So. I'm thirty today. I feel thirty today. Maybe I can have a nap later....I have been incredibly spoiled this year though. And all the facebook messages are very cheering! John brought home a wonderful cheesecake yesterday and put 30 candles on it and proceeded to light them with a blowtorch! Above you will see the progression..

You would think that going to Red Deer A.B. wouldn't be too exciting. BUT...with the right people and a pedicure and massage, it can be a sort of paradise! Well, that may be a stretch, but it was a fun weekend with Mir and Melissa celebrating, ruminating, and recalibrating (fun words). I had a wonderful time listening to CBC, "Quirks and Quarks" and another show which I don't remember the name of uninterrupted on the drive and met some interesting people at the Bed and Breakfast we stayed at and the spa we went to. It turns out that the woman who gave us our massages grew up on the Hoebbema reserve and it was very interesting talking with her about her experience growing up there and our experience being at Pine Ridge. I would like to see her again.....and not just to get another massage! Though I was pretty sore afterwards....I came home to a very sick boy and an extremely excited girl telling me all about how they got to watch the first star wars movie with dad and how GREAT it was! They also had some surprises for me which included some very hand made "foot rests" and "elbow rests", and "chin rests" made with a conglomeration of tape,fabric, felt, glue, and buttons! Lovely! Oh, and some flowers that were chosen by Mikaela (though Jacob thought of the idea) and some tums all wrapped up in the flower paper and a vase and a box of books that John found at the dump! I am spoiled rotten! I came home with a dress and pair of jeans and some Bernstain Bear books for Mikeala, and some hot wheel cars and books for Jacob from Value Village. All in all, everyone was quite delighted with their gifts :) Oh, and not to leave John out, I won a coffee for him at Tim Hortons, good wife that I am. And now we begin another week....This week I want to do some more research on how to grow vegetables and fruit with a higher nutritional content, try to find a new doctor in St. Albert that will not be so pushy about C-sections (long story), and of course do school, violin, dance, plug away on the basement, and turn 30!

I have to say, it has been a tough week. Neither John or I have been sleeping well. But after a sick day yesterday, Mikaela seems to be coughing less today. She came up with an ingenious way to make her journal longer. She figured that if she wrote "achoo" everytime she coughed while she was writing, her sentence took up much more space! I'm sure she gets this "cleverness" from her father. But because of the coughing she didn't go to school, violin was cancelled, and their dentist appointments were cancelled so things all of sudden were quieter! Oh, and she also couldn't show off her "curly" hair which she was very upset about. Hence the picture on the blog for Grandma to see :)It was nice not to have to run around too much today, aside from AWANA of course. Tomorrow is a run around day but it starts with an uncomfortable bladder and a family holiday to the ultrasound tech! Not every day starts like that.
This week has been a tough one, but the prevailing tone is victory, not defeat. We were real, we didn't turn to unhealthy things to assuage our anger and hurt, and God in his grace helped us out of the downward spiral. Not every week ends like that!

I am absolutely delighted that a load of laundry, with jeans no less, dried on the line outside in about 4 hours today. I will be happy to quit using the dryer again (most of the time :)! We had a great day of school, laundry, cleaning up our junkyard (oops, I meant yard :), more trying to get our driveway to drain and dry up, making cookies, building MANY lego vehicles of all shapes and sizes, making venison stew and whole grain biscuits for supper (yuuummmmm) and a bit of work on the basement. To name a few of the things we did....It was beautiful weather and I think I might cry if it snows again, though that is very likely. We started some pepper plants today as well. We'll see how that goes! We haven't grown them before and we'll have to really baby them.
Oh, and I forgot to mention I gave the kids their piano lessons today and Mikaela practiced her violin as well. Jacob is really getting into piano lessons.....for about 10 minutes! But he loves it up until that point. It is so cute to see his little pudgy fingers playing "Old Mac Donald had a farm" :)

"We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them-we give grudgingly."
Mark Twain

