The Wood Between the Worlds

This preschool has been the highlight of Toby's week this year.  He loves writing his name and his letters, doing art projects and playing with his two best buddies.  It has indeed been a bit of a daze...a preschool run by two mamas with new babies, and one mama coping with the loss of her baby/dealing with morning sickness and major fatigue.  But it's still been fun all around for everyone!

Yep...the new photo apparatus has arrived.

Due to my early February sugar over-consumption (vacation with friends, my birthday and Valentine's Day)...a decision was made by my brain to stop eating sugar for the duration of Lent (February 17-April 4).  I have now been off sugar (everything but honey and fruit) for 11 days and it is FANTASTIC.  I highly recommend it.  It feels so good to clean my body out and show my body who's boss again...since I can't do it by running long distances right now.

I just have to post quickly to gush about my girlfriends that I have up here.  The are the nicest, craftiest, smartest and most sweet gals around!  And here is the proof:

The week after we got back from Leavenworth, I had a birthday.  Since Brent had already taken off several days for our vacation he didn't take any days off for my birthday.  And he worked on Saturday too...the day after my birthday.  So I casually mentioned to my girlfriends that I would like to hang out during the day on my birthday, since I wasn't going to be doing anything with Brent.  And I meant hanging out as in watching a movie together, eating lunch together or having a sewing day together. 

But after I mentioned that to them...they concocted some secret plans of their own!

As I sit here, the rain is tapping lightly on my window.  This is the first rainy day we've had in 2 or 3 weeks.  Before today, days have been full of sunshine and temperatures have been at or close to 60 degrees.  A few Sundays ago our family took a little walk at Elk Rock Garden after church.  It was a beautiful day...early February and already some flowers were blooming.  The air was warm, and the scent of spring wafted through the air!  And wouldn't you know it...my good old trusty camera chooses this gorgeous day to finally stop working.

Enter Sony Cyber Shot DSC-S75; 3.3 mega-pixels.  Trusty friend.  We bought this camera used from a camera upgrading Asian family at the University Village when Joshua was 15 months old (2003), at a very great savings.  Over the years, cameras have gotten more advanced; quicker at taking pictures.  I have yearned for a newer camera.  But this camera takes great shots.  And we try REALLY hard to 'use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without', especially when it comes to electronics.  So we waited...and waited...and waited for this camera to die.

BUT why did it have to die on this beautiful day?

Alas...it was only a few days before my birthday, so we decided to get a new camera for my birthday!  We researched and researched...and consulted facebook...and consulted with my bestest friend who is a professional photographer.  We considered getting an entry level SLR, since we really enjoy photographing nature and our kids.  But after discussing with my friend, I realized that having an SLR would mean buying a few extra lenses to get everything that we would want in a camera...and having to buy a separate video camera...on top of the price of the base SLR.  And what do I want and need in a camera?  I want one with a quality glass lens that can let in a lot of light.  I want one that can take quicker pictures.  I want one that can do video and zoom and do closeups and higher mega-pixels would be nice.  So we looked into the top of the line point and shoot cameras...and guess which is #1?

     This puppy has 20x zoom, it can take 10 frames per second, it has HD quality video, and it has...enough mega-pixels...along with many other features which I CANNOT wait to try out.  I am so, so, so excited!  And it is supposed to arrive tomorrow!

In the meanwhile, I have spent the past two and a half weeks of amazing spring time weather...in which the weatherman has confirmed that yes indeed 'spring temperatures and foliage have arrived exactly one month early this year'...without a camera.  Oh, how I have yearned  to take pictures of the pink blossoms and the crocuses and all the other springtime delights.  And now my camera will arrive tomorrow...and we are back to rain for the forecast.  Thankfully I was able to take some pictures with my friend's incredible professional SLR camera while we did pre-school at the garden...but I am pretty sure that I didn't know what I was doing with the settings, so probably none of them turned out.

Ah!  But now I have one more wonderful distraction in learning all of the bells and whistles of our new camera...to keep me occupied until this crazy year is over, and a new kind of crazy takes over our house.

