Settling In...

We got sent home from the hospital Friday with our sweet little Emory. And it has been crazy a crazy start. Very fortunately, my mom was/is staying with us this whole week to help out. I had some problems right off the bat, probably from lack of sleep b/c of the hospital experience. Emory seems to be doing great. She also wants to eat ALL the time. It does seem to be getting better though. She also wanted to stay up during the night for a few hours which was not fun, but we are really enjoying holding her. I know we don't need to spoil her, but it's nice right now to be able to do that.

Then Monday we woke up to a world of white outside our windows. We hadn't been following the weather, but I don't think it was predicted to have sleet & then snow, snow, snow. We needed some things from Walmart, but made do b/c that just was not possible. We did get some good snow pictures and Kaleigh had a lot of fun playing in it. So did Nathan! Then Nathan got an extra day off work today! Unfortunately, we had an unpleasant surprise today finding out that Alexis and Kaleigh are sick. The pictures below might be why... Both were running fever, and Alexis' was pretty high. I felt terrible but we had to bring them to Nana's (Nathan's mom) to keep them away from Emory. Kaleigh was excited, but I felt bad about Alexis. She always scares me when she is sick b/c she acts so lethargic and unlike herself. We have a doctor's appointment for all the kids tomorrow except Avery. So that's where we're at so far. Crazy start to life with 4 kids!

Welcome Emory!

As I said in my previous post, we were scheduled to have a c-section Friday, but things obviously didn't turn out that way! I was praying about whether a c-section was the right decision & really wanted a VBAC so that I could recover easier & care for my other girls with less complication. At the same time, we went ahead & set Friday as the "deadline". I know things would have worked out either way, but I don't think God could have answered my prayers any better. There was no point during this experience that we questioned whether doing the VBAC was the right decision.

We decided on her name, Emory Christine, at 11:30 last night, and the contractions started about 30 minutes later. I wasn't sure at first, but it got painful quick! We got to the hospital around 2:00. The contractions were probably 3 minutes apart at that point. The first time they checked me I was a "5" and right after I got my epidural (praise God for that!) my water broke. A couple of pushes & she was born at 4:45. It was the kind of labor I have envied friends having. Now I've gotten to experience all kinds of labor - inducement, a c-section, and now "natural". We were so glad to meet our little Emory. She's sleeping soundly right now. Looks nothing like her sisters. More like me, but with Nathan's dimples. We are tired but excited about embarking on this adventure once again!

A Date, A Nursery, but still no name...

We got a date for our C-section - it's this Friday, the 5th at 1:30 unless little baby girl Statton decides to come sooner. Yes, it's sad that it's 5 days away and we still don't have a name picked out. We have a probable name but just haven't made that final decision.

Also, my sweet friends Nitzia and Sara came over a couple of weeks ago to help with the nursery. Sara also helped paint the room. And Nitzia's husband, John Paul helped Nathan hang some ceiling fans and put the baby bed together. Now her room is pretty much the only one in our house that's decorated! Does that make up a little bit for her not having a name? Here are some pictures. Nitzia worked her magic & put together some of these hangings with stuff she brought. I got the wall quote from Kohl's on clearance. I really like how it turned out.









Our SS class had a diaper shower for us last week which was sooo nice. We are well stocked with diapers now. It was a fun shower. They invited all the husbands and we had a lunch after church. It was also with another couple who is having their 3rd boy who was also an "unexpected gift from God!"

New Year's Fun

My Christmas present to Nathan this year was a New Year's Eve & Day celebration with several of our best friends. Us girls all decided to do that for our husbands. We have such a hard time getting together now, especially without kids, and thought it would be a lot of fun to do a whole night out. We got suites at Embassy suites and babysitters for the kids. We stayed up until after 3:00 just playing games and laughing a lot! The next morning we had a great breakfast there and got in the indoor pool & hot tub until we had to leave. The joke was that it was more a present for us girls, but Nathan did tell me it was a great present and he enjoyed himself a lot. I promise I was having fun, regardless of what it may look like in this picture.

