Funny .... or not so much.

We have way too many nerf guns at our house. Too many nerf guns equal too many nerf bullets everywhere! Lincoln loves to play with the bullets, so we had a little fun with them. He thought it was funny at first ....


And then he changed his mind.
 

Discouraged

Warning: This is just a long rant. It hasn't been a fantastic day ... 

After I got home from church today, I was just totally discouraged. Week after week, I get excited to go get a spiritual boost and get my tank filled up. Week after week I get discouraged. I thought after last week when my baby finally got to go to nursery, I would finally get to pay attention and feel the spirit instead of playing the entertainer, snack provider, scream eliminator, and baby carrier.

I was wrong.

I had been looking forward to the spiritual boost that I was going to get at Ward Conference today. I definitely did not get it. Apparently Lincoln was traumatized by his first week of nursery and me leaving him there all alone, that today he flat out refused to go. I walked up to the door and he started crying. I walked in, and he cried harder. I sat on the floor and he stood there leaning against me and wouldn't even look at the blocks. After 20 minutes of trying to get him to go, I finally just stood up and left. He screamed a blood curdling scream. I waited in the hall for a minute, and out came the nursery leader. She was trying to take two little girls to the bathroom. They were short handed. I ended up just taking him with me to Relief Society, but only caught the last 15 minutes or so of the lesson. Not what I wanted.

Then onto Sunday school. Lincoln was just in a bad mood I think and just wasn't happy. I fed him plenty of fruit snacks and crackers and gave in and let him play my kindle. He kept yelling at me and squirming and I caught next to nothing of the lesson. I had to leave a few minutes early to come put dinner in my oven. We came back for Sacrament meeting and Lincoln had just had it. He screamed at me when I wouldn't give him the hymn book, he screamed when I took away the sucker he refused to keep eating. He didn't want a single toy in the back, no books, no coloring, no snacks. Ethan did pretty good just playing with my kindle and eating snacks.

By the time we left, Mart had had a good boost and was telling me how it was one of the most spiritual meetings he has had in a while. I felt beyond discouraged. I left feeling like my skirt was a buffet table, covered in all sorts of food.

When we got home I found out Ethan had been a stinker in primary and I just snapped. I felt so horrible that Ethan had acted out when he should be behaving himself. That boy just won't listen lately and it's so beyond frustrating. I don't know what to do! I've never had a child before. :) I'm learning and what I'm doing is obviously not working. I was so frustrated that Lincoln finally turned 18 months and can go to nursery and I still can't go to class and learn anything. I'm getting so tired of his screaming. He's a serious sweetheart, but I just need a break.

It was just a very discouraging day and I hope tomorrow is better. I hope I don't feel the need to sell my children and ask for them back in a week. :)

New Couch!

Our couches have been through a lot! They have had a good life and are totally hammered. They were getting to the point where you had to put pillows underneath you to even sit on them. This year we decided it was time to buy a new couch.

Goodbye old couches ....

Hello new sectional that was on a door buster sale!




And, I even got a cute accent chair! 

We also got a matching ottoman, but it wasn't here yet when I took the picture. It fits so much better in our living room and it made our small living room look a lot bigger than it did before! And, we are able to fit more people than we were before!

**Side note story that maybe one day I'll want to remember ... or maybe not. :) **

The day after it was delivered, one of the slats in the couch broke! (Are you kidding me??) After working with the guys at the store, they finally decided that instead of fixing it for us they would just bring us out a brand new base.  It had broken at a knot in the wood, so the manufacturer covered it.

Seriously, I think it was like 2 days later Mart walks in the house and says something like "We have to be really careful with our couch! I just drove by the store and they have going out of business signs and 80% off signs all over the building!" Not even 30 seconds later Ethan stood up on the arm of the couch and dive bombed the couch! The dive bomb was followed by a horrible, unmistakable, crunching noise. He had broken another slate on the couch that hadn't been replaced... I couldn't believe it.

Mart will get this one fixed, and it was 100% our fault. Even though it's been broken twice in about 2 months, I still really like it! I'm glad that we were able to get a new couch!

Ethan's New Pirate Bed

We have been planning on getting Ethan a new bed for quite some time. Mart decided rather than buying a new bed, he'd build Ethan a theme bed. We decided to just make a toddler size bed for now and then in a year or so when he outgrows it, we'll get him a bigger bed. That way we didn't have to buy a new mattress just yet.

