family time

Our Christmas vacation was a beautiful whirlwind full of emotions!  Since, as always I am so late getting this out, I am going to touch on the highlights of the vacation.

I love Christmas!  I am one of those die hard, sappy, emotional about everything Christmas people.  I love the decorations, I love the food, I love the sugar, I love the presents, but by far the thing that I love the most is the family-time that Christmas brings.  The kids are on school break.  My handsome hubby is on vacation from work.  Extended family sacrifices and flies to one place just to be together.  I love it!!!  I would give up the decorations, food, and everything else just to have those moments with my family.

I adore watching my kids interact with their aunties, uncles, and grandparents.  They relish in the time that they get to spend with these special people in their lives.  They talk about them when we are away from them.  

By far the best part about my break this year was spending time with my sisters.  They each chose to stay in the house, which meant that I got to spend time with them and their fabulous husbands.  I didn't have the opportunity growing up to spend a whole lot of time with them.  I am so much older than both of them that by the time I left for college they were still pretty young.  It was (and is always) so fun to stay up late together, cuddle on the couch, sunbathe in the yard or at the beach, do each others nails... I just love them, and I feel like every time I get to see them we just get closer.

Now since I usually have 1-2 kids on my hips I don't get to take a whole lot of great pictures.  Thankfully Alycia DOES take lots of pictures and I swiped some of hers!  Thanks Alycia!!!

 

Evan's surgery

I had written this before we left on our Christmas vacation and just never got it posted.

(don't know how I missed that one!)  Anyway, here is how our surgical experience went down.

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Evan has never been a big eater and I have dreaded and stressed over every calorie his tiny little body has consumed in the last 5 years or so.  After about a year of research and stress we made the decision that Evan should have a feeding tube.  He will be required to continue to follow all of his "food rules" and we will be supplementing his feeding at night while he is sleeping.

When we first made the decision he was quite distressed by it, and eventually he just became resigned to it.  I know he wasn't thrilled, but he knew it had to happen so he didn't fight it anymore.  We are hoping to accomplish a couple things with this new adventure.

1)We hope that Evan will start to grow better than he has in the past.
2)We hope that the night time feedings will boost his energy during the day.
3)We now have a back up plan for feeding when Evan is sick and goes on a food strike.

The surgery was the first one of the day so we left our house at 5:30AM.  Having that time alone with Justin and Evan was such a beautiful thing for me.  I needed Justin's strength to hold it together (I don't like knowing that my baby is going to feel pain) and I just needed to hold my Evan as much as I could.

By the day of surgery Evan wasn't as afraid of the procedure because he had decided that he would be able to stay awake.  He told the anesthesiologist that he was going to have a competition with him and didn't think that he would be able to get him to go to sleep.  (hint: Evan lost that competition, but scored points for effort).

They let me take Evan back to the operation room.  I laid him on the operation table and started to sing him to sleep.  Evan was true to his word and he did put up a fight.  I held one hand and a nurse held his other hand.  As I was coming to the conclusion of the second verse Evan took his hand away from the nurse and reached up, touching my face as he peacefully went to sleep.  I hardly finished the song because I was crying and I left my angel in the care of his doctors.

Thankfully the surgery wasn't very long and after an hour we received word that everything had gone text book perfect.  We saw him a half an hour after that.  Watching him try to recover from the anesthesia was brutal for this parent to watch.  He was in a ton of pain and nothing really settled him.  Finally they were able to get his pain under control and he started to come to his senses.

It took a while to get a room, but we didn't have to go to ICU which is what the original plan was.  We stayed in the hospital for 3 days and came home.  Evan gets better every day and is now even showing an interest in doing his own care for the surgical sites.  I know this was just a minor surgery, but it is still surgery and I am so grateful that Evan came out of it alright.  We look forward to the exciting prospects that this tube might offer to help Evan through his day to day.

it was a long day for all of us ... and yes, Justin is actually sleeping!!!

after a whole day of fasting Evan finally gets to have a popsicle!

Home Depot came and did a project with the kids.  Evan had just lost his IV and was thrilled to go without having to be hooked up to a machine.

the kid who doesn't eat very much was soooo excited to have his first real food the next day!

a special visitor came!!!

and he had EXACTLY what Evan requested for a present.

The brothers came with daddy for a movie night ... everyone but me and the baby fell asleep.

Evan got a "bath" before we went home :0)

TUMMY BEFORE AND AFTER

back to reality

Well it has come.  Winter break is over.  Vacations and trying to sleep in are at an end.  Tomorrow I will have to wake up my kiddos before they are ready to get up, get them ready and send them off to school.  In some ways it will be nice to get back to routine, on the other hand my life will once again be dominated by schedules.

Next major milestone on the Palmer family schedule ... have a baby!!!  (In approximately 14 weeks)  Crazy!!!

pregnancy: thus far

Pregnancy has been an interesting experience.  Never did I expect it to be a piece of cake.  In fact I've had so many medical "issues" with my body in the past that I almost expected pregnancy to be tricky.  I'm not completely naive about what pregnancy and delivery can look like, heck I've been watching my friends have babies for about 11 years now.  It is really interesting though to discover first-hand some of the "beautiful" aspects of pregnancy.

In the beginning I felt like I had the flu 24/7.  No I didn't throw up, but I always felt like I was going to.  Because I was constantly nauseous I was really tired.  I mostly just wanted to sleep.

One of my very favorite discoveries (cough, cough) is best summed up by something Justin tells people.  He said that for years and years he heard about this mystical pregnancy "glow".  He now knows that this "glow" is actually a haze of toxic gas that follows me wherever I go!  I wish I was kidding too, but even my kids started to ask me if I had a tooting problem.  I told them that it isn't actually me tooting but that the baby is tooting and obviously we will need to teach them to have better manners when they are born.  :-)

We rented a Doppler so we could hear the baby's heart beat whenever we wanted to.  It has eased my mind through this whole thing and the boys and I have sure had fun.  They love to sit and listen to the babies heart beat, then mine, and then we spend some time listening to each of their hearts beat.  It really has been fun to see my children have this very new experience of building a family.

Speaking of the boys.  They have collectively decided that if this baby is a boy it will be named Scooter and a girl will be named Rainbow!  Landon will switch between these two names and talk to my stomach.  While I am not going to publicly say that those are bad names (heaven forbid I offend any "Rainbows" out there, we will NOT be naming this baby either of those names.

We have chosen to not find out the gender of the baby.  We have our reasons, but the biggest of these is that we think it is fun to have that surprise at the end of the experience.  It drives everyone else around us mental that we aren't going to find out!

I felt like I didn't really look pregnant until last Monday.  I went to bed Sunday evening looking chunky and woke up on Monday morning looking pregnant!!!  Even my girlfriends all agree that I "popped"!

I spent many many years coming to terms with my infertility.  In fact I would say it was a full seven years before I could say that I was actually completely alright with my lot in life.  Though I had completely accepted my infertility there was a single aspect of pregnancy that I was unbelievably jealous about.  I wanted to know what it felt like to have a baby move inside of me.  To have that connection to a life that nobody else gets to experience.  To be that mother carrying a child is such a special privilege.  I was BY FAR the most excited to feel this baby kick!  It is literally what I've been waiting for the whole time!  Everyone said it would feel like flutters, a slight movement.  I was feeling NOTHING.  Believe me I think I would have even counted gas bubbles as movement, but my stomach was almost rigid.  The night before I hit the 20 week mark I was laying in bed, trying to fall asleep, and all of a sudden a was poked from the inside out!  My eyes sprang open and it happened one more time!!!  I immediately started to cry.  It had happened.  I could feel my baby move inside of me, a literal dream come true.  I have to admit that since then I have been quite selfish almost willing this baby to move more often.  I want to feel them all the time!  Last week Justin was able to feel one small kick, but it will be a beautiful thing to share this with him as well.

This whole thing is flying by so quickly!  I am so used to having to wait years for a baby that it seems that 9 months is no time at all!  Yes we actually did get all of our children quickly through adoption, especially when you consider how lucky we are to have been chosen for 3 beautiful babies, but from the start of the paper work to placement it was over a year and a half for all of them and longer for Cameron.

Overall this experience has been incredible, breathtaking, and miraculous!  I never said that I wanted the "joy" of pregnancy and delivery.  I have always yearned for the "experience" of pregnancy and delivery and I still cannot believe that it is happening to me!  

baby scooter

bullies

Being a parent is hard.

I am constantly worrying about my kids.  I worry about what others do to them.  I worry about what they do to others.  I worry about the choices that they will make, and I worry about the choices that they won't have.  I also worry that I won't know what to do, or how to react in every one of these situations.

One of my fears has come true in the last week.

At the beginning of the school year we had a lot of trouble with busing for Evan.  His day was too long and it was not a situation that he could continue with.  We managed to switch companies and it seemed to be working well.  The schedule was better and he was riding with other kids.  The problem is that his chair loads in the back and he had to sit with the middle schoolers.  I was worried about what he would learn from kids so much older than him.  Little did I know it would be so much worse than I imagined.

I have a hard time getting my kids to really open up and talk about the "deep" things in their life.  I mostly attribute this to their age and attention span.  On our way to the hospital on Monday for a sleep study I could tell Evan was in a mood to talk.  I turned all distraction off and we talked.  My heart broke when I discovered that he has been bullied for several weeks by some of these middle school age kids.  My sweet sensitive 6 year old is being bullied by teenagers!  The saddest part about this is that Evan told me that it was all ok because he now put himself down with them and now they like him.  My 6 year old even used the phrase, "Mom, its ok.  I have to do this because they are the cool kids and I have to fit in with them."  He then went on to put himself down for the next 15 minutes.  I couldn't sway him to say anything positive.  Evan saw my reaction to this information and kind've shut down.  The part that makes me the most sad is that he thinks that these jerks are his friends now, because he has began to feed into their game of bully Evan.  This has come on the heels of some behavior issues at home and school in the last couple weeks that now makes sense.

I called Evan's vice principal, who I have a good relationship with, and told her what was going on.  She was alarmed and to my pleasure started to investigate immediately!  Both schools administration has been very much on top of the situation and the guilty parties have been discovered.  Evan's vice principal even rode the bus with the kids today along with a speech to all the kids on the bus about what is appropriate behavior and what is not.  I am a little disappointed that they chose to leave the seating arrangements "for now" and "see how it goes", but hopefully these bullies have been scared enough by multiple principals to change their behavior.

I hope that Evan isn't affected by this in the long term.  His life is already harder than most everyone else and it is only going to get harder as he physically declines.  I hope that Evan can know that these idiots are not good examples of what friends should be.  I pray with all my heart that he can remember what a great kid he is.  I hope that he remembers his own morals and doesn't accept their poor behavior as normal behavior that he needs to take part in.  I hope he remembers that he is perfect, just the way God made him.  I hope he remembers that I love him so much that I literally lack the words to describe just how much.

I put "love notes" in his lunch every day and made sure that the last couple days have been about his strengths.  He had one of his aides help him write a note back to me and he gave that to me yesterday.  I burst into tears, which he thought was awesome.  I feel so confused about what I can do in this situation and how to help him remember his worth and his note made me feel a little bit better.  Maybe I'll do alright.  I know I am trying to do my best.

this is a painting of a golden pyramid that Evan made for a contest at his school

 

halloween 2013

Man alive am I behind on keeping up this poor little blog of mine.  Our little family had a rough go there for a while, but I will save that for another post.  

Halloween came around and was the much needed mindless relief that we all needed.  Halloween is by far one of my favorite holidays and I usually have everything planned out months in advance.  This year all my plans fell through.  My first and second choices for costumes didn't happen for one reason or another.  Ultimately I decided on Dorothy and Cameron was my lion.  I wanted Justin to be scarecrow (and he was for one night) but I think he had his heart set on being the hairy outlaw so that is what he ended up being on the big day.  For four months straight Evan wanted to be a ninja and as I'm putting on his ninja pants he changes his mind and wants to be a knight.  I would be lying if I didn't admit that I, being the Halloween snob that I am, had a hard time with the last minute switch.  Thankfully my good outlaw of a husband reminded me that the point of Halloween is for the kids to have fun and if Evan wanted to be half ninja, half knight then that was just fine.  Landon changed his mind everyday leading up to Halloween, but in the end was pretty set on Spiderman.    

We had pizza with the cousins and then the baby and I ran home to hand out candy while Daddy took the boys out and about.  I think what I love most about Halloween, other than the fact that I can dress up, is the sense of community.  People open their homes and give out sugar joy to all the children.  How fun and wonderful is that.  I feel that as a society we are fairly closed to others.  We can so easily live a life within our bubble and halloween is a day that our doors are literally open to each other. 

this is Evan's "sexy" face!

Landon helped me make lunch ... Mummies dipped in blood, guts and throw up

HAPPY HALLOWEEN