"Kaleigh-abulary"

I might have shared some of these before, but I thought it would be funny to share some of the words that Kaleigh doesn't get quite right. She speaks so well, but let's face it, the English language is confusing at times. So here are some words & definitions out of Kaleigh's special dictionary, pronounced as I have written them.

Yogrit - a fruity, dairy snack, usually eaten at our house in the morning
Jalor - a place to store things, as in "I'm going to go put my clothes in the jalor" (Love this one!)
to raze - what you do with a razor - "Mommy, are you going to raze your legs now?"
mazazing - a piece of reading material; usually comes in the mail
toefood - a squishy, white soy substance that I mix with other things & feed to the twins
ore - a sweet snack made of marshmallows, graham crackers & chocolate; if you want some, you say "I want some ores"
N a Mem - candy coated chocolate, comes in different colors
Kick - the singular form of breakfast cereal Kix

Don't some of these just make so much sense? We've corrected her plenty, but she still insists on her way and I enjoy it too much to make a big deal out of getting it right. I know we'll miss it when she says everything correctly.

Christmas Part 2

Here are a few more pictures from Christmas Day at the Stattons house. I think it was the most relaxing Christmas Day we've had since we got married. After spending the morning at our house with my family, we had a big lunch then Lance & Kristin left for Shreveport. My parents went to a movie and we even had time for a nap before going to Nathan's parents house. We had a ham dinner over there & then more gifts! It was a good time & once again the babies were in a surprisingly good mood. I'm sad that it's all over, but excited about the year to come.

Christmas Recap

A quick overview of my week last week -
Sunday night continued our tradition of going to Garvan Gardens with some friends and afterwards they came back over here for soup, salad & dessert.

Tuesday my parents came into town & we went to meet my brother Lance & sister in law Kristin. We met up at Playtime Pizza for lunch. Lance & Kristin moved to North Carolina this past summer so we had not seen them in a while. We enjoyed catching up with them again. I had to go to a Doctor's appointment for me (everything was good) and then take Alexis to the doctor (ear infection). I ended up taking Avery to the doctor Wednesday and she turned out to have an ear infection too. I was pretty surprised b/c neither of them has acted especially fussy lately but Alexis had a fever that prompted me to take her.

We did a little shopping but mostly stayed at the house (out of the rain) and visited & played with the kids. Wednesday Nathan and I smoked a turkey and had all of his family over with my family to eat that night and play games. We had 5 couples so we played a game called Couplez. It's sort of a Christian version of the Newlywed game. (Thanks DeBusks!)

Thursday of course it was still raining but we made the best of it. I was so glad that my Christmas shopping was done on Monday so I didn't have to get out it that mess. Our church's Christmas Eve service got cancelled but we played games & watched The Nativity Story. After Kaleigh went to bed we stuffed stocking & put out all of the presents.

Christmas morning we had breakfast then opened stockings. Then it was time for presents. That was a lot of fun, of course. The twins just had the best time walking around through all the chaos & carrying things around the room. I was glad to see that Kaleigh had not gotten gift crazy. She still wanted to stop & play with things instead of just asking for "more presents". We had to prompt her to keep opening. We had our Christmas lunch then Lance & Kristin had to leave. My parents went to a movie and I ended up falling asleep. That evening we went to Nathan's parents for Christmas dinner and more presents.
I'll post more pictures later from the Statton's house.

WALKING!

I have done an awful job of documenting the babies' milestones, but they are hitting a big one right now. I want to make sure we know when it happened. Alexis has been taking steps for a while now, but just this last week is walking all over the place. It is so cute to watch. She looks like a little old woman with her tiny shuffling steps! Then last night my parents were over and we were sitting around with the kids and Avery decided she wanted some attention. So she stood up and took a couple of steps. She just beamed when we cheered and kept doing it until she was taking 7 or 8 steps. I loved literally seeing our praise & belief turn into a success for her. What an important lifelong lesson in raising kids.

