My favorite time of day

By the time Braden gets home from work I have usually already spent the last 12 or 13hours with the girls by myself. Typically, I am in the kitchen finishing dinner, Anabelle is organizing all my Tupperware, measuring spoons and cups into "families" (sorting them by type, color, or design), and Lila is sitting somewhere in the middle of it all grinning and playing with whatever Anabelle has deemed fit for her to play with. We hear a key in the lock and Anabelle freezes, her eyes look like they're gonna pop out of her head, and she goes running to the door shrieking, "Daddy's home!". Braden comes in and we all get hugs and kisses. We eat dinner and Anabelle can be counted on to say or do something entertaining. Like when she just says "Amen" in the middle of the prayer if it's too long and she wants to eat. Or like the other day when I was cooking she told me she needed to go potty all herself, I just needed to come turn the light on for her. So I did. After a few minutes I call out to her and ask her if she went potty. She yells back, "Yeah! But I'll poop some more if you get me some more yogurt!" What a deal. Then we shimmy the girls into the bath where Anabelle proceeds to use 7 or 8 washcloths so that each bath animal can have a beautiful princess dress. Last week Anabelle got in Lila's face and with all the excitement of the world in her voice yells at her, "Lila! You have a bagina! And I have a bagina! And mommy has a mommy bagina! And we all have baginas together!" I laughed a lot. I'm laughing thinking about it. It is unfortunate that most of the funny stuff that happens at our house relates to the body or one of its many functions. But, it is what it is. Braden recently decided that he would try to practice doing Anabelle's hair after bath time. She is so supportive of his efforts. When I do her hair I have about 6 seconds and anything that isn't secure by then doesn't make the cut. I can do respectable piggy tails while walking the length of my house. But for Braden she will sit perfectly still for a very long time. I walked by the other night and heard Braden saying in frustration that he couldn't do it. Anabelle said, "Dad, you can do it." The pony tail didn't stay in very long and when I went to fix it she batted me away and said protectively, "No! That's Daddy's pony! Just leave it okay?"

Then we jammy up and hang out for a bit. She likes Braden to play her favorite song on the piano (Let it Be, by The Beatles) so she can dance. Braden recorded it so they can dance together. It is most often at times like this when I'm watching Braden and Anabelle dancing together that the thought comes to mind "My cup runneth over". I become overwhelmed with the feeling that we have everything that matters in this world. I am scared of forgetting these perfect moments.

The onslaught of snot

Lila has been basking in a thick coat of her own snot today. She's sneezes faster than I can wipe her (granted I am trying to wipe her while doing a puzzle, meal planning, and folding laundry. But still...).Anabelle and I are also sick, so when the stars aligned for both girls nap times to occur simultaneously today, I quickly decided I would join them and try to sleep this off. Except Anabelle decided not to nap. She instead dumped out the contents of every container in her room and banged her rocking chair against the wall. For 2 hours. At this point I resign myself to staying awake and feeling nasty, but have bright hopes of putting her in bed earlier. I feel a growing excitement about this and envision Braden and I having lots of time with each other tonight and watching The Office in peace. I make this decision and go to get her and she has suddenly fallen asleep. Hey! Grrrrrr! So naturally, I'm feeling slightly grumpy.(Not terribly grumpy-just slightly grumpy. Like if someone walked though the door with an orange gummy bear for me I would totally do a jumping jack). Then I think of Lila who seems to have it the worst and is a glistening pitiful sight to behold,yet has been beaming like a clown all day. Yet another lesson from my kids. She doesn't yet know how to feel bad for herself, so she just trucks through it with a smile and takes it like a champ.

I was noticing the other day that as my Christmas decorations have been put away for a few weeks now, Christmas is sort of out of my mind. I've moved on. But Anabelle is still talking about Baby Jesus at least once a day. She saw someone with something draped over their head and she said, "A Shepard!". Maybe she can't recite Luke 2 but it seems like she was touched by the story of Christmas and is still talking about Christ even after the presents are all opened. I am glad for her simple example.

Another thing I have always loved about Anabelle is the way she thoroughly experiences and appreciates nature. In the stroller she will put her head back, let the wind blow her curls, close her eyes, and soak it up with a small smile. She examines all the leaves, smells all the flowers, and talks to all the animals. It is one of my favorite things to watch her explore earth matter. Something I don't do nearly enough. I hope she never loses that curiosity. I hope she always takes time to sit in nature and be moved, be appreciative. I hope she knows how much I adore watching her and growing with her, because of her.

Pie!

I have leftover giving spirit from the holiday season that has urged me to share this simple, healthy, easy, fast, cheap recipe for pizza dough:

1 teaspoon instant or rapid rise yeast
3 cups flour (I use unbleached white whole wheat flour)
2 teaspoons coarse kosher or sea salt, plus extra for sprinkling
1 cup water
2 tablespoons olive oil

Combine half the flour with the salt and the yeast and stir. Add water and olive oil, stir with a wooden spoon until smooth. Add remaining flour a bit at a time, when mixture becomes to stiff to stir with a spoon, begin kneading, adding as little flour as possible, just enough to keep the dough from being a sticky mess. Knead until smooth, but still quite moist. Then you pile it up with all the leftovers from your fridge that no one will eat, then you hide the leftovers in a mountain of cheese.

Bake it at the hottest temp your oven will allow for about 10-12 minutes. I bake mine in a greased glass 9x13 baking dish.

I won't deny that this is a tasty staple in our home due to the aforementioned virtues of this recipe. In her breakfast prayer this morning, Anabelle was still thanking the heavens above for it ("thank you for the pizza and the Cheerios").That was her whole prayer. But she was really sincere.

Yuletide Festivities 2008

Christmas was a hoot. The trip both ways was smooth sailing- no puke, no blowouts, no tantrums and only one diet coke each way. We spent our time frolicking about the coolest yard imaginable. I feel confident if I had a yard like that it would be a different story to have a whole litter of little curtain crawlers. It's a totally different story when they disappear for five hours at a time. Anabelle looked in her stocking and found a bouncy ball and was happy as a bird with her Christmas score. Braden and I looked at each other and wondered if we should sneak the other gifts back into the trunk and disperse them through the coming years. But the truth is, I bought that canister of Play-doh in November and couldn't wait any longer to bust it open and make Lila into something great. In true Reynolds fashion, there was tons of grub, hardly any sleep, and competitions and games of every kind (including wrist rocket paintball). We got to know the two newest members of our family, who we unanimously totally approve of, and are excited about. Anabelle's still talking about the trip-this morning I found her riding her stuffed horse and asking me if I could get her hat so she could ride her "neigh". She also cleverly renamed Grandpa's horses from "Prince" and "Shay" to "Princess" and "MaShay". It always takes us a while to accept real life after we return from Florida.

Aunt Jess holds Lila, Lila holds Crawdad

Mary and Baby Jesus. Clearly.

Mary's looking awfully cheery for her days "to be accomplished"

Cousin bath time. We can do that. We're from Alabama.

Braden told the little kids to wrestle each other. It's nice to see Anabelle on the recieving end of brute force.



Mexican dresses brought back by Cody and Jess.

Lila's ears are finally in season.

What a year...

We just returned yesterday from a road trip to Florida where we spent Christmas with Braden's family. I had the chance while driving all night to do a little reflecting on these past 12 months. I thought about all that has happened in our lives this year. I came away from this experience feeling immensely blessed. This was no doubt our hardest year- full of hardship and a seemingly endless string of trial after trial. But we learned some stuff. Some really important stuff. Somebody asked me right before Christmas if we had everything we needed, and I told her that we did. Then she asked if we have everything we wanted, and after thinking about it, I realized that those two things have become one and the same to me. And this year has been a tutorial in getting to that place where I have realized a few simple beautiful truths:

-If you have healthy kids, who cares what else you don't have.
-Family is everything.
-Good friends are gifts from God, I really believe that.
-Appreciate each seemingly average normal day with my kids- it means that we are all healthy.
-Be faithful to the Lord, He watches over and guides my life.
-Be grateful

I learned some other stuff too that's less crucial. Like:

-Never ever ever ever give anyone from the La Leche League (or any other breastfeeding fanatic)my phone number. Anabelle is forming complete sentences with proper conjugation of verbs and she can count to nineteen, AND I have another suckling child- so yes, I have stopped breastfeeding her! Stop calling! Sheesh.
-We can live on beans and rice and still be happy.
-Never potty train a child. Should this come up in parenting, promptly ship them away until all bowel issues have been resolved. Growl.
-Don't use any box of hair dye. Don't do it. Seek a support group for the addiction and call a friend to help you through the weak moments.
-Run. It makes me feel good. I learned that lesson this year from not being able to.
-Doctors are not the boss of my kids. I worked hard to grow, birth, and feed them and by golly, I am the boss. I learned to trust myself as a Mom and put the Mama foot down if I need to.
-Slow down. Drive slow. Don't speed. Obey the speed limit.
-GSE is useful for about a million household things. Love it. Look it up and love it with me.
-Take time for the things that matter. Read adult books. Well not "adult books" but books that are on an adult level with big words and less pictures. Some pictures would be good though. My kids won't remember if I dusted or not but they will remember if I took time to play with them and hold them. Take time for Braden, even if we pay a babysitter just so we can go grocery shopping and to the post office without diapers and time outs. Just be together- this matters more than I ever imagined.

I'm not gonna lie- I feel anxious to put this year behind me. To take the doll face I got out of this year and run and never look back. But in the looking back I feel humbled to tears to think of all the blessings. The miracles. The nights I knelt by my bed in the hospital and cried in gratitude for friends, for medical care, for family, for service, for compassion. I could not count those nights. And in each one of those prayers I prayed with all my heart that because I could not hold Lila or comfort her or care for her, that somehow she would know anyway how much I wanted to, and how deeply and completely I love her. I prayed that she would feel the love of her Heavenly Father. Someone held her the other day for a few minutes for me and when I went to get her they thanked me for letting them hold her. She said she felt as though she had talked with God during those few minutes because she had never looked into anyone's eyes and felt such love. I feel like this has been a year of answered prayers -from Lila's health, to Braden's job, and everything in between.

The Dinner Conversation Tonight

Me: Anabelle, in five minutes it's bedtime ok? Five minutes.
Anabelle: (hugging me) I love you Mom.
Me: I love you too Anabelle.

30 seconds pass

Anabelle: You guys are so cute (to Braden and I as we look at each other and roll our eyes at our little schmoozer).

a minute or two later...

Me: What are we gonna do in 2 minutes Anabelle?
Anabelle: You're gonna play with me? 2 minutes until you play with me Mom (as she hugs me).
Me: No, 2 minutes until you go night night
Anabelle:NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

a few seconds later

Anabelle: You're a skinny mom (as I eat my 30th nacho)

The skinny line may have worked if she hadn't already called me "big fat mom" earlier. Which by itself would have been overlooked but a few minutes after she did that she began pushing on my stomach and saying, "Squish, squish". Yesterday she was calling me "churchy Mom". Not sure how to take that one. We put her to bed shaking our heads at each other, at a loss for words about that kid. What a character.

My geriatric 2 year old

Anabelle tries her very darndest each day to consume all of her calories via sipping from a cup. If she is forced to eat, and she is, she mostly insists on her basic three staples: yogurt, applesauce, and cottage cheese. It's as if she has already made the full circle of life in two years and already struggles with nutrition through a straw and bowel control.

We went to Wal-Mart yesterday because there was not much in our fridge besides condiments, cilantro and heavy whipping cream. I find myself waiting until things get that bleak because I consider grocery shopping with kids as much fun as salmonella-survivable, but crappy. I arm myself with 5 different snacks, drinks, toys, and I do not talk on the phone because I have found that when I walk through those doors, I am in the war zone, and I must have all my wits about me.

However, yesterday we happened to have a highly successful trip. By that I mean no screaming, no demanding, no angling my 3 mile long cart into the bathroom so that Anabelle can sit there for 4 seconds and say, "Never mind".

There she is sitting in the big part of the basket and she says to me:

AB: Mom, we need ogurt
She is right. I go to the yogurt aisle.
Me: Peach or strawberry?
AB: Stawberry. Can I have some please?
Me: No, I need to pay for it first
AB: Okay. Let's get some cottage cheese.
I get some.
AB: We needa get some abblesauce too.
I get the appleasuce
AB: Yeeeeeesssssssss! We got some abblesauce!

The rest of the trip was spent quietly eating pretzels and chatting about Christmas decorations. And we visited the lobster tank quite a few times. When it was time to check out, she stands up and begins putting items on the conveyor belt.

Me: Oh, are you gonna help?
AB: Yeah, I need to do it all myself. I need to exercise my muscles.

So this morning she asked me if she could have some abblesauce. Then she says, "No, I need to have some ogurt first". She eats the yogurt. "Now I can have my abblesauce". She eats the applesauce. Can I have my cottage cheese please"?
The girl knows what she wants and she will make it happen. I can respect that.

I consider myself highly blessed and downright lucky to get to hang out with that girl all day. I just put her down for a "nap" (I hear whistles blowing and ducks quacking) and as I did she hugged me, kissed me, and said, "Mom, I love you. We are cute together".

Last week she had an accident in the bathtub and as I was draining and cleaning the tub I heard Braden in the next room gently chastising her. She came in to where I was scrubbing and put her arms around my neck and said, "Mom, you're doing a great job! I'm so proud of you! Dad's grumpy".



Coloring her sister

Free zoo days and cheaper auto insurance

We found out last week that Braden got accepted into Officer Training School to be an Air Battle Manager in the Air Force. This is the realization of a childhood dream (his, not mine) and I am so proud of him. It is a flight position. He will be mission control from the sky. At the beginning of this year, he was in a job that he thoroughly hated and was miserable in and looking for a way to get out. The way out presented itself in April when he got laid off. Not quite what we were going for, but it turned out to be a blessing for several reaons. Hard, but a blessing nontheless. I was six weeks out from having a baby so it shook our lives up a bit. He waited tables and interviewed and put out resumes like crazy. He got a good job offer in Seattle right before I had Lila but he didn't feel good about taking it. After her birth and all those weeks in NICU we know why now. I remember him calling the Air Force when I was still pregnant to see if there was any chance at all he could do it. One guy told him no way. So he called another and the recruiter said they only accept 1% of their guys from the track that Braden would be doing. Braden got off the phone and told me that and I said, "OK, now we can move on". In my mind I heard basically no chance, what's next." Braden heard him and thought, "So you're sayin there's a chance". He began the process that turned out to be eight months and lots of work. In the mean time, nothing else seemed to work out. He was working three jobs at one point, Lila and I were in the hospital, and Anabelle was all over the place. It would be fair to say that there was stress. So he started doing some carpentry in the fall, which he loves and is good at and we've been waiting to hear. There have been plenty of small miracles along the way and although we have never known how or what was going to work out, we have always known and felt that the Lord would take care of us. And He did that mainly through friends and family. I am happy that Braden started this year in a job that he hated and is ending it in his dream job. He has worked really hard for us this year and it says a lot about him that he was accepted. We were looking at the credentials of the other candidates and they were far more impressive and decorated than Braden's resume (Master's and PhD's, great gpa's from prestigious universities). He had an interview with a Colonel as part of the process and the guy that typed the notes of the interview told Braden's recruiter that the notes read, "I want this man in my Air Force".

Now to be honest, I am scared for me. I have never been a fan of him joining the military. I don't enjoy single parenting. And anyone with a spouse understands that it is best when they are on the ground. So I'm trying to feel good about what life will be like for me. Part of that is because I really don't know what it will be like. Hopefully we'll get some more info soon. We know that he will go to Officer Training School for 13 weeks at Maxwell AFB which is about an hour from here. We don't know when he will leave. So I'm thinking I might just pack up the girls and catch an AF hopper and hop right around this ol country for a few months. After that we think we will be in Panama City for two years. ON THE BEACH. That helps take the sting out of deployment. A little. Hoping to get more concrete info soon. In the meantime, I'm doing a funky little celebration jig on behalf of Braden's total awesomeness.

Yay Braden!

Tim was here

Thanksgiving week brought us a visit from Tim and his "friend" Katasha. Which always means thousands of pictures, bargain shopping, and good times. There are not many people I like to host more than Tim. He always comes with the purpose of fixing stuff and being helpful. He is sort of a sore loser when it comes to being demolished by the girl team when playing games though. He left us with just a few pics for now and (drumroll......), here they are:

She keeps me on my toes

Yesterday I was stepping out of the shower to hear Anabelle yelling at me. Now every time I step out of the shower it's a time of great anticipation and wonder. I wonder what Anabelle's been doing to my house, I'm wondering if I stowed Lila in a safe enough hiding place or if she gave herself away by squealing. I'm wondering who she has called on my cell phone and hoping that she hasn't launched the web browser or activated song recognition which costs four bucks a pop. So I hear her yelling at me and it sounds like she's saying "Mom, it's Tigger". It's a logical thing to conclude- I had just given her a drink in a Tigger cup a few minutes before. But she keeps repeating it over and over- something she does if you don't respond or if she knows you don't know what she means. So after about the 10th time of me saying "Yeah Tigger", I come out to check and see that she actually must have been saying, "Mom, it's sugar!" She got down a bucket with 5 pounds of sugar in it, brought it to my room, opened it and ate it through the duration of my shower. I'm glad to have no way of knowing how much she actually ate. But her face was caked with the paste that forms from saliva and sugar-all the way up to her cheek bones. It was all over my floor, not from dumping, you could just tell that she had been shoveling it in by the handfulls. I took it away and this is how that went...


I tried to tell her it wasn't healthy to eat sugar like that and she calmed down, took a breath, and said, " Yeah, we have to cook it first". Right.

A similar thing happened last week when she was jumping on my bed. I thought she was saying to me, " Mom I need to fly first". She likes to hop on my bed, then jump off and calls it flying. We were in a hurry to go somewhere so I was trying to get ready and I kept saying "Ok go ahead". But she kept saying, "Is that OK Mom, Is that OK?" I hear a small squeal from Lila and look over to see that Anabelle had picked up Lila chest to chest and was swinging her around. It was then that I realized what she must have been saying was "I need to fly HER". Key word. Missed that one. Lila's ok. We're working on annunciation.

Strange but true...

Lila is five months old today. We went to her four month check up today (because that's how we roll). Ever since she got her two month shots she had been very sick. It progressively worsened over those nine weeks. It got to the point that she was wheezing and choking all throughout the night, a few times losing color like she used to in the NICU. It became very scary and sometimes we would be shaking her to get her to take a breath. During the course of this, I took her to the doctor four separate times, each time receiving another medication or machine to put her on. None of them had any affect so I stopped all of it and told the doctor that none of it was helping. He told me to just take her to the emergency room so they could give her some steroids. When we took her there, they told us that it was just reflux and that she would grow out of it within the year. They also said there was nothing in her chest and that her nose was stuffed and was echoing in her chest. We left there feeling so frustrated. I am so sick of the reflux line. All the things wrong in this little girl's life is not reflux. I don't need a doctor to tell me that my kid throws up- I do laundry all day, I'm well aware of that. Braden had a pretty good crash on his bike the other day and he came home with an impressive gash on his leg and told me what happened. I looked and it and said, "No. It looks like a wound from the bike accident, but it's actually just reflux. It should go away within a year". When Lila was having grand mal seizures around the clock, it was just reflux. It's like every doctor looks at her history, sees the reflux, and attributes anything going on to that condition.

Anyway the day after we spent the night in the ER, we were sitting behind a woman in church who heard her wheezing and asked if she was sick. I gave her the rundown and she asked if I would bring Lila to see her (she is a chiropractor). I wondered what she was going to be able to do to help but I was more than willing because I was desperate. We were at the point where I was going to say whatever I had to say to get her re-admitted to Children's so they could see how bad it was. So I took her the next day and was unprepared for her unorthodox treatments. It involves acupuncture and other oriental medicine ideas. Not exactly mainstream medicine (which I'm happy to get a break from). She practices a holistic technique called NAET (Nampudripad's allergy elimination techniques). Through some resistance testing, she concluded that Lila is allergic to my milk, among other things. She treated her for this allergy and several others since. Each time she had a treatment (which are a little weird but very quick, painless, non-invasive), she would get a little worse that night, then get better. She had a treatment last Friday that was a very strong allergy apparently, and it totally cured her. I do not pretend to know how it works, I'm reading a book about it. And to be honest, if I didn't just watch it heal my baby, I would probably think it is a bucket of hogwash. I really don't believe that after all these weeks of trying to help her and watching her suffer, in my most desperate moment, that it was just a coincidence that this woman happens to be sitting in front of me and offers to help. What a blessing. What an absolute answer to my prayers.

So at the doctor today I told him that I took her off all the meds he had prescribed long ago and that none of them had worked. I told him what had worked and he didn't say anything. He did take pretty copious notes though. He checked her out and confirmed that she seemed to be healed and then prepared to give her shots. I told him that I didn't want her to have shots because that is exactly when she got sick last time. I feel that she is a sickly little thing with no immune system and don't feel right about pumping her full of toxins that she is highly unlikely to encounter at this point. I want to do some more research and identify which ones I think she needs and when is a better time to have them. He basically told me I have to find a new doctor. Which is okay with me. I'm not anti-vaccine, I just want the ability to put her on a slower track and be able to have a say in what she gets and when. It made me sad because I felt like that was such a business call- it wasn't about Lila's health at all. But anyway, she is about the 10th-20th percentile on growth. But she is growing well, she's just a dainty little thing. I mean, Anabelle and I are both feeding her around the clock, she better be growing. She would do well to team up with Anabelle the Tank early on in life as a means of protection.

But she sure is the sweetest little thing. She seriously appreciates every kiss you give her. Even in the middle of the night when I kiss her she smiles in her sleep. For the first time in her little life she is not seizing or choking through the night. We are SO indescribably happy.

Just helpin out...

Anabelle does not yet grasp the concept of personal space. She seems most comfortable communicating nose to nose. She spends the majority of her time breathing the air that Lila has just expelled because she lives in her face. The other day Lila was doing some unhappy squealing and I tried to explain to Anabelle that it would be nice to notice the unhappy squeal and take it for a sign that Lila wanted some space. Of her own. Anabelle got a very hurt look on her face and said with a curled lip, "I'm just trying to feed her to make her happy". I hadn't noticed all those times what she was doing but I snagged a picture of it later.