I have to say that, though I think this quote is true much of the time for us, the last two days have been filled with wonderful moments of "personal association" time. Finally two days where we weren't out in town all day for something and we could just hang out at home together. Sure, there was school work to do, but when it doesn't have to be done in a rush and can be savored a little more, the atmosphere is much more positive. Yesterday we were able to spend a few free hours outside doing some last minute sledding (before the snow is all gone :) and some gardening (in the mud with rocks as seeds), filling in mud ruts in our driveway, and concocting stews and spells out of sticks and muddy water (and all sorts of wonderful imaginary ingredients). We even had a snack on the porch and read some books in our lawn chairs! Today Mikaela came and walked with me on the Tri-leisure center track and than colored and did her math while I worked out. She even accomplished 16 equations in 6 minutes when there was a booster juice on the line! The kids jumped on the trampoline with John for about 45 minutes after supper and than the kids and I played games until bedtime. It has been quite an enjoyable two days. Even John's big conrete pour went good today. 80 something meters of concrete is apparently a lot, though I can't say I know much about it, but all is well on that front.
I can't believe our ultrasound is next week! It seems like we have been waiting forever for it and it is just around the corner. We will finally get to see those little features and fingers and toes for the first time. I think John is going to come from work and I am going to take Mikaela and Jacob so they can see their new sibling as well. I wondered if it was a good idea to take the kids in case there is something wrong with the baby, but if there is, they will have to deal with the consequences along with us and it may be better for them to know right away. I find it mostly doesn't pay to keep kids in the dark about things, at least in a general sense. So, something great to look forward to next week!

Every March I think that I should have been a dentist. Not that being a dentist interests me much....at all. I just end up giving so much of John's hard earned money to them and I wish that I could feel better about it by earning that kind of money myself! Oh well, toss some more money to the wind and watch it dissapear :)
I had an interesting experience at Mikaela's violin lesson today. There is another woman whose son has lessons at the same time as Mikaela. Today she had almost fainted just before we got there and was shaking and looking very unwell. She had phoned her husband to come pick them up and so I was holding her baby while she laid on the couch and tried to manage her other three little kids. The baby's diaper was soaking wet and he smelled really bad like puke. It was making my stomach turn and I was a little worried that whatever she had, her baby might have and might pass it on to me and harm my baby..... When her husband came he didn't bother to help her up or help with the kids at all, he just walked around looking at the instruments and than berated her for her being too sick to drive home. Of course, I don't understand the situation but I felt for that woman. She just had this overwhelmed, tired, beaten down look and obviously her husband wasn't much of a help. And it made me think of extraordinary people like Mother Theresa and countless others who would look at this woman and her children, maybe even her husband, with compassion and glory in helping them, putting their own health and certainly their own sensabilities on the line. I wonder how much they notice about the people that they are around, if they notice the smells, the appearance, the disease, or if they are desensitized? And yet their level of compassion is so great, they cannot be too desenitized. I've been in this situation before and the smells and the appearance of people did not bother me nearly as much as they did this time. I realized how safe a life we have lived since we moved to Edmonton, a far cry from Northern Saskatchewan, that is for sure. And maybe in my busyness I am starting to overlook those who are living like this.....

Beginning again.....

I am going to begin this most important blog post with....laundry! Everyone's favorite subject of course :) About 7 days allows a lot of laundry to accumulate and I am so happy to be able to make a dent in it. We are desperately trying to finish the basement before the baby comes because we know from experience how fun it is trying to do inside renovations with the dust and noise that comes with them with a baby in the house. So John and two friends of his were tiling the laundry/cat/furnace room floor and thus the machines were removed! But I am willing to sacrifice anything......even doing laundry....to get this finished.
I tend to think only about what we still have to accomplish but when I think about what we have accomplished in the last ten years....I understand why we feel like we are working all the time. So many moves, renovations, projects, busy busy times, building a house on our own, a fort for the kids, a driveway, a garden, homeschooling....and this list goes on. Sometimes it is very beneficial to look back at what has been accomplished in order to appreciate your own blood sweat and tears. The ultimate success of this venture is still unknown, but we've worked so hard! I think we all tend to forget this. It is easier to look at how far we have to go, than to appreciate how far we have come. Here's to more time spent celebrating past accomplishments rather than dreading future ones!
We'll have to see how often I post, but I have to say that I find this format much more fulfilling than facebook. With a verbose nature like mine, "facebook statuses" just don't cut it!