When Ethan was born we made his room into a pirate themed room. It was only fitting that his bed be a pirate ship! Mart got to work and it came together really fast! The hardest part for him was deciding what colors we should paint it. After a few days, we decided that we liked a red, white and black one we found online.

Here is the finished product:

The day it was put in his room, Miss Taylor was over playing and I could hear Ethan calling her Captain the entire night. :)

 
You can't have a pirate ship without a cannon! It even swivels!

Can you can't forget the steering wheel!

 

 
The pirate blanket I made him for Christmas fit perfectly! 

This is a toy/blanket box at the foot of the bed. It was the perfect place for all of the random stuffed animals just laying around his room.

Call me Captain Ethan!

Ethan LOVES his bed! Seriously. When we put him in bed, he has to drive his boat for a minute and then shoot a cannon, and then he can lay down. Sometimes even while laying down he'll reach behind his bed and steer some more. Silly kid.

Mart asks him every now and again if we should get rid of it and give it to another kid and he tells us "No! That's Ethan's bed!"

I'm glad he likes it so much. It turned out super cute!

Chef in training

 

My boys love to play Chef and pretend to cook! One day they will both cook me up something totally delicious! :)

Thunder ... Thunder ... Thundercats!

When Martin was little, his favorite tv show was the Thundercats! I'll admit, I didn't watch a lot of tv when I was little, so I had never seen or heard of the Thundercats until we got married ...

We built up our collection and now we have all of the old Thundercat seasons on DVD so that he and our boys can watch them together. For Christmas, Ethan got a Thundercat sword and arm claw thing ...( maybe I should sit down and watch it more often! ) and both boys love it! They always want the sword and we have had to practice sharing.

Now that they actually watch the show occasionally, they know what the sword is, and when the recording in the sword starts to talk, they know they are supposed to raise the sword high above their head!

They both do it all the time, but I just happened to catch Lincoln yelling "hooo!" while holding the sword above his head. Cute little boy.






Mart totally loves that his boys also love the Thundercats.The next thing he started to try and get them to love is Ghostbusters ... (and it's working. Ethan is obsessed!)

Picture Buddy

Ever since Lincoln was born, Ethan prefers to have all pictures taken of him, taken with Lincoln as well. I pull out the camera, and Ethan will run to find Linc, wrap his arm around him and say "Say cheese buddy!" Lincoln is Ethan's picture buddy.

Here are a few examples: (okay, maybe more than a few ...)

 

 

 

I LOVE that Ethan adores Lincoln and I LOVE that Lincoln adores Ethan! I hope that when they are both older, they are still best friends.

Friendships

When Mart and I were in high school, I'd like to think we were pretty outgoing and had quite a few friends. We all had a blast hanging out and hung out with friends often. We were the first of our group of friends to get married, and well, I'm sure everyone knows how that goes. It doesn't generally work. Things slowly went downhill from there. Long story short ... we got burned pretty bad by our friends, and basically ended up with zero friends. We were both hurt by it, but neither of us really expressed our feelings on it. We just moved on with life, but a lot more cautiously.

When we moved into our house in Richmond, our first week at our new ward we felt very out of place. We felt like we had just moved into a retirement ward! I was by far the youngest person in the relief society room. We both felt like we were so different from everybody else, and sort of shut ourselves out and would just go and keep quiet and come home when it was over. We were given two callings within a couple weeks of moving in, which didn't help matters at all. We only knew people if their kids were in our classes, and even then, we only knew them as "so and so's parents".

After a year or so, our ward boundaries were extended and a new neighborhood (that was currently about to begin construction) was added to our ward. This made it so we had a lot more families with small children in our ward. It was our chance to meet new people, but still we felt out of place and kept to ourselves.

Fast forward roughly 4 years from when we moved in. We were finally released from our calling in the black hole which I call nursery. (Don't get me wrong, I love the nursery ... but 5 years was long enough ...) Two weeks later I had Lincoln and wasn't at church for a couple of months. We knew people in our ward, but not really. Our friends at this point consisted of Mart's siblings Kace and Ber, and then our friend Traves. There is nothing wrong with this, but we just needed something more.

Last summer, it seemed like overnight everything was about to change. I made a new friend out of the blue, and it was so nice to have someone to talk to, even if it wasn't a lot. I also reached out to someone else for a haircut and she turned out to be another new friend, who sadly, moved soon after. I almost felt like I was back at square one. I was invited to go to the Relief Society session of General Conference last fall and went with a small group of people. It was really fun, but I hardly said a word the entire night. That's just me ... I'm quiet until I feel comfortable. I just don't want to get burned again if I let my wall down.