The other night I went with some friends to see New Moon, and a couple of people were asking about what other books I read. I do love to read and thankfully I read fast, since I don't have tons of free time to do it. I'm pretty much a "lazy" reader, meaning if I have to keep rereading a page to grasp it's meaning, I probably won't finish that book. I also read mostly fiction, with a few parenting, marriage, or decorating books thrown in for well-roundedness. But this blog will pertain to fiction.

Lately I've been reading Jodi Picoult. I definitely like some of her books better than others. My two favorites are probably Salem Falls and Nineteen Minutes. I'm about to read Picture Perfect. For laughs, I like to read Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic books. If you've seen the movie, the books are way more hilarious. They are a little absurd, but that's part of the fun. Not as funny are some of Barbara Kingsolver's books, especially The Poisonwood Bible. I really liked that up until towards the end. It just lost momentum completely. But it was worth reading. I initially get most of my book ideas from book clubs, like Oprah or Target, or bestseller lists, then go from there.
Nicholas Sparks books are also usually pretty good and easy to read. It's amazing how many of the books I like end up getting made into movies. I guess that's just the thing to do these days. What sparked the discussion with my friends was "Lovely Bones". I liked the book but it was waay overhyped in my opinion.
In the Christian category, I like anything by Karen Kingsbury and most books by Francine Rivers.

So, if you're looking for something to read, maybe this will help you. This is kind of an "obvious" list. If you want more obscure books, I've got those too.

This past weekend Nathan put up shelves in our laundry room. We just needed more storage space for food, cleaning supplies, appliances, etc. Although he didn't quite finish, he got a lot done. The part that is left shouldn't take too long. We had a very busy weekend, with doing that. Friday night was our SS Christmas party. We had a gift exchange of mostly gag gifts. I say mostly b/c it was supposed to be a gag gift but a few were really nice. We ended up with a $5 Sonic gift card which was great and a chocolate monopoly game. Very cool. I brought a 70's/80's book & cd set. Nathan's was pretty funny. Our class normally does an ornament exchange and his tradition is to buy a photo ornament & put a goofy picture of himself in it. This year we got a frame with 8 pictures and he put 8 4x6 pictures of himself in it! I'll have to get a copy of the picture of it.

Saturday Nathan was working on the laundry room and I took the kids to a Christmas party in Benton that we found out about through HIPPY. The kids got to sit on Santa's lap and I actually got a pretty good picture of all three of them. Kaleigh told him she wanted dress up clothes & blocks. She is getting some dress up clothes but I haven't gotten any blocks yet. They also served lunch, had several nice crafts & gave the kids books, hats, gloves & pillows.

After the party we came back here & Kaleigh and I helped Nathan paint the laundry room and he went to work on the shelves.

Sunday we had to clean - it was getting unsafe for the children. Then we put up our Christmas tree and put out a few decorations. It was a full day of work as well, but fun work.

I was thinking back to all we have done since we got the house. I say "we", mostly Nathan, but I have helped as much as possible considering the pregnancy and the 3 kids. We've painted our room, the living room, kitchen, the twins room, Kaleigh's room and the laundry room. We pulled up the carpet & prepped the floors, installed wood floors, put up a curtain rod, built a workbench in the garage, built shelves in the laundry room, and started organizing junk in the basement. We've also had a lot of help with all that. What we still have to do is paint both bathrooms and the new baby's room and install some kind of slide out shelves in my pantry. Oh, and the small matter of the basement. I won't talk about that right now. I just think it's amazing how much we've been able to do in such a short amount of time. It probably helps that we don't have tv yet and just got internet. I'm so glad to have such a handy, hardworking husband.

