First Steps

Chloe has been standing unassisted for a few weeks now. She's pretty pleased with her little trick and she's gotten to the point where she can actually stand up pretty well from the floor and get all the way to standing. Not gonna lie, it's impressive.

The way this girl works, she's not much into trying and trying and trying to figure milestones out. She's more of the not thinking about them at all and then one day it enters her mind that she can do something and boom, she's doing it type. So until she thought of walking herself, she wasn't going to do it.

And that's what happened tonight. We were watching Moana and the kids were bouncing off the walls from excitement of watching it. That movie is so high energy. Chloe caught the energy and was just going crazy. She stood up next to the couch and I offered my arms out to her. I was only a couple feet away, but just far enough she had to take a couple steps to get to me and boom, she did it! They were pretty unsteady, but I saw the look in her eyes. She was like, hey, I could just WALK to mom instead of crawling. Oh boy, nothing is going to hold her back now. She's ten months old and five days. That's virtually the same age as Spencer when he took his first steps. The other two walked at 11 months and 13 months, so she's winning development milestones here. I'm so excited for her to walk.

Blessings

Back when Bill and I got married 8+ years ago we were married over Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend so we didn't have time for much of a honeymoon. At the time we were big into going to presentations for super expensive items we weren't really going to buy only to get the free gifts. They only convinced us once to buy, and I still haven't used that thing, so that's a testament to their sales skills. But one thing we got was a few days' stay at a hotel in Cancun and we excitedly planned it as a delayed honeymoon. We showed up in the airport that morning to discover that the name on my ticket and on my passport didn't match because of marriage name changes and Delta refused to help us with it. I was heartbroken. I haven't flown with them since. I may in the future, but it was awful. They did refund us the full price of our tickets, which is unusual. And the bird flu happened to be going through at that time, so going to Cancun wasn't a great option right then. But still. I was heartbroken. We've never made it down there since. Instead of doing that we decided to buy a digital piano with the flight money. I've never regretted that decision. We purposely chose to get a piano that wasn't so nice that we would never want to replace it with the real deal. I've not regretted that decision either and yet I've thoroughly enjoyed the piano we have had for the last eight years. 

Last night a friend posted on a group page that she was giving away her piano. You better believe I jumped all over that. She had been given her mom's piano and was giving away hers that is still in good shape. I'm over the moon about it. We're picking it up tonight. I can't wait to have the new to us piano in our house. 

This is a pretty stressful phase of life for my family. I'm ping ponging between doing great and being really stressed. This month in particular has been financially taxing. But yesterday I felt so blessed as this opportunity to get this piano popped up and I also determined that as a result of some extra money earned we can cover all the unexpected costs that came up. It's nice to feel taken care of even when this spot we're in is hard. 

An ode to computers

While Bill was out of town a couple weeks ago my computer suddenly died. And I do mean suddenly. It cut out in the middle of a movie the kids were watching never to start again. It's been a bit of a whirlwind trying to get that taken care of. A great friend let me borrow her laptop for a few days while Bill was still gone. For the last week I've used Bill's laptop, which is fine but looking at the screen for too long makes my eyes hurt.

I had an iMac and I dearly loved it. It's six years old and until the moment it died it was in perfectly good working shape. Unfortunately, replacing it with a new one was just a bit out of a price range that made me feel comfortable to drop money on right now, unplanned. We are so close to the end of grad school and a move across the country and saving for a house and paying off student loans and all sorts of things I want to put money towards more than a new computer. Yet my computer is my main work device so I have to have one that works. I've been in a pickle for a while trying to find the best solution.

We finally decided to get a new PC instead of a Mac and shopped around to find one with similar specs that I wanted. We ended up getting a normal desktop computer with tower, monitor, keyboard, mouse. I got it today and started setting it up only to discover that there is no way to adjust the screen brightness except through a horrible menu accessed directly on the monitor. I use that feature multiple times a day, so as weird as it sounds, that ended up being a deal breaker.

Bill is a super savvy shopper though and lo and behold he came up with a solution. We found another computer that had virtually the same specs but is an all-in-one just like my iMac was, but just a PC.

So after just hours with my new computer I'm packing it up and shipping it back and the new one is ordered and will arrive in a couple days. Hopefully the computer buying saga will end and it will be back to business as usual.

All through this process I've felt super blessed. Bill got a paycheck we hadn't planned on for some previous work done. I've upped my hours of work the last few weeks and am seeing a significant increase in my paychecks. I was able to sell the broken iMac for $145. Talk about holding its value. I appreciated that. We have been really blessed so that even though it wasn't in the plan to replace a computer just now, the money is there. It's lovely.

Weather and videos

This week we've had a series of thunderstorms come through. There's been tons of wind, which is very abnormal for this little corner of South Carolina, and tons of damage. Earlier this week I went to pick Spencer up and discovered that trees and power lines had been knocked down in a line just missing the elementary school. That was startling. Their power was out and the road was blocked in both directions. I discovered a super windy road through a subdivision by the school that I didn't know existed and it turned out to be the only way to get to the school. It was pretty chaotic that day.

Several nights we've had crazy amounts of thunder and lightning. The thunder shakes our whole house. I remember storms like that growing up in Colorado Springs. Turns out they're just as intense to weather as an adult as I remember them being as a kid. We have a dead tree in our yard that hasn't been removed yet. Tons of other trees have fallen but so far that one is still there. It's pretty far away from our house and the wind blows parallel to our house so if it did fall it should go away from us, but that's kind of nerve racking. There was a while this fall and winter where we were in a drought, but looks like that is past. We've had inches and inches of rain this week.

There's not really much else going on at the moment. It kind of feels like a time warp actually. Bill and I are both working a ton. Time seems to stand still but we're already a week into April, so obviously it isn't.

The kids are doing lots of fun things. Spencer is learning tons of awesome tricks on the trampoline. Genevieve is the queen of the rings we have in the carport. Aaron is perfecting his ability to pester his siblings. He's living up to his little brother status to perfection. It goes both ways. Genevieve has gotten into cutting hair. She cut her own bangs this week and she trimmed a chunk out of Aaron's side burn too. Chloe started standing on her own this week too and she cruises a bit along the furniture. She can drink out of a straw these days and I make kefir smoothies daily and it's pretty much the best thing in her day. She starts hyperventilating if we don't give her one fast enough when she sees I've made them. Today is the beginning of Spring Break. I haven't a clue what we're going to do, but I'm sure it'll be fun.

Here's a picture Spencer drew. "Jump in the puddles."

And here's a few videos I've posted elsewhere, but they're good here too.