whut's up weekly.

Ugh, I'm so sorry I went dark without warning this week.  If you've been wondering, I'm alive.  I'm not hungry or hurt or in peril.  I have adequate food and supplies.  I'm fine.  Really.

Todd was in Oklahoma all week and I've been wrangling the kids by myself, and have had tons of house guests (ten total individuals, if we're counting, and some of them on multiple nights).  I have had dinner guests four of the last six nights, and my dishwasher is still dead as a door nail, so I've been just trying to keep up.  Now, I think I may be getting sick.  All that to say, by the end of each day, after the kids are in bed and all guests have gone home, and I find myself sitting in the quiet, perpetually dark house alone, blogging has not been my main priority.  

My main priority has been eating microwave popcorn and watching Parenthood and picking the peeling skin off of my dried-out dishwater hands.  Mmmm.

So, let's start with the dishwasher.  I go back and forth with what I'm hoping happens with that.  Yeah, we could just pay to have ours repaired, but I really don't know how much that will cost and if it will be worth it in the long run.  It's already seven or eight years old, and it's not a super nice dishwasher, so I'm guessing it's nearing the end of its realistic lifespan.  However, buying a new one is kind of a major deal.  I mean, it's not the most expensive appliance in the whole world, but a new dishwasher is still hundreds of dollars more expensive than the $0 we had previously been spending on dishwashers.

So then I'm like, maybe I'll just keep washing stuff by hand and use the money that we would have used for a dishwasher to have solar tubes put in (because dang y'all, my house is a full-blown hobbit house and my eyeballs are starting to sizzle anytime I walk out the front door because they're like, "WHAT IS THIS UNFAMILIAR, BLINDING HELL FIRE COMING FROM THE SKY?!?  SUNLIGHT?!?!"  And then my skin blisters and starts to melt).  Honestly, solar tubes are probably as practical an expense as a new dishwasher when it comes to saving my sanity.  But then I wash seventeen people's dishes over the course of a week and I start to reconsider.  So we'll see what happens.

As for the rest of our week:  On Saturday, while Todd was still home, our friends Josh and Megan came to stay the night.  We know them from the Cedar Falls church plant, and they'll soon be moving down here to help with this plant.  Megan spent some quality time with the girlies, polishing their nails.  The girls LOVED it.

On Sunday, Todd left after church to make the eight-hour drive down to OK.

On Monday, we finally got in to the chiropractor for the first time since the car accident, so the little kids all took rockstar naps.  After nap time, we went with a friend to an indoor play place/Tiny Ninja Warrior training course.  The kids had a freaking blast.

On Tuesday, we had Connection Group here at the house like we do most weeks.  Remind me next time to get someone else to host it when Todd's gone.  I kind of lost my mind trying to get ready for it.  It was not pretty.

On Wednesday, we headed up to the Amish in the morning, and a friend and her daughter came for dinner.

Yesterday, we did nothing except make a run to the library to pick up some of the books I'd put on hold.  Also, I had to re-pierce one of my nose ring holes with a safety pin after a botched attempt at switching out the gaudy studs for little gold rings.  It was a success in the end.

I am, at this point, basically catatonic.  Luckily, Todd is home today and I am planning on making the world's largest margarita and going to bed at like 4:30 p.m.  That is, after I pick up a friend's kiddo from preschool and her mom comes to get her.  Because the order of those things is important.

Tomorrow, I have a baby shower to go to and a college girl is coming to read to the kids for a bit for a class she's in.  On Sunday, Todd will be teaching at church, only after which will my max capacity for extracurriculars will have been exceeded and I will go into a coma.  Do not resuscitate.

ANNNND.  Laurelai in a hat.  You know.  Because.

weekly 'what's up.'

This week has been great.  Nothing major planned, nothing major missed.  Just a standard, run-of-the-mill week, just like I like them. 

On Saturday, instead of going and doing anything, we just hung out.  Like, all day.  Todd even went and picked up food for dinner so I didn't have to cook or do dishes.  (Our dishwasher is broken so I've been doing our dishes by hand for the last two weeks.)  The only things I accomplished all day were a little bit of reading and a run.  Which I have to brag about, by the way - 3.1 miles in 29:22.  I met my goal of doing a full 5k in under a half an hour!

Sunday was pretty standard: church, naps, movie night.  And Rocco turned ten months old!

Todd was home on Monday, since it was Labor Day, but other than that, our day looked super normal.  We did some school and went to the Amish, like we usually do, only Todd got to come along for the ride!  Anything is better when he's along.

Tuesday, we had a couple of doctor's appointments scheduled in the morning to get the ball rolling on treatment for the minor injuries we sustained in the small car accident we were in a couple of weeks ago.  I'm really excited to get started with our chiropractic care for all of that - I've been having a hard time sleeping, and having a lot of neck and back pain, and the doctor thinks Atticus got a mild concussion.   So I'm ready to get that stuff looked at by a chiro.  (In my own limited experience, chiropractors have been a lot more helpful and knowledgeable than MDs in regard to most things health-related.)

Also on Tuesday, Finneas turned four and a half!  I am not one to really keep track of half birthdays (heck, I have a hard time keeping track of actual birthdays) but Todd is on top of all of that, which I'm thankful for.  It provides for one extra day a year for each of them to feel special and unique!

School is going pretty well.  I'm desperately trying to get into the groove of Missouri record-keeping, which is tedious and burdensome, but no one asked me what I thought before passing the law.  The one silver lining of all of it is that we'll end up with a 'yearbook' of sorts when all is said and done.  Pictures like this are for the portfolio (check out Atticus' beading!) but it's also nice to know that the little things like this will end up being documented through our days.

And that was our super normal week!

i'm readin' a book, kid; i'm readin' a book.

my diastasis recti: the final verdict on Ab Rehab.

Well, I've not only completed my ten-week Ab Rehab course to recover from my diastasis recti, but I finally have the ability to upload photos to the blog again!  Yay!  So it's time to issue the final verdict on whether Ab Rehab actually helped or not.

If you remember from the previous series of posts on this topic, I had started out with a gap between my abs that was about the width of two fingers.  After having carried and delivered five babies over the course of the last few years, my stomach was bulging, and I had no core strength.  Even standing up straight required more conscious strength than I was able to muster most days.  So I got in touch with Kelley Suggs of Lithe Wellness Solutions in Buffalo, MN, who regularly helps clients recover from ab separations like mine, and got my hands on a copy of her Ab Rehab DVD.

Basically, it's ten weeks of exercises that help re-train those muscles back into proper, healthy position.

So... did it work?

(For reference, there is only a two-pound body weight difference between the first photo and the last.  I am not sucking in or slouching in any of these photos.)

Girlfrannnn, it DID work!  If I'm being totally transparent, I was pretty darn skeptical that the exercises would make much of an actual difference.  From the way things sounded when I'd read up on diastasis recti online, it seemed like once you were struck by it, you were doomed to a lumpy existence for the rest of your sad, slouchy life.  So it was out of desperation that I had started the program, but I didn't have a ton of optimism that it would do much good.

Ugh, how pallid was I when I first started this?!  Thank the good Lord for UVBs.

But here's the thing:  my gap is now only half a finger wide.  I repeat, it is only HALF A FINGER WIDE.  That's 75% improvement in just ten weeks.  That's huge!

And here's what else: I asked Kelley how closed the gap has to get before it's considered fully healed, and she said, "CLOSED is closed."  If my gap wasn't fully closed yet (which, obviously, it isn't quite), I should go back to the beginning of the DVD and do exercises one and two again.  So I'm back in exercise one, and I'm seeing continued improvement.  I really do have full confidence that in the next month or so, my diastasis recti will be no more.

Guys, I really can't recommend this enough.  I am feeling strong again.  I am looking more normal to myself.  I still have a little ways to go still, but I am feeling hopeful that at some point, I won't be carting around any extra softness in my belly region... at least, softness that wasn't put there by nachos.  (If anyone has a DVD program for healing Nacho Addiction, I'll be all over it.  I'll do a blog series on it.)

If you're wanting to go back to the beginning and read through my journey, or if you want to learn more about diastasis recti and how to check if you have it, check out the rest of the posts in this series:

Post One: the battle of the [belly] bulge... my diastasis recti.

Post Two: healing my diastasis recti: a progress report.

Post Three: diastasis recti: Q & A with someone who knows more than I do.

Post Four: my diastasis recti: the final verdict on Ab Rehab

*I was not financially compensated for this post.  I received the DVD for review purposes.  The opinions are completely my own based on my experience.

our hike at Rock Bridge State Park.

A few weeks ago, we took a Saturday to head over to Rock Bridge State Park to hike around and check out, well, the Rock Bridge.  If you can't guess by the name, it's a naturally-occurring bridge made out of... rock.  

Getting out of the house still requires some scheduling acrobatics in this season of life, since Rocco still takes a morning nap and an afternoon nap.  He wakes up from his first nap around noon, and we have until two-ish to get out and back before he's ready to head to bed again.  So once he woke up that day, I nursed him and then we took a super-easy picnic lunch with us, so we could maximize our time out there. 

After lunch, the kids (meaning, mostly Atticus, but also the rest of the Tag Along Gang) spent some time burning off their freshly acquired calories by jumping off of rocks and climbing trees.

Then we headed to the hiking trail.  There are two main sights along the trail:  the Rock Bridge, which we've covered already, and Devil's Icebox, a cave kind of under the Rock Bridge where the water stays 58-degrees all year round.  We didn't go into the water, since it's crazy-rainy here over the summer and the water was really high and moving pretty fast.  But even in just descending the stairs to get down there, there was a drastic temperature shift.  It felt so good - the heat and humidity here is outrageous, so we were all pretty sticky, and grateful for even a temporary cool-down.  (There was a Professional Park Guy on hand who said that Columbia's climate can best be summed up as "Georgia Summers, Michigan Winters.")