Here's my promised pregnancy picture and a picture of the girls playing. They climb up in this little toy then scream b/c it's not big enough for them both. Alexis has just been sitting in there all day like a little queen.

? Week Checkup -

I finally went to the doctor today. As they say, every pregnancy is different, and this one is definitely way different from the other two. Especially the twins, of course. With Kaleigh, I was busy working, moving (twice!) and getting ready for my first child. I was starting from scratch with baby stuff and of course I always knew what week I was in my pregnancy and how long I had left. I was fairly paranoid about what I did, ate or drank, etc.

Then, the twins. That was just a whole other ball game...

Now this one. I'm so laid back this time around. Probably a little too laid back. Once I got past the sickness & started feeling good, I got caught up in all the changes in our life and taking care of the three kids I have already. Mostly it's a huge blessing & an answer to prayer that I'm feeling good enough to not know exactly how far along I am and how long I have left. With the twins that's all I could think about. God had his hand in that whole pregnancy also, but it was a trial for us - to say the least. He took us through the fire and back again. This time around He is blessing me with a much easier time overall and good health and energy.

But I am so laid back that I missed one doctor appt and waited 4 more weeks to make another. So today I went back after over 2 months. Everything looked good, but something kinda funny did happen. I was getting weighed by the nurse and she kept moving the scale up, up & up. She said my weight and I said "yes, I'm finally gaining weight". She looked back at my records and said "Well, it looks like you've gained 27 pounds so far. We usually like to see our patients gain between 20 and 25 the whole pregnancy." Then she mentioned something about maybe watching it. I just sort of smiled & nodded, knowing that I'm not going to change anything. Mainly b/c she wasn't taking into account that I started out at least 10 pounds underweight. Also, after what I went through with the twins I developed almost a food phobia. I'm so glad to have my appetite back that I don't really care if I gain 50 extra pounds. Still, my belly is pretty big. I'm about 30 weeks along. It makes me wonder what I will look like at the end of the pregnancy! I'll post a belly picture soon.

What a difference a weekend makes!

Sorry I haven't been able to post for a while. We have internet off & on right now so I'm going to give it a try.

The title of this post is referring to our floor. Nathan took off Friday and his dad & Ben came over to help with it. This room is majorly transformed. I will take more pictures once we have furniture in place but I'm loving it. I also love that we did it ourselves. It's so satisfying.

The "before picture, with the lovely green carpet.


With the carpet pulled up. Even Kaleigh got in on the action!








Laying the floor - it has to be perfect of course!







The almost finished living room. I love it! The babies seemed to like it too. They just crawled around and around. I should add that as much "help" as the babies and Kaleigh were, it was a huge help when Nitzia watched Kaleigh for us and Patti took the twins most of the day on Saturday.

Okay - I think the consensus is that we are still good people & had a right to be mad. Lisa, you're right about the heaping coals of kindness, but I'm still gonna have to pray about that one! Because the charity had done so much work loading stuff already, we let them take a lot. That's also why it makes me mad that she called Nathan greedy. It makes me want to demand everything back if she's going to call us greedy anyway!

But moving on, we've managed to get a lot of work done this week, with some help and some loong hours put in by Nathan. The entire LR and our bedroom have been painted and Kaleigh's room just needs another coat. We're still working on getting wallpaper down out of the twins' room.

Here's a couple more pictures. Kaleigh's room is the yellow. I think it's adorable, but doesn't match her bedding at all so we had to paint. The last one is the view of the kitchen from the front door. This is truly an OPEN floor plan. I think it will be a lot of fun.

House Drama

Please read if you have the time!
I've got to write this post to vent, and I also want honest input.