In August, a group of guys from our ward randomly invited Mart to go on a major hike they were all going on. We were both thrown through a loop and surprised that he was being included, but he was VERY excited. He was beyond nervous of the socializing part of this trip. He didn't think he had a thing in common with anybody who went. It turned out good though and he had a great time.

A month or so later, Mart had a really strong impression that he was supposed to be friends with Ethan's nursery leader. We didn't know him at all! Not even a little bit. All I knew about him was his name. A few months went by and Mart hadn't done anything about it. He finally told me about it and I came up with an idea for him to break the ice. He made some granite letter blocks with last names of people in our ward for Christmas gifts, so I told him to make one for them and take it by. It wouldn't be too weird because he was Ethan's nursery leader. Later that week, Mart took the blocks over to their house. His wife opened the door and Mart looked at her and blurted out "God told me I'm supposed to be friends with your husband!" (apparently we are more awkward around people than I originally thought ...) More surprisingly, she welcomed him in with open arms and told him that her husband had been telling her that he wanted to be Mart's friend as well! It went so smoothly, that there was no way that God wasn't involved. He knew what he was doing. We have since had them over several times and they have joined our "game night" group competing for the trophy each month. Shawn even won it the first month they played! Beginners luck. :)

I still don't feel like I fit in all the way at church, but now I know more people and am way more comfortable than I used to be. I enjoy seeing the people who have become my somewhat friends and I hope that as time goes on, we have the opportunity to become closer.

I hear the stories at church about women who are so blessed by friends who show up exactly when they are needed, and I try not to feel left out. Instead, I just hope that maybe one day, it might happen to me on one of those really bad days. I know I just need to let my guard down and things will fall into place more easily.
I know that God watches out for me, and maybe he's tired of me not doing anything about it, so he's finding the friends that we need and shoving them in our direction. Whatever it is, I'm grateful for the new friendships that are beginning to form.  It's been a very long time.

Water Baby

Lincoln LOVES to take baths and showers. He is such a water baby. I can't wait to take him swimming this summer.

Every time he hears the water turn on, his little skinny legs go booking it as fast as they can for the bathroom. He has even tried climbing in with Martin fully dressed. Silly boy.

Here are just some cute pictures of him after a shower.

Tender Reminders

For a while now, Lincoln communicates by nodding his head in yes or no. He doesn't say a whole lot except "Dad" on repeat. You have to ask him questions that can be answered in yes or no, and he will respond by nodding his head. It makes things so much easier! "Are you hungry?" *Nods yes* "Are you sleepy?" *Nods yes* "Do you want to go take a nap?" *Nods yes* "Do you know how to say no?" *Nods yes, and then nods no so that you know he knows the word no* ha. Silly boy.

He's very much a Mama's boy and I'm basically the only person he likes to put him to bed. I will snuggle him up against my chest and just rock him and hum. Sometimes after he calms way down, I'll ask him questions in a whisper.

Tonight went something like this:

"Do you know I love you?"
*Nods yes*
"Do you love me too?"
*Nods yes*
"Do you know that Dad loves you?"
*Nods yes*
"Do you love Dad too?"
*Nods yes*
"Do you love Ethan?"
*Nods yes*
"Is he a fun big brother?"
*Nods yes*

**Long pause**

(Kacean, my cute sister-in-law who had a baby two months after I had Lincoln, is currently pregnant again with a sweet little boy due in August. Pregnancy has been on my mind lately with so many people I know who are pregnant.)

"Do you think Mama should have another baby?"
*Nods yes*
"Do you think you could share Mama with a baby?"
*slight pause, nods yes*
"Is there a girl waiting for Mama in heaven?"
*slight pause, nods yes*
"Do you remember heaven?"
*pause again ... nods yes*
"Do you remember Jesus?"
*Nods yes*
"Do you know that he loves you?"
*Nods yes*

At that exact moment, my heart became so full of love and peace and I knew that he remembered heaven. I knew that he remembered our Savior. I knew that he knew he was loved. I also knew that I was remembered, cared about and loved. It brought tears to my eyes and it was such a tender reminder that was much needed.

While sitting here typing this out, the feelings I had while rocking him and an incredibly warm and full heart came rushing back. I don't always feel like I'm remembered or loved. Sometimes I just feel like I'm lost in the background. Tonight, I am thankful for tender reminders.