten day forecast is all weather in the 70′s, one day is even forecasted to be 80.  I have a feeling there will be more hiking and creek swimming in our near future!  I have no idea why it’s this warm in March, but I’ll take it.

I’m sitting in my freezing cold house surrounded by half folded piles of clean laundry and random toys.  The heat was turned off and the windows were left open, so it’s a chipper 60 degrees in here this morning.

We had oatmeal raisin chocolate chip cookies for breakfast because the chickens have temporarily stopped laying eggs.

The girls are playing with dolls on the floor in mismatched pajamas while we listen to The Civil Wars.

Next up, a Queen dance party…

Yesterday we were supposed to do chores.  Instead we spent the entire afternoon in the warm sun at the park, and then Rosie went to a friend’s house, and we spent the evening in our backyard.

Our backyard is so ready to be cleaned up for spring.  We filled the yard waste can with a fallen tree’s branches.  Soon we have to repair the wind ripped tarps over the chicken pens, rake up all of the half decayed leaves, and put out some new grass seed.  Then we get to fill up the raised garden beds and plant, plant, plant.

I can’t wait until every day is filled with warm sun.

It feels so good beaming down on our backs.

Today it’s cloudy outside, and rain is in the forecast.

Spring will be here soon though.  My daffodils are coming up, their green shoots taller every day.  They know spring is coming.

The birds are back too, from their winter vacation in the south.  I’ve seen lots of robins recently.

My cat has eaten lots of robins recently.

Outside I found an empty blue robin’s shell on the ground.

This spring Ada will be one year old.  Can you believe it’s been an entire year?

Next spring at this time I secretly very much hope to be pregnant again! I can’t seem to stop the baby fever, maybe it’s a sign.

I just keep looking at the two of them and wanting…no, needing…more.

More love, more baby goodness, more sleepless nights sniffing soft baby hair, more chaos, more messes, more fun, more life.

Even on a cloudy day…