We were able to close on our house Monday after a long wait (yay!) The situation was a short sale and a divorce situation. Everyone had already moved out but there was a lot of stuff still left in the house. After we got the house on Monday, we went over Monday night to start working. The first thing that had to be done was clearing the upstairs so John Paul kindly came over and helped Nathan cart stuff from the garage and almost every bedroom to the basement. They spend about 5 hours doing that and we cleaned up. We really didn't look through the stuff closely, but a lot of it was in good condition, there was some furniture that we could use, baby things, etc. Tons of clothes and other stuff that we just barely looked at and threw in trash bags and figured we could go through later and keep some, have a garage sale, and/or donate to a charity. In the meantime, it was all stacked neatly in the basement. I should mention that Claire (our real estate agent) had warned us to change the locks b/c of the situation. We were planning on doing this, but weren't able to on Monday.

So Tuesday we pull up to the house around 3:00 and see a Uhaul parked in front of it full of stuff. After looking closer, we discover that it is the stuff from the basement. We find out that the previous homeowner told this local charity that they could have the stuff and she came over and let them in the house. Now I was absolutely appalled. I am still mad when I think about it. Nathan was about ten times worse. They had almost loaded everything, including a lot of the furniture that we were going to use, and we told them we were sorry but that it was our stuff and it needed to go back in the house. We ended up letting them keep about 10 trash bags full of stuff. We donate to charities regularly but I like to get a tax deduction for it when we do. Also at this point we had no evidence that they were even from a charity. We also found out later that about $50 worth of our stuff had been taken as well. The whole time I am thinking to myself "what is the Christian thing to do here?" But still feeling very violated. We immediately pulled off all the doorknobs and took them to get the locks changed. In the meantime while I was gone, the previous homeowner showed up. Nathan talked to her and she claimed that she thought she had until Wednesday to get the stuff out, which I think was a lie. First of all - how do you not know when your house has gone from your possession? Secondly, everything had obviously been moved and cleaned. It was in nowhere near the condition it was left in.

Now we go to today. I had calmed down but I'm mad all over again. Nathan went to the charity which I won't mention at this point but may later and asked to get some things back that they had taken which actually belonged to his dad. They said that they didn't have them, the previous homeowner had those things. Then the lady who owns or runs the place starts into Nathan telling him how her guys spent all day working on this and it cost them money and he was greedy to take stuff back from a charity! Until that point we had been sympathetic to the charity knowing that it was an unfortunate situation, but not really our fault! Nathan listened to her rant then asked her how she would feel if she went home and saw two guys coming out of her house that she didn't allow in, loading stuff into a truck?! She didn't have much to say about that. She did say she was going to notify the papers about the whole thing. HA! I'm sure they'd get a twisted view of it too.

So I sincerely want to know what you think. What would you have done?

Little Bo Peep and her Little Sheep

This year for Halloween I wanted a themed costume for the girls. I kind of borrowed this idea from my friend Candice. I pieced together Kaleigh's costume from borrowed items, thrift store, garage sale & stuff we already had. We have several events & birthday parties to go to and dress up for. The first one was a community event in Benton. They had little games and inflatables and even horseback rides!


Alexis's new trick. She just stands up!

Kaleigh's Birthday & Misc

Kaleigh had a great 4th birthday party. We decided to do a musical theme this year. Unfortunately, our pictures were not so great. You know those expensive cameras - one little setting gets off and everything is blurry. She loved it though and that's all that really matters.

We had a little trailer ride rigged up for the kids. I think that was probably the highlight of the party. That and the Dora pinata getting completely decapitated! We also had a musical squares game and a little obstacle course set up for the kids.

BIRTHDAY PARTY!

We had the babies' party on their actual birthday, October 1st. A big part of the party was taking pictures of them and watching them dig into the cakes. They liked the icing but didn't get very messy. If you are on facebook, I'm going to post a lot more pictures on there. Just so you know, Nitzia embroidered the onesies for me and I made the hairbows (Nitzia taught me how). Nathan said he thought that was the most crafty thing I've ever done!

Stay tuned for more posts coming up telling about our trip to Texas for the reunion at the Texas Children's Fetal Center and an impromptu 2 day trip to the beach at Galveston!