It is odd how time undulates at an uneven pace.  I looked at my calendar and realized that today is Elsa's 6 month birthday.  Wow!  Where did the time go?  How have I survived 6 months and actually felt ok for several of those?  At the same time...really?  6 months?  It sometimes feels like it's been years, or like it never even really happened...kind of weird; in a dreamlike way.  On the other hand, I am half-way through this crazy year!  That is: the time from Elsa's birth to this next baby's birth.  What a year...I'll breathe again once it's over.  So, I am now most officially in my second trimester!  And I am feeling better.  I am no longer tired all.  the.  time.  And nausea?  What's that?  I can't remember.  YAY!

At the same time, whoa...I realized on Sunday, and almost every day that my heart still really hurts.  I was sitting in Stake Conference (a very large church meeting with many people I don't know), and there were many parents with baby girls around me.  I just wanted to stand up and yell "YOU ARE SO LUCKY!!!!"  I have realized that almost every picture or blog or person I run into with a baby girl really makes my heart hurt from missing my girl.  I thought that maybe this hurt would lessen with time...but I have come to realize that it doesn't go away.  It just becomes a part of who I am and something that I have to learn to deal with in a constructive way.

6 months Toby:


















6 months?  REallY?  I mean, sitting up and everything?  I can't believe that my baby would be this old.  I'm glad that I still have these six months with Elsa in the future.

What's up with all this blogging again suddenly?  I've been quiet for these past three months because I couldn't truly be honest.  But now you all know, and so I return to blog land.

Does this year feel vaguely familiar to any of you?  Probably not...unless you are reading my blog again for the second year in a row and you realize that I am pretty much exactly the same amount of gravida as I was last year at this time.  Sometimes I can't help but wonder if last year WAS just a dream.  Can this really be happening to me?  After I lost Elsa I just wanted to be pregnant again.  My first preference was to go back in time and be pregnant with her again.  Even if it meant being pregnant with her forever...just so she could stay with me.  But since that wasn't a reality, I decided that the next best option would be to carry on with life and start over again with a new baby.  And I KNEW that if I did that, I was NOT going to take one single day of this pregnancy or time with this baby for granted.  The sad truth is that we never really know how long we have with our loved ones.  And so...I am ELATED to be spending my days (sick or well) with little Jefferies baby #4.

But it is a weird sensation knowing that I am due 2 days after Elsa's first birthday.  At least...I am due 10 days before I was due with Elsa...so I am a week and a half ahead of where I was last year.  That counts for something psychologically.  It was not really our intention to have this next baby so close to Elsa's birthday...but I think that Elsa worked it all out for us so that we will have happy times in Augusts to come...and not just sad times.  BUT...I know that this is a different year.  I have already been blessed with many reassurances of that.

In this pregnancy and with this baby, I feel permission to move on from the pain of loosing Elsa.  Not to move on FROM Elsa.  Not that I still don't miss her a lot.  Oh how I miss her!  But I feel that this next baby will be healing.  In the very first week after loosing Elsa, I knew that they key to healing myself would be to have another baby.  During the long summer heatwave we had here, we drove to the beach often and in the car I read all of the birth stories in the book Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin out loud to Brent.  We felt that it was groovy to fill our minds with as many natural birth stories as possible.  Well, I remember pausing on the few stories where someone had a stillbirth or a miscarriage and just solemnly letting it register.  So, after I lost Elsa I remembered those stories and knew that I needed to re-read them.  I spent the whole first hectic week trying to find the story where midwife Ina May lost her own baby.  It was hidden within another story.  But when I finally found it, it brought me the peace and comfort that I was seeking.  She said something about how she was filled with grief that didn't really heal until the birth of her next baby.  Right when I read that, I knew that was my path.  And reading Mary's story of her two miscarriages brought me the strength to 'keep it together' in those early days.  After her second miscarriage and third, successful pregnancy she said "I really know in my heart of hearts that choosing to be spiritual instead of depressed was what got me together enough to have a baby."  These words hit me and I knew I had to be spiritual and keep it together so that I could have another baby right away.

And I am so lucky/blessed/grateful/healthy to be able to do this again so quickly.  I know that there are many couples out there that have a harder time with pregnancy and I am now shedding tears and saying a prayer for you.  I cannot imagine the heartache of having to wait and wait (especially after a loss).  It is something I wasn't able to comprehend until I went through 9 months of pregnancy (that's a LONG time!) and then only to unexpectedly loose the baby girl that I had been planning on keeping.  I didn't even realize how long 9 months was with my first two pregnancies...I think afterward I was too absorbed with my newborn to remember how long it was.

And so, I continue to read happy and good birth stories in the hope that my trust in birth and the ability for life to triumph has not been too heartily shaken.   

We took a few days this past week and traveled up to the snow in Leavenworth, Washington...a small mountain village that was remade to look like a Bavarian Village in the German Alps.  Fun place!  You may remember it, from a previous visit in 2008.  Our friends The Mansius' invited us to come along to their timeshares.  It was a blast!  We spent as much time as we could (until the little ones froze) playing in the snow, and then we spent the rest of the time by the fire sipping hot cocoa, playing the Wii and other games, shopping, and eating!  Oh boy...I ate WAY too much unhealthy food (thus the looking too fat in the last post comment...).

Do any of you mamas out there who have had two kids REALLY close together know if your belly gets GINORMOUS really early with the second subsequent pregnancy?  Because it's either that, or I'm having twins.  I'm measuring myself to be about 6-7 weeks ahead of where I usually am in pregnancy (!).  But I've never had two babies SO CLOSE together before.  Hopefully it will slow down a bit because if I keep growing at this rate, third trimester is NOT going to be pretty!

So here is a really poor quality self portrait at around 10 weeks.  I kept trying to get better ones...but it's not happening.  And I'm starting to feel FAR too FAT for pictures...until the actual baby is the one forming the belly...and not just the baby pushing the epiploic appendages and such up and out.

Joshua is plenty busy with school this year...and it's only second grade.  We were told that second graders would only have 20-30 minutes of homework a night...but most nights he ends up spending 3 hours on his homework!  Part of that time is spent doing extra reading that is not required.  Part of that time is spent whining and procrastinating said homework.  And part of that time is due to the extra homework that he sometimes gets because of his quick advancement in reading and math.  We're really proud of him, but man oh man!  It can be hard work trying to get him to stay focused sometimes.

I have documented some of his recent projects and fun stuff:

 BONE diorama:
  This is a diorama that he made after reading all 10 books in the Bone Series, by Jeff Smith, in lieu of writing a book report for each individual book.  It was lots of fun, but also a lot of work!  The only things that I helped him with were getting proper (modest) clothing for the little polly pocket that he used to portray "Thorn", and I helped him glue and re-glue his little clay "Phone Bone" character together until it was stable enough to survive a day at school.  Now, don't go on getting too impressed with him reading 10 books so quickly.  They are graphic novels...so they are very easy.  The books remind me a little of 'Lord of the Rings'...and they are fun (I read them too).  My only complaint is sometimes too much skin showing in the illustrations (nothing a little permanent marker can't fix...but I don't recommend that action unless you purchase the books first).


RECIPE PROJECT:
  These next set of pictures are Joshua making cookies for his homework.  He had to write down his favorite recipe and then make it and submit a picture of him making it.  Yep.  Yummy homework.  He choose to make POWER COOKIES.  Yum.  I really liked this homework, since he is not a cooking kind of person by choice (unlike Toby).  I've been trying to get him interested in cooking more.  Maybe making cookies will do the trick!

CRAZY HAT DAY:

So, we did a total re-make of our guest room...Brent did a switcheroo with the beds in the boys' room and the beds in the guest room...since the bunk bed was proving to be a bit more challenging than we had planned right now (pee...I'll spare you the details).  We will switch the beds back when the boys are older, but for now I really like the way the bunk beds look in the guest room.  Very cozy!


So come on up, yo...and visit us...before it's too late and we move away.  We have lots of extra room for the kiddos too...  Just think...you could experience all the beauty that you see on our blog, and we will be your personal tour guides!  And don't worry we had waterproof mattress protectors on the all the beds.