After we'd hiked around for about an hour, we headed back toward the car.  Right at the opening of the trail, there's a place where, even though the bank is steep and muddy, the water is shallow enough to walk around in.  The kids begged to dip their toes in, so we let them for just a minute.  Some kids ended up ticked because they didn't get to stay in the water longer; other kids were ticked because they were put in the water at all to begin with.  I'll let you guess who is who.

At the end of it all, the girls got a few flowers that had accidentally been pulled up by Todd's shoe.  I'm pretty sure that was their favorite part of the day.

I'm really looking forward to more opportunities to go check out some of the neat things nearby!

whut update.

On Saturday, my parents, my grandpa, and my sister and her husband came down to spend the weekend.  It was so great to have everyone here for the first time since we got settled.  Saturday we just spent the day around the house, and on Sunday we all attended Anthem's first service and partied the afternoon away for Laurelai's birthday.  It was a full day.

The launch service went really well, and we had about 200 people in attendance!  God is so crazy.  My brother-in-law was able to get some candid photos during the service.

After church and the birthday party, Uncle Austin showed them his camping equipment.  Gas stove with real flame?  Mace?  Sharp knife in a leather sheath?  You better believe Atticus was swooning.

We got into a pretty minor fender-bender on the way to church, so I've been spending the week getting estimates done on the van and setting up doctor's appointments for all the thousands of us.  The kids have been complaining of headaches and neckaches, and my whole body feels like one giant headache all day, so I'm hoping for a referral for some chiropractic care.  Nothing major, but it added some unexpected color to our week.

In other colorful news, I had been all excited because I'd finally set up our recycling bin since the move, and I was planning on trying to minimize our trash.  But then our dishwasher stopped working, so I've been relying heavily on paper plates because we dirty so many dishes.  So, one step forward, one step back.  I'm still not sure if/when we'll get our dishwasher repaired.  I'm starting to acknowledge the sad fact that life costs a lot of money, and I'm not happy about it.

The kids spent the week being adorable:

Atticus spent all his free time nailing stuff to other stuff.  (His bike helmet is currently nailed to a tree.)

Penelope spent her time drawing in her nature journal.

Finneas spent his time Finneasing, which is a verb I've decided to coin to describe running around naked at full-throttle, getting into everything, and alternately laughing and screaming in anger.  It is never boring to be Finneas.

Laurelai spent her week being simultaneously adorable and absolutely maddening.  But what else is new?  Also, she turned three, and I think it has given her an air of wisdom, maturity, and know-how.

And Rocco?  Well, even though I somehow dropped the ball on getting a photo of him this week, you know he's just as funny and delightful and wonderful as ever.

Todd taught at Salt Company last night, and killed it.  I'm so proud of him!

And that was our week.  How was yours?

hey, hey, look who's three!

Laurelai turned three on Monday.  YES SHE DID.  I can't believe it either.  And, apparently as always, there was a church launch around the same time as her birthday.  (Of the four birthdays she's had, including the actual day of her birth, two of them have been celebrated in conjunction with a church launch.)  So my family came down for the weekend to go to Anthem's first service and to party hearty with Lolo.  And this girl knows how to party.

Laurelai refused to show the camera how old she is now, so all her subjects (ahem, guests) took it upon themselves to inform you that she is, in fact, three.

Penelope was very excited to give Laur a gift.  It was a bag full of Penelope's old socks and a nightgown she doesn't wear anymore.  She said she chose those things mostly because Laurelai could spin around in the socks (which, admittedly, is Laurelai's favorite activity) and because Lo would love the frogs on the nightgown.  But second to those reasons, she conceded that the concept for the gift stemmed mainly from the fact that these things are now too small for Penelope.

We had fruit and yogurt parfaits for her special birthday treat, and we stuck flipflop toppers in them, in honor of her very favorite thing to put on each morning.

Laurelai finally admits to being three and not 'fourteen,' as she consistently informs people when they ask her age.

Happy, happy birthday to my sassafrass lady.  She is tiny and funny and so, so spicy.  She loves praying for 'girls who like to spin like me' and for 'the babies, and the babies, and not the babies.'  She is smart and spunky and has the other kids wrapped around her teeny tiny finger.  (Except Finneas.  Finneas seems to be onto her ways.  He is not fooled by her cutie patootie exterior.  So she just screams at him until he submits to whatever it is she's wanting.  So she screams a lot, because Finneas rarely submits to anyone.)  Her favorite outfit is her pink dress and her flipflops.  When I say, "You are getting so big!" she responds with, "No, I not.  I'm tiny."  She loves her daddy.  She loves to sing and dance and build with duplos.  She loves pretending that every piece of food is Mommy, Daddy and Laurelai.  She is our itty bitty Meat Sticks, our sistergirl, our Lolo.

We love you, Laur!  You're so special!