valentine's day

happy valentine's day!

it's not a big holiday around our house, but we try to make the day just a little bit special.

we started out the day with a special breakfast of cinnamon rolls, eggs, and strawberries. i made them last night from this recipe. they are low-carb, gluten, and sugar free. the first batch was a terrible disappointment. they smelled delicious, but were as hard as rocks! i baked them too long and also learned that i needed to add more almond flour than the recipe says. the second batch turned out better. not perfect, but good enough that we were able to enjoy them for breakfast this morning. i put heart stickers on toothpicks and stuck them in the cinnamon rolls to add a festive feel this morning.

we exchanged valentine's cards. always homemade at our house.

and the other day i made some truffles, because i knew the day wouldn't be complete without chocolate. (the recipe is from a book i recently got from the library: sensational stevia desserts, by lisa jobs). they were quite a lot of work, but they are delicious and definitely satisfy a desire for chocolate.

a day in my life: saturday, feb. 9

{i thought it would be fun to record some days from our life...so here is the first one. the disclaimer is that i am not this productive every day and our kids are not this cooperative or portable every day either. this is really long, but i want to remember it. i always enjoy reading similar things that other people post - maybe you will as well? if not, that's ok}

5:30 am. jobot wakes up. i get up so that Jeremy can keep sleeping until the alarm goes off (at 6:30). he is really tired from snow-plowing for ten hours (!) on thursday night. jobot and i go downstairs. i change his diaper, get him dressed, and nurse him.

love wakes up crying at 6 am. jobot and i go into her room and get her out of bed. apparently she thinks it is still night-time. she is crying and i can't figure out why she is so upset. we go downstairs and she stands in the middle of the living room crying. she refuses when i ask her if she will come snuggle on the couch with me. jeremy comes downstairs and she goes up to snuggle with him in our bed. she comes downstairs in a much happier mood. it seems she wasn't quite ready to get up yet.
i give jobot a bottle. love has her juice (she gets one small cup in the morning and then no more juice for the day, so she really enjoys her juice in the morning).

jeremy makes breakfast (a "stack" of a slice of uncured canadian bacon, a fried egg, and a slice of dubliner cheese). love gets a fried egