need some guidance here for a health/science study

So I had a moment this morning. I was just getting out of the shower, I barely had the towel in my hands even, when Kimi and Liddy came into the bathroom. (sometimes I really do NOT like having only one bathroom, this was one of those moments at first) Now, these two kids are my inquisitive ones who make complex connections quickly on a regular basis. I'm regularly surprised by the things they say, think, figure out, and do.

Their question when they came into the bathroom was one that I was NOT prepared for, however. "Mom, we want to know how the baby is going to come out of your tummy." Oh my....... I'm dripping and trying to cover the important parts with a too-small towel thanks to my stomach growing (I show early and then gain a lot during pregnancy, I'm hoping to stick under 50lbs this time) and now I get to figure out how to answer THAT to a 5yr old and 7yr old. I told them I needed a bit to think about how to answer that because it is a little complicated, and they skipped off to let me think.

An hour later now, I still have NO IDEA how to answer that and they've asked me about it already a couple more times. Anyone got suggestions for me on how to explain that to them (we've not had the talk yet about how the baby actually got there, they are starting with the end and working backwards for information) without scarring them for life? We've already talked about the things a newborn needs and what they can and can't do, looked at pictures of them as newborns, and stuff like that. So, now we're talking about the baby growing in there and then coming out. Suggestions?

they never cease to amaze me

My sweet little Kimi and I have been working on writing her numbers for math mostly, and counting to 20. Well, it looks like now I need to teach the kid to skip count by 10's and then 5's because she can count to 109 with help at each ten's change. CRUD! I'm not ready for her to be moving this fast...... and I'm thinking that Primer may now officially be beneath her level, she's also memorizing some of her facts just from playing with the math blocks with her sisters (they are all playing with them lately to help them memorize which color is what number).

pregnancy- week 12

I have officially hit the 12 week point, as of yesterday, in my pregnancy. I can now start to relax a bit about it. However, by now I've usually had one or two appointments with my OB/GYN. I've still not had my first appointment due to money issues, but we're getting that fixed now.

I woke up this morning to the sound of my two sweet oldest girls fighting quite loudly. Yesterday I caught them playing in my front yard without even mentioning that they were going outside at all, which doesn't EVER fly with me. As a result, they got the lovely task of "go clean that black hole you call your bedroom and don't come out until it is finished!" for this disobedience. They are more than welcome to play outdoors, but they must ask first and are required to stay out back unless they ask special permission (which is only granted if an adult is able and willing to sit out front since we live on a busy main road). Its the same rule we've had since my oldest was old enough to go down a slide on her own, and it hasn't changed even with moving to a new city and house three years ago. Rules are rules, and I will punish those who break them.

So yes, they got to clean their room, and they took all day until Scott got home and still didn't finish it. So he fed them and sent them to bed after getting on them about it himself, and I gave them hugs and then told them that if their room wasn't finished the next morning before I woke up they would have warmed butts. (I did mention that i have NO patience when I'm pregnant right?) Yeah, they decided to get into a screaming match at 6:30am and it woke me up.

I tried to lay in bed and ignore it, until I heard one spout off, "oh don't worry about cleaning our room. Mom won't do anything, and she's probably already forgotten about it by now." That got me up and I warmed butts for not doing their task I assigned yesterday. 4 hours later, they finally decided to do it and had it finished for me to OK Missa running the sweeper in there. I got my point across....... now let's hope this time it sticks.

But when i had to get up this morning so early from the fighting, I stood up and had this horrible sharp pain in my lower stomach. It felt like i pulled a muscle, so I scrunched right up immediately and stayed for a minute before slowly straightening myself up again and rubbing my stomach to loosen it up. Ahhhh the aches have begun.

I also canceled my appointment with my OB/GYN for next week, and requested the release form to transfer records to another practice. See, I live about 5 minutes from an acceptable hospital, but my practice delivers at an amazing hospital in Westerville (northern Columbus if you aren't familiar with this area). With my being due March 5th, as soon as I found out my due date I started feeling uneasy about the distance to my doctor's practice and to the delivering hospital. I have had to reschedule my first appointment as well, due to financial reasons. So, I spent a lot of time praying about this and trying to figure out why I felt uneasy, and then decided to transfer to a practice with a midwife that delivers locally. Well, when I looked up the number this afternoon at the hospital's web site, I discovered that this practice has three CNM's instead of just the one I knew about. I got the call made, appointment is scheduled with the midwife, and I just need to get my proof of pregnancy mailed in for my insurance coverage and then the form for records transfer to the new practice. Amazingly, despite not particularly caring for the local hospital, I feel completely at peace with the decision. It isn't St. Ann's Hospital, but I'm sure that they can take care of everything just fine with my delivery. Now I just need to find a sitter for the girls for my 2pm appointment the 7th, I really don't want to take them when I'm going to my first appointment at a new practice and not knowing what exactly to expect. Eh, I'm sure I'll find someone.....

I love Math-U-See

So I posted over the weekend how I'm starting to feel better and was starting officially this week. I really need to learn to not say that kind of stuff, because I now feel like crud again. I'm so tired that I can barely stay awake, pregnancy sickness is starting to make an appearance again, and I'm sore everywhere. Its just that awkward stage for me now. Poor Scott ended up sleeping on the sofa last night because I went to bed before the kids did and I locked the bedroom door, when he was ready for bed he couldn't get me to wake up to unlock the door for him.

But anyway, my love for Math-U-See........ As you may know, we switched in the middle of last school year for the kids. Well, this week with me feeling so tired and unable to do much of anything has pretty much meant that we're just doing basics. For us, basics means they read to me and write stuff as they want to. At least, that's what it meant to me in the past. Now, they can do their math fairly independently as well when I'm not able to spend the time teaching them. Math-U-See has a dvd instruction video for each level that teaches the lessons, and the worksheets ALWAYS follow the same format for practicing the material so there is no guessing. This week, Missa has done an entire lesson on her own pretty much, and will do the test tomorrow or Friday. Liddy is halfway through a lesson herself, and tomorrow Kimi and I will be watching the DVD lesson she's on together (I love my laptop).

Because of our choice in curriculum for math, even days that I'm not really able to be much use beyond the most basic of tasks aren't a total wash academically. If I'm not up to actually teaching, I still have that fallback of them reading to me and being able to do their math fairly independently. I know this isn't exactly how the program was intended to be used with lower elementary students, but it is working beautifully for our family right now when life is upside down because mom and dad got this crazy idea to have another child.

energy bursts, new homeschool year, and stuff like that

Well, I've hit that point where I am starting to feel less tired. If you read my last post, I'm having some trouble with this pregnancy feeling real to me. I've not had much in the way of symptoms really this time around, and almost NO sickness. The main clues I have, besides my beautiful ultrasound, are tiredness and crampy/achy feelings in my stomach and abdomen as things start stretching and moving around to make room for the baby. OK, I've been hormonal and moody lately too, picking fights with Scott and being harder than usual on the kids. I've said things to the family that I wouldn't normally, and I'm using obscene language more around the kids than what I'd ever do typically. I am having issues with a short temper lately, and saying a lot of unkind things.

So anyway, this week I've noticed an increase in my energy level. It started with a few minutes of playing with the kids instead of just laying around supervising them (I get REAL tired at the start of a pregnancy apparently) and has moved up to where I was able to take a child with me out on a 2 hour grocery shopping trip this morning. So obviously, I'm not needing as much rest as I was even a week ago. It is now that I'm realizing exactly how many symptoms I was having earlier even though I wasn't too terribly sick.

So, now this is starting to feel real to me since I've figured out my major symptom. I now am starting to feel the anticipation. And, I'm beginning to take advantage of the energy that I'm starting to get back. We've put off starting the new homeschool year because of my lack of energy, and now I'm thinking I can do this on Monday. I don't have *all* my supplies really for this, but I've got enough to last for now. I have most of our books, and although I cannot make the switch in history that I wanted to originally (since we did so little history last year I wanted to pick up a couple books and switch from the 2 year program to the 1 year program for world history) I feel like we can totally pull off this whole thing.

I have a few weeks of basic consumable supplies for projects at least, but Scott has worked a lot of extra overtime this last 2 weeks so I will have the money hopefully to go out next weekend and finish off my supply shopping on top of a good restocking of groceries. This paycheck was a bit tight thanks to renewing tags and a driver's license, the mortgage payment, and having to get the drain guys out here to run the auger through our sewage line for the year. That took every bit we had, to where we had to ask Scott's mom for a small loan to get us through this second week of the pay period. I just needed a few more basic groceries, and Scott needed gas for the week so he can make the commute to work. We're good now though, thanks to her. Good supportive family is so important when it comes to the success of our family, and knowing that I can call her when it gets tight or I need a sitter in a pinch has been vital for the success of our family. She watches the kids for my prenatal appointments, watched them for several days/nights when Scott had his surgery, and even took them overnight a few months ago when Scott took me to the homeschool convention in Cincinnati. She will also keep the girls when we have the baby, hopefully we can convince her to come stay here in our house during that time instead of taking the kids all to her tiny 1 bedroom apartment for that 2-4 days. It may just save her sanity to have the extra space (the girls' bedroom is bigger than her apartment, plus the actual yard and toys that we've got to keep them occupied).

I'm really hoping that the fact that I'm starting to feel more energy and less cranky means that my house will start getting cleaned up and that I'll be more able to get things going again around here. Last homeschool year was so filled with interruptions that we have a LOT of math catch-up to do this year. I can't afford to be too far behind at all this year, Missa and Liddy both need to finish Alpha and Beta this school year in math and Kimi needs to finish Primer and start Alpha. Yes, that is more than a year and a half of math in one school year. All 3 girls are about 1/4 to 1/3 through the current levels in math. Last year we made huge strides in reading, so this year the plan is to go heavy on math and get that caught up to a degree. I hope I can pull off my plan for this subject.

Also, next weekend I hope to have pictures to post of the indoor garden that we are starting. I plan to send Scott out to purchase the materials needed to build the platform, and then hopefully we can get hold of one of those hard plastic wading pools still to use for our garden plot. If not, the plan is for him to build a box from wood and line it in pool plastic before filling it with soil. Then we wait for the seedlings we've started to get big enough to transplant successfully. The tallest one is an adorable little 3" tall cucumber plant. I am really looking forward to being able to post an update and pictures of our big science project that I'm doing this year with the girls.

is it real?

I still am having trouble here with believing that we're expecting baby #5. I've had almost NO pregnancy sickness except for a week or two where I just felt horrible, and really there hasn't been anything to indicate that I'm pregnant happen. Yes, I am tired and I have some round ligament pains, but other than that I'm having no issues really. Scratch that, I've turned mean according to Scott and the kids. I've been picking fights with Scott lately, but he is such a good man he just forgets about it once I get done with my fighting and doesn't say a word.

So I decided that since I hit 10 weeks yesterday, putting me at 25% done with this pregnancy (give or take, as I'll likely deliver sometime the week before my due date), it was time to dig stuff out that I've been storing. The first thing I dug out was my boxes of cloth diapers.

Yes, I use those old-fashioned things. For over a year I used them on 3 kids at once while Missa was being too stubborn and not developmentally ready to learn to use the toilet instead of her pants. And, there are a LOT of options available for diapers now. Some are just as easy as changing a disposable, but you wash them instead of throwing them away. I have some of those; however, I prefer the good old fashioned pinned prefold with a cover over it. And yes, even the prefolds and flatfold diapers (those big squares of cloth you do origami to so they fit the baby) are better quality than they used to be back when we were children. In fact, here's my sweet Kimi modeling one of my diapers at 1 1/2 years old.



That is just a simple bleached infant prefold pinned, she was (and still is!) very small for her age so she never made it into premiums or toddlers before we quit using cloth at the end of my pregnancy with Jojo. I love them, and am planning to use them again this time.

So, I dug out boxes. Now I know I'm missing at least 1 or 2 boxes here of diapers, because I'm not seeing some that I clearly remember that are NOT cheap diapers. I had some very desirable fitteds and pockets with the girls that I was VERY proud of having, and they aren't in the boxes I got out today. However, with what I did find today I discovered that minus pins and a few covers, I don't need to buy ANYTHING to start from birth once the Pampers St. Ann's Hospital gives us runs out. Not too bad huh.........

But even with digging out the diapers, noting where my baby swing is at, and finding the pack n' play, this still doesn't feel real to me yet. I've had an ultrasound already, and I heard the sweet little heartbeat, but still it just isn't quite real to me. I sure hope that changes soon, because it feels odd to know that another baby is coming but its not sinking in really.

the start of a new school year

Well, it is now August so I decided to go ahead and start our new school year today. I didn't do too much really, but it is more about getting into the habit right now than anything.

We started off this year's big science project. The kids are totally obsessed with how things grow, so I decided a while back to pick up a Miracle-Gro greenhouse kit for kids. It is a cute little thing, essentially a plastic base with clear plastic sides and lids and then there are 4 cups that you put the gro-mix into and then plant 4 different kinds of seeds that it came with into the cups. We have tomatoes, cucumbers, a hybrid of eggplant, and orange bell peppers planted in my living room now. Each girl got to plant one cup, and then Scott is going to build me something to transplant these little plants into hopefully in the next few weeks (or whenever they are getting too big for their containers). It was pretty easy and the kids got a kick out of it, and I have a feeling they will really enjoy watching the plants grow. Tomorrow I'm going to take some dried beans and wet paper towels to put in a clean empty pickle jar so they can SEE the process that their seeds are going through with growing in the "dirt" mix.

Then tomorrow will be a light day as well because we have a 9:30am appointment that will likely take us all morning, and hopefully that will be followed by a small food shopping trip. At least, this is what I'm hoping happens, I've heard rumors that WIC is changing from paper coupons to a debit card style like food stamps are done now so I may not be able to get milk and cereal tomorrow like I NEED to do. If we get to math and reading tomorrow, I'll be happy.