Improved Outlook

Last month was a real struggle for me. I felt completely overwhelmed with what I had on my plate. I didn't really see an end in sight to those and it was hard. Thing is, it's not like anything had changed except I had gotten further along in my pregnancy. I don't really care for the sensation of being overwhelmed and down on life, so I started wondering what had changed. And guess what? It was pretty simple. I had stopped getting good sleep. I mean, I can only get so good of sleep right now since I wake up multiple times a night, but Bill has been pulling crazy late hours doing research and I had started staying up later and later just doing whatever I was doing, fiddling around on projects or work or whatever else until midnight or later every night, getting up at 6AM to work, and just being thoroughly exhausted throughout the rest of every day.

I have no idea why I never seem to learn this lesson. I have night owl tendencies, but early morning responsibilities, which forever come in conflict. But this is not the first time and I'm certain won't be the last where I learn yet again that I need to prioritize sleep. It's kind of one of those duh moments. It's especially important right now because come end of June my sleep is going to get real crazy for a few months and I'm going to have to weather through that newborn phase.

So here's to going to bed at night and remembering that taking care of that need makes everything else easier.

Updates

I feel like I'm just in a circle talking about the same two things over and over, but really, most of my world right now is consumed with feeding my kids and hanging on for the last five weeks of this pregnancy and that's about all I've got.

So let's see, updates. I got a prenatal massage yesterday. It was lovely. It really improved my mood and I felt great the rest of the day.

I had my last prenatal appointment at my midwife's house. I'm having this baby at home, so after 36 weeks along she'll come to me. I do have one more appointment with an OB to finalize that I can indeed have a home birth. Don't get me started on the ridiculousness of that law in South Carolina, but this OB is a nice guy and he will prescribe all the medications I will want on hand just in case there are any complications when I'm in labor, so we'll just focus on that and call it good. She's head down and dropping and all in all in a very good place for 35 weeks pregnant. It's less than a month until my mom flies in and

And now Spencer updates. I don't weigh my kids much, but with the brushing routine thing with Spencer with his OT stuff I am in contact with him a lot more than usual and I noticed this week his knees had gotten exceptionally knobbly. I didn't really connect the dots, but earlier this week I asked him to weigh himself. To my dismay he had lost almost 10 percent body weight from his well child visit back in January. That was terrifying.

We've been doing the Satter method like I described last week. It makes life much simpler for food battles. Except he turned it on its head by deciding at dinner every single night plus most lunches that he'd rather not eat anything, and I've watched any fat there was strip off his bones and he has circles under his eyes and his moods are deteriorating. Lately he'll come and say he's hungry, but if I give him an option that isn't the two or three foods on his firmly comfortable with it list, he says never mind, actually I'm not hungry and walks away. I don't even know what to do with that. I still think it's a good eating method that could work for us long term, but right now not so much.

I don't quite know where to turn. We got him into OT but are now on hold because his insurance denied the OT office's claims. I may take him to the pediatrician, but I honestly don't know what she would do. She hasn't typically been helpful in this area. I don't know if there's a specialist that would be better. It seems like healthcare professionals all start talking about just have him eat these foods and he'll be fine, except he doesn't eat any of those. They always look shocked and I'm like obviously you don't have expertise in this field if this concept that a kid will not actually put food in his mouth even if he's starving is foreign to you and that it's possible for a kid to utterly refuse all categories of food but crackers, peanut butter, and ice cream. There has got to be help out there, people who have experienced this and actually gotten through, yet I don't know where. So consider this a call for help. If you have any clue about this area, I'm all ears. Otherwise I just keep muddling through hoping for some inspiration or breakthrough or something that will help us get out of this hellish phase. It's getting the best of me at the moment.

Eating Update

It's been an interesting few months on the eating front, punctuated by some gains and other complications emerging.  We started back in January pushing Spencer much harder to eat more normal and closer to what the rest of us eat. We instituted a one-bite rule but then super emphasized that we wanted him to taste everything so he could experience new flavors, but then just eat until his stomach was satisfied. It sort of worked. He definitely ate more food, but there were a few complications that emerged as side effects.

First, Spencer has never been a speedy eater, but it got so he was sitting at the table for two or even three hours before he was willing to buckle down and eat. And when he did eat, he ate a single bite of everything and then left, saying he was full. We had to do an incredible amount of emotional management with him as well to keep him from dissolving into tears constantly. He was very stressed. He doesn't have any kind of eating success when he's stressed and crying. It's not a method that has ever worked for him. When his emotions ramp up, his ability to cope pretty much disappears and never comes back.

We also started some occupational therapy in the form of play therapy last month. His therapist is great. We only go once a week, so she's still kind of figuring him out. We'll see what comes of it. I have hopes for success there. He's doing a brushing routine where we brush his extremities and back every two hours, hopefully to minimize some of the stress in his world. We've been doing it for a few weeks. I'm not completely sure we're seeing results, but hey, I'm also not quitting it. I think it might be helping a bit.

This week I just got really tired of the sheer amount of time eating was taking in our world. One of my concerns is about how short lunchtime is at kindergarten and whether Spencer will be able to eat in that amount of time. Taking two and three hours to eat both lunch and dinner is completely counter productive to him learning this skill, so I decided to make some changes. I've read loads of books and things about eating and the approach I most agree with is by Ellen Satter. If you haven't heard of it, it's basically a division of power. The parents pick the food and the location of meals, the kid decides if and how much of the food they eat. There's certainly more to it than that, as she's written a couple books about it, but that's the barebones.

This is sort of what we were doing all this year, but I've been too scared to fully implement it, or go full Satter, as people in this little eating world call it. See, Spencer is really skinny. He's gained very little weight in the last 18 months. I'm concerned about his growth being stunted. But I think he may have actually lost weight in the last couple months, which concerns me. I'm trying not to fixate on this, but mostly I'm just concerned that he get enough to eat to grow. I think the food issues affect his moods, which are often pretty negative, so it's a multi-faceted problem. But it's become apparent that what we're doing isn't turning into long-term improvement, so yesterday I started the full Satter approach. It requires I be a lot more structured in our meals/snacks, which will be a good thing. It will also help my other kids, who are in the throes of toddler and preschool eating craziness as well. So I'm making whatever I'm going to make, and then talking constantly about how I make the food and they decided whether to eat or not. It's a process to get them to understand how things are going to work. I think it's going to take a few days of constant effort to get the routine down. But I'm hoping for good things.

In addition I've started setting a limit on mealtime length. I'm trying out half an hour for now. That might change. Spencer didn't finish his lunch in that time today and it's been like 30 minutes since lunch and he just asked me for a snack. I told him we'd have a snack in a couple hours and reminded him this is why we need to eat at lunch instead of looking out the window or otherwise doing anything but eating. So we shall see. This still feels like my kryptonite, but I'm not hopeless like I've been at other points.

Pregnancy Update

All I can really think about is how soon I'll have this baby, so I figure I might as well blog about what's on my mind, right? :)

I had my 32-week midwife appointment this morning. I'm measuring measuring 34 weeks at this point, which is super heartening to me as it just might mean she'll come early. Whether it means that or not, I thoroughly appreciate the attitude boost it gives me.

My midwife and I decided we don't think she's a particularly large baby at this point. It still seems like she has room to move, which this far along my bigger babies didn't, and it was readily apparent to me as I got pummeled from the inside out. So that's also heartening to me right now. I love all my 8+ lb babies because they eat so well and thrive fast, but heck, having this one be in the 7-lb range would be completely welcome for the whole giving birth part and still be a plenty healthy size. I haven't even the slightest clue how big she'll actually be, so this is all conjecture and forecast, but that is what it is.

It's gotten really hard to sleep of late and that's done a number on my mental state. It's really easy to get frustrated over everything these days, so I'm definitely doing my best to find ways to stay positive. It just goes with the end of pregnancy that this is the biggest struggle, so it's all normal, but I'm in the thick of it right now.

I didn't think it was possible after my other three pregnancies to carry a baby more in front than I did before, but sure enough, this one is proving me wrong. It makes my back pretty sore, and I was concerned that I would tear muscles like I did with Genevieve, but so far so good. I have lots of contractions all the time, as is also pretty normal after multiple pregnancies, and anytime I do anything of even minimal effort, my poor body rebels, but hey, I can now say this baby is coming next month and that is golden. Also, my mom just booked her ticket to come help me with the baby, and that totally makes my day.

So there it is. Pregnancy at 32 weeks 4 days. I'm counting down, folks.

Things happening of late

Entertaining themselves while we were at a therapy session for Spencer. 

One of the first strawberries from our garden. We have so many growing. I'm excited for this summer.

Swinging before bed. Aaron loves to mimic whatever Genevieve does.

And a video of Aaron being Aaron. He is very definite about everything he does, to say the least. And we love to pester him. Ha!

Baptism Time

My beautiful niece Katrina got baptized this weekend and we grabbed the opportunity to make a quick trip up to the Philadelphia area to celebrate with them. None of the rest of my family lives on this side of the country. We figured we're never going to live closer to them than we do now. Whether that is true or not, off we went on a whirlwind trip. We woke up late by accident Friday, but still managed to get on the road by about 7:20am. It meant we drove through DC and Baltimore during rush hour, which wasn't exciting, but the kids were total rockstar travelers. Seriously, in the last few years we've mostly stopped taking trips because traveling was just so much work, but it seems we have moved past that stage. They did so, so well. We drove for 13 hours Friday and 12+ hours Monday coming back and we didn't turn a movie on until literally the last two hours both trips. They just read books and looked out the window and ate food and laughed and chattered and it was like night and day from previous trips. Amazing.

My sister's in-laws are delightful people who throw amazing parties. I've always wanted to go to one, and this weekend was my chance. They were kind enough to let us stay at their house for a couple nights, and we enjoyed a Paris-themed party complete with au pair to watch our kids in the basement and full spread Parisian meal, even a French waitress (my sister's MIL who served her mission in France, or at least part of it). It was incredible and so fun. We had a fun place to take pictures set up, the house was themed like a French market, with a flower booth and paintings booth and other such things.

The baptism was lovely. I accompanied a musical number that turned out nice. Katrina's aunt sang beautifully. Katrina's grandma, the one who threw the party, gave the best talk on the Holy Ghost I've ever heard. She used a comparison of the music from Peter and the Wolf as an object lesson. She played a piece of a number from it and told us she liked that part best because she loved the oboe. Well all the kids looked at her strangely of course and she said, what, you don't know what the oboe sounds like? Well then she played another piece with just oboe. Then she went back to the original piece and played it again and you could see lights go on in everyone's eyes all over the congregation as they recognized the instrument. She then compared that to recognizing the Holy Ghost. I've never seen people so riveted by a baptismal talk.

And now we're back and glad to be home, and I'm so happy we made the trip. It was worth it.

My wanderer

Don't be fooled by that innocent face. This kid wandered down across my neighbor's large yard, across the street, and over to the next house over to play with the girls he saw outside this afternoon while I was making lasagna for dinner and periodically checking outside to make sure the kids were good. All while the older two jumped on the trampoline. Though they were probably fighting, so maybe he was looking for more enjoyable playmates, lol. Our neighbor, who we haven't actually met because two doors down is kind of deceiving, the houses are way far apart, kindly brought him back after asking him where he lived. He was happy to show her. He's 21 months old.

Holy cow. This kid. He wants to walk into the stores now instead of being carried. He gets into his own carseat and gets really ticked if I clip his chest strap for him. He wants to put his own arms in and clip it. He's "reading" a Calvin and Hobbes book here. He climbs in and out of his high chair on his own. He can open all our doors. If he can't reach, he just gets a chair so he can. He finds his own food if we don't get him something to eat. The day he learns to open the fridge will be a day that goes down in history. I have thought on numerous occasions of late, huh, these three kids really keep me on my toes. Good thing I'm having another one in ten weeks!!! lololol.

But geez, I love this kid. He's imaginative and innovative and has the most amazing cheeky grin that splits his face in half. I just hope he survives the transition to middle child here in a bit okay and stays just like he is, because he's just the best and I don't want him to change at all. I just to figure out how to keep up with him.

Some random photos

Aaron still looks uncannily like his cousin Gracie. He put on one of Genevieve's shirts the other day and I snapped a picture to send to my picture telling her we stole Gracie. :)

After watching a Mickey Mouse short that talked about Turkish Delight, Bill made some for the kids. It looks totally beautiful here, but unfortunately it wasn't solid enough to cut and frankly it tasted a little weird. Fun experiment though. 

Annual Easter/conference Girls Scout cookie making day. Samoas.

Thin Mints. Worth every minute it takes to make them, which are a lot of minutes, so that's a good thing.

I've been cultivating a sourdough starter in my fridge for a month or so now, making something every couple weeks. This week I made these. They are delightful. It's a recipe from King Arthur flour. I basically just went to their recipes section, looked at sourdough, and picked a recipe that looked good. I'm pretty sure I'll be doing the same thing every couple months for a good while. They have so many recipes. So, so, so yummy.

Third Trimester

This is what the beginning of the third trimester looks on me. So.much.baby. I passed the 27-week mark last weekend and boom, suddenly I am horribly uncomfortable and some of the pregnancy quirks I've been waiting to experience again hit with a vengeance. It's not really a fun way to spend the last few days, but oh well. I'm two-thirds done and so happy about that.

I switch my kids' rooms around all the time, trying to find the optimal setup. My mom is going to come out when the baby is born, and I want to have an actual bed for her, not just an air mattress or a couch. Plus, I made the kids bunk beds in the last couple years and Spencer's is horribly squeaky now and the legs on Genevieve's are just a bad design, so I'm making a couple new beds for them, getting rid of their bunk beds, and we pulled out the toddler bed for Aaron. He's in absolute heaven over that, Genevieve's bed is in the midst of being stained/finished in my carport and she can't wait for it to be done, and Spencer keeps asking when we're going to make his. All good things.

One more thing. I took down the crib today. That's right. I'm having a baby in 12 weeks and I took down the crib. A friend of mine had a fifth baby and really didn't have room for one in her house, so her youngest has slept in the pack 'n' play her whole life and will just transition to a bed straight from there. It struck me that I could totally do that with Chloe and it would work so much better in this little house of mine. She'll never know the difference. If we go on vacation she'll never have to adjust to a new bed because we'll bring it with us!!! We'll see how it all goes down, but I like the idea right this second, especially as I just took down the crib and have a whole extra wall in one of the bedrooms. Huzzah!

Things that happened this week

I'm working through a haze of exhaustion today. We've had way too many nights in the past three weeks with very little sleep. Aaron got diagnosed with RSV last Friday, after having a double ear infection the week before. Needless to say, sleep has not returned to normal for any of us. Last night Genevieve made her way into bed with us without me even noticing until she was already there. King size beds are wonderful, and definitely an improvement on smaller ones when kiddos join you, but this pregnant lady needs more space to move than having her there allowed. So today is a push through the exhaustion sort of day. But here are a few things that have happened of late.

Spencer sends me and Bill selfies everyday as well as typeing all the letters of the alphabet out in uppercase and then in lower case to the zoo friend letter of the week that he is at in preschool. He's to U this week, so I get a daily text sharing that. :) 

Like I mentioned, Aaron has been sick for at least three weeks. He hasn't been sick this much his entire life. Usually he is the picture of good health. He's slept or cuddled on me more for hours every day. Since that hasn't been the norm in at least a year, I'll take it. He has started just today being willing to run around and play again and it's nice to see his happy self coming back.

Chicken pot pie for Pi Day.

This is how Genevieve rode on our new lawn mower when we picked it up earlier this week. She's laying on the box that is sitting on top of the cart.

Aaron got to have his own mini cart yesterday for the first time at the grocery store. He was in heaven. Everyone in the store that saw them it put a smile on their faces. It made me happy.

This is the table I refinished last week. I like how it turned out. It was pretty trashed before. 

Acrobatics

Sometimes when Daddy gets home we do acrobatics. And we have to carefully screen out Daddy so as to keep it all modest, lolol. The kids love it.

There are blessings in even the hardest experiences

I've struggled a bit with the idea of writing anything about the last 10 days here on my blog. My world got flipped upside down as a result of a simple phone call two Mondays ago informing me my dad was back in the hospital after a visit the previous Sunday. That phone call triggered a series of events that included all of my siblings scrambling to get to Utah as fast as possible to get to my dad's bedside. We all made it. We were all there surrounding him as he passed from this world three days later, now a week ago.

I haven't experienced a week this difficult in my recent memory. It was so, so hard. At the same time there were blessings interspersed throughout. It was incredible to be with my siblings together a mere six months after our last time doing that, when before that it had been 13 years. The spirit we felt throughout the experience was tangible. I felt bigger emotions than I've felt in many years, both good and bad, but all were poignant.

And through it all I got to celebrate a wonderful man, one who cannot be replaced and will be missed greatly. I've attended a lot of funerals. My dad's was special, and not just because it was him. He was a special man, unique, and the stories that were shared, the songs that were sung, all showed that.

It still blows me away that he is gone so quickly. I will miss him more than words can express. It is going to be a long time before I see him again, but I know that I will indeed see him again. He will no longer be in pain. His body will be perfect. And it will be worth every moment we've been apart.

Pregnancy treating me nicely

I'm only 5'2" tall, so when I get pregnant I get huge pretty fast. It can become really uncomfortable. Case in point, two of my friends I work with at church are pregnant too, one six weeks ahead of me, one ten. I am bigger than the one six weeks ahead and about the same size as the ten. They're both significantly taller than me. It makes a huge difference. But it's all good. I'm not in it for the comparisons in terms of being bothered, more just because it's fascinating. My body has always really impressed me with how well it recovers after the fact, so even if I get really huge and uncomfortable, I know that I can get back to a place I want to be afterward without too much time elapsing. After about a year each time, sometimes much sooner, I have always been back to whatever my normal is.

Anyway, this pregnancy has been a bit different. My last one was super uncomfortable the whole time, so I've been much more proactive about eating well and exercising and addressing issues as they pop up, such as when I started carpal tunnel symptoms a month or so ago and immediately started a supplement that really helped. This has resulted in things going so much better this go around than last. A friend of mine mentioned that she gets woken up every night in the wee hours to use the bathroom or just for no reason whatsoever, and it made me step back and appreciate that I do not have that happening yet. Our due dates are only a few days apart, and I'm sure I dealt with that at this point with my others, but not so this time. Maybe that means tonight will be the night, but whatever, I'm 21, almost 22 weeks along and sleeping soundly all night long. I don't have that many aches and pains. I do pretty significant yoga and it has helped keep my strength up, which is making a huge difference on that front.

My goal is not to brag. I really just want to record somewhere that I'm super grateful that despite this being my fourth pregnancy, and always being under the impression that each successive one would be harder, this one is not right now. I feel good. I'm trekking along well. She is growing well. She's moving all the time, but not to the point of uncomfortable like it will get eventually. Things are nice. I appreciate every day that feels that way. And hopefully I'll remember in ten weeks or whatever that I did feel good for a long time. And if I'm lucky, I'll still feel good then and it will be amazing. The female body truly is an incredible creation and I'm sure grateful for what mine is doing right now.

Naming a baby

As luck would have it, Bill and I have actually had a fairly easy time picking baby names. We had two the first go around, Spencer and Luke. I believe both of them actually came from my list of names I had gathered over the years of names I liked for future children. We didn't decide on Spencer until he was born and in the hospital and we sort of tried it on him and it worked.

Genevieve's name actually came from Bill's internship at a gas company in Las Vegas the summer I was pregnant with Spencer. We didn't know his gender yet, and Bill came upon the name Genevieve while looking through property records of some sort. He liked it and mentioned it to me and I liked it as well. So that name just hung out for a couple years until she was actually born, but we never stopped liking it, so that was surprisingly easy.

Aaron took quite a bit longer to decide on. His name ended up also coming from my list if I remember right, but it didn't stand out immediately. I don't think we picked his name until about 25 weeks pregnant. We liked the names Aaron and Alexander and we actually asked Spencer which one he liked. He unfailingly picked Aaron, which is pretty impressive for a barely three-year old. The name stuck and we picked it.

This go around the instant I found out I was pregnant I was sure I was having a girl. I have no idea why it seemed so obvious to me, but it did. My boy and girl pregnancies have been quite different from each other, so that helped, but mostly I was just sure. We didn't have even an inkling of a name but one day the name Chloe popped into my head and it felt so incredibly right. I was pretty hesitant to share wtih Bill for fear he wouldn't like it when I was so certain it was her name. But then I told him and he loved it and we were both completely shocked. We've gone through loads of names that we couldn't agree on, so this was impressive. It's never happened that easily. We haven't a clue what her middle name will be, but hey, we're halfway there and feeling good. It'll come.

Moving forward

Spencer finally had his first consultation appointment with an occupational therapist at the group we found a month or so ago. It has felt like quite the wait, but it went really well. They have a wait list, but I was told he should get in pretty fast because we have lots of availability to schedule. So that's great. It probably means it will be weeks away still, but we're making progress and that's good.

I had an interesting thankful moment while I was there. Like I've said before here, we have been heads down working through his particular set of difficulties for years and it is easy to get discouraged. But this place did all sorts of different therapies, so I observed a wide variety of children, some of them with more obvious developmental delays than others. It made me thoughtful and I felt very grateful that my particular children, while they certainly have their quirks and things they need to learn, as do all children, I've never felt they wouldn't learn what they needed to or develop in such a way that they can successfully navigate school and work and society in general. They do fine in social situations. They are just average kids growing up. Well I don't think they're average, but for my point, they are. There are kids out there that face real struggles and potentially have barriers to success that mine have never faced. This made me grateful and very thoughtful. I applaud the families out there that work through much more intense difficulties than we are going through and they do it day in and day out. They are very impressive to me.

So that's that. I had a friend point me to a talk given by Sis. Wendy Nelson for a CES fireside last month. It was only about ten minutes long and worth a listen. She talked about the things we do when motivated by desperation. It was spot on for what has happened in the last six weeks with working with Spencer. Parenting sometimes feels like that. We muddle along doing the best we can, trying different methods, discarding some, trying others, and then there are moments when we get desperate. It suddenly becomes worth it to try methods that seemed too hard in the past. I've read so many books about eating. I've scoured the internet. We've tried seemingly everything. But until I feared that we'd end up with him in the hospital, I never buckled down and tried some methods that were harder, that took more perseverance, that required daily effort on my part. It was so much easier to go easier routes and hope time would help things. When it became apparent that wasn't happening and we might be facing real health concerns very soon, it is amazing how my motivations solidified. I recommend the talk. And hang in there all my friends out there dealing with their particular struggles. I hope you don't get to the desperation point, but then again, you probably will, and I can attest to good things coming out of that kind of motivation. It's not the easiest place, but good things happen there.

A few photos of recent good things

Opening birthday gifts. Spencer and I had a great birthday.

Spencer got a paint-by-number set that he immediately colored the morning of his birthday and he was so happy about it. The weather cancelled preschool that day, so we had a totally chill day at home.

My hair is so shaggy. I'm letting it grow out again and the growing phase is something else, lol. It's starting to discover it's natural wave again. I've got some pretty impressive wings. Hopefully those grow out very soon.

Yes, this cake tasted as good as it looks.

This kid. Those crinkly eyes. That huge smile. He is delightful. He's my first kid who is bound and determined to be big. The complete meltdown over a plastic fork when he wanted a metal one is a great example. This kid is smart as a whip and picks up on stuff so fast. I don't want to comment on the number of times he's managed to get a sharp knife in his hand and looked so pleased with himself. But seriously, he is so sweet. He's heading for his terrible twos with a swiftness, but I'm hoping he doesn't lose all that sweetness when the crazy hits.

The snow actually came! We got maybe two inches, but it was perfect snowball and snowman building snow and we had a fantastic time. Spencer has been talking about how it's going to snow for his birthday for months and it totally happened despite mine and Bill's skepticism. Yay for Spencer!

Awesome selfies

Bill fulfilled his lifelong dream to make homemade corndogs. He's already made them a second time. They are shockingly good. We get the higher end hot dogs from Costco and it makes all the difference on taste.

Rocking the overalls. She is going to grow her bangs out, so we'll see lots of pictures of hair in the eyes over the next few months, lol. Also, people debate about how much they teach their kids versus how much they are just the way they are. This girl is feisty. She came that way, she is still that way, and nothing we do changes that. She comes up with the best comments and has so much emotion bottled in that cute little red-headed body. We call her spicey and it's as true as it can get. :)

A bit more cautious hope

I talked a week or two ago about Spencer's eating issues. I got some pretty positive responses back from people that it helped, so I thought I'd talk a bit about some cautious success we've had the last couple weeks. We're still waiting for the healthcare wheels to turn on the new therapy option we found, but in the meantime Bill and I have changed up how we run meals around here and it seems to be having some positive results with not just Spencer, but my other two as well.

I've always said trying to apply things that work for most kids has never worked with Spencer. His development path just seems to be different than other kids. He learns some stuff crazy fast and is way behind in others. He always catches up in the end, but general trends in child development just don't seem to work with him. For instance, we tend to like the Satter method of eating, which basically says the parents choose what food and the kids choose if and how much they eat. Turns out that doesn't quite work because Spencer chooses to never eat food if he thinks he won't like it. Hunger has no bearing on it. So this last week we've actually gone back to the basic idea that he has to eat what we eat and basically can't leave until he does. It sounds super simple and kind of like, duh, that is normal, but that's not really how it works in action.

First off, I spent significant amounts of time petitioning the heavens for help on what we could possibly do to help him learn how to eat. It's hard to know if it was a clearcut answer or my utter inability to cope with the status quo and that I just had to do something different or I was going to have a nervous breakdown, but the change has been an improvement.

Second, we've spent a lot of nights this week sitting at the table for hours working through this change. There have been lots of tears, lots of bargaining, attempts at bartering, and total freak outs over the changes, not all from Spencer unfortunately. Thankfully he's old enough to talk him through why we're doing what we're doing and why and that makes a big difference.

I remember when he was four months old and we realized rocking him to sleep every night wasn't sustainable. We decided to try to wean him of it and ended up using the Ferber Method, which if you're unfamiliar is basically that we would lay him down in his crib, he would cry, we'd come in a few minutes later, comfort him, leave, come back in a few more minutes later, comfort him, etc, and he would learn to go to sleep. Tada! Ha! No chance. Every time we went in it reset his expectation and he ramped right back up screaming. It turned out the method that worked for him instead was to put him in bed and leave him until he crashed. It took an hour or more the first night, 30 minutes the second, maybe five minutes the third, and he went to bed on his own from then on out with virtually no problem. It sounds so easy when I write it with those bare details. It's so easy to gloss over the absolute anguish we felt as he screamed for that long each of those nights, how we felt like we were killing our baby and it would never get better and he would never learn.

Turns out that's a bit like it has felt the last three and a half years working through the eating issues. He was never going to learn. We were killing him. Actually that was a more pressing concern since not eating really could kill him, but still, it was the perception of it that was so hard. Everyone else seemed to be able to figure this out. Our kid was never going to be able to go to a fast food restaurant and happily eat a meal, let alone any other restaurant. We were going to feed him his special selection of food forever.

Yet suddenly something seems to be working a bit better. It's not perfect. Every meal includes lots of cajoling and hopefully cheering him on as he works through it, though that depends on how thin the patience has gotten that day. We still spend way more time than I'd like at each meal. The first day it took probably two extra hours for him to sample a bite of whatever was for dinner. The second day it was more like an hour and a half. I think we finished our entire family's dinner from start to finish in an hour last night. He's tasted more things this week than in the last year. We're aiming towards eating more of the dish and not just one bite, but progress is being made, progress I thought would never come. He was never going to learn. We would never get past this. Well, we're not past it, but it doesn't seem as hopeless.

I think the key is that feeling of hitting rock bottom. I felt like I just couldn't cope anymore with how things were going, so my commitment to fix it is much more solid than any other time. When you look at your child and wonder how long it will be before you have to take them to the hospital, it changes you. But you know, it's okay. This isn't the first time I've felt this way in my life. It won't be the last. The cautious progress helps. We'll get there. The hope continues.

Funny things from this week

Aaron decided his favorite word is no. That's all he says all day long. He says it with every inflection under the sun. He even has multiple ways to say no. No, nooooo, uh-uh, etc. It's amusing and aggravating and we'll all be glad when he moves past this stage, but he is really cute, so it's pretty adorable at the same time.

He sometimes gets a little over zealous eating his yogurt.

Genevieve was my first child to experiment with shoving an item up her nose. It was a lego, one of the round button ones that are only one dot size. We asked her what possessed her to try it and her response was classic Genevieve, "I thought it would be fun." She followed that up in the car on the way to the doctor with, "It isn't very fun." lololol. Hopefully she learned that lesson and won't do that again. The reason I even discovered it was because we were playing legos and she starting picking at her nose. I told her to go get a tissue if she needed to do that and she said, "Mom, it's not a booger. It's a lego!" It turned out to be a pretty easy fix. Our PA at the doctor was able to get it out, which was kind of miraculous because she says she never succeeds at that. So all in all an amusing, albeit a bit traumatic experience.

The kids got a bit antsy to be done on our last Costco trip. This is how they ended up as we were going through the checkout line. If you look close you'll see Spencer is actually in the cart. Let me tell you, this cart was heavy to push! 

Spencer turns five in a week. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the fact that he's been on this earth for that many years. This isn't really a funny thing, but more just that he's developing some self awareness and I'm enjoying the process. He developed a cold after church on Sunday and it ramped up pretty quickly, so I planned to keep him home from preschool Monday but didn't mention it to him. When he woke up and was eating breakfast he told me, "Mom, I don't think I should go to preschool this morning. I don't feel very good. I'll go tomorrow." He has always had a quirk where if we ask him how he feels his response is always, "Good" or "Fine." So this is actually kind of a big deal. He did end up going to school Tuesday, but he has a cough that developed again last night, so he said the same thing this morning. I appreciate that he's finally starting to recognize how he's feeling. Communication is a really good thing.

One of the hundreds of selfies Spencer takes on my phone.

A bit of hope

I don't talk much about my oldest's struggles with eating on this sort of platform. It hasn't been helpful to me for years. The issue is too longstanding and even well meaning advice causes more pain than help because it's not a normal situation, so normal methods have proven unsuccessful every time. But it has been an issue we've dealt with for three and a half years and it pervades all aspects of my family's world.

Meals happen at least three times a day. Imagine having that activity be hard each and every time it comes around. Imagine a constant struggle between getting enough, or anything, to eat and eating more than two or three foods. Imagine the worry it causes me as he's obviously hungry but anxiety and fear is keeping him from eating because for some reason food is an enemy to him, and he'll choose hunger over eating something unfamiliar every single time. Think on what it must feel like to live hungry most of the time, how it might make you cranky and easily frustrated, how you can't understand how this activity is not a big deal for everyone else.

And from my point of view, who am supposed to be able to provide food for him to grow and develop and learn, imagine the worry, the guilt, and the fear as I watch him not grow, not eat, and just struggle so much on this seemingly simple task. Do I feed him the foods that I well know are not proving him all the nutrients he needs, but at least get something in him so he doesn't end up in the hospital, or wrack my brain and the internet for some new method that might help him to overcome, to improve? How do I handle the tears, the fear, the anxiety, heck, the other two kids and their needs? How do I deal with the repercussions of trying numerous normal methods of getting kids to eat that entirely backfired and that I still hear about sometimes in our food interactions. Now multiply that by 3.5 years.

That's our reality and it's hard. Mind numbingly hard. We look for progress in the most minor changes. We don't live in a location that has a lot of resources, so I've felt very alone as I've tried to work through this. There was a time when I just couldn't handle reading about eating issues because it caused despair, not hope. The therapy we did several years ago helped a bit for one or two issues, but not the eating ones. We stopped after six months when progress completely stalled. Funny thing is, we're actually in a better place in this whole process than before. We have way better communication between us. But it's not enough. He's not flourishing, he's not growing as much as he really ought to, and the actual eating food that allows him to be healthy is just not there. It came to a head this vacation when some of the few tried and true foods started getting rejected and that just got scary. I hit a breaking point. I sent a lot of prayers heavenward. I've been doing that for years, or truthfully it's more like years ago I prayed like crazy about it and when things never changed we just kept plugging away but the prayers faded away because it was too hard. Sound familiar to anyone?

So anyway, that breaking point. While Bill is endlessly supportive and helps as best as he can, he's not around the majority of the time we're eating, so this often ends up being a solo challenge. But he jumped in and started doing some research and those prayers had at least the beginning of a result. We found a therapy resource in Greenville that we didn't know about that has potential. We're in the process of getting in to start meeting with them and I have cautious hope that we'll get the help we need to start healing some of these issues. Time will tell, but cautious hope is more than I've felt for years, so I'm feeling good at the moment.

Christmas in pictures

We had a fantastic Christmas Eve and Christmas and today as well. It really was the best holiday season we've had since we had kids. I just loved it. Here's some shots of how the days went.

His stocking treats were no match for him. Gone so fast.

She got a giant Elsa doll that is nearly as tall as her and she carries it everywhere.

Favorite gift by far, the toolset his cousin gave him. He had some sort of tool in his hand the entire day, generally the hammer, and was very bugged whenever his siblings wanted to play with them, as they thought they were super cool too.

She loved the several stuffed animals she received.

After he cheeseball grinned for this he grabbed the camera to see how he looked. They learn so young!

Playing hungry, hungry hippos

We had a Christmas miracle! It stopped raining for the entire day until the evening, for the first time since Monday. Much joy occurred on the new trampoline because of this.

Trying out the trampoline as a napping location.

She was going for the serious look, but really she was in heaven.

She doesn't know it, but this is the last hurrah for this toy box. I built it when Spencer was under a year old and we just don't have room for it anymore. It was an excellent spot to watch Aladdin today.

A shot from Christmas Eve dinner. We always do a simple dinner patterned after the Last Supper. We sit on a blanket on the floor and have crackers and cheese and sausage and juice and read the Christmas story and sing a few songs. This year we started it off with a video from LDS.org portraying the Last Supper and the kids just loved it. It's a fun tradition.

We have this awesome full-size New Testament with pictures that I received as a gift I think at my bridal shower. It's pretty fun to read the Christmas story from it. 

More hammer love.

See? Never without it.

I have so many shots of them jumping, generally in different sets of clothes each time, which is amusing since it's all in the last two days.

Talk about blackmail shot. Spencer jumping in his underwear and butterfly wings. Also, Aaron is totally capable of climbing on and off of the trampoline, but it's terrifying to watch and I'm so not comfortable letting him do it by himself yet. He figured out the zipper on the net basically on the first try. Nothing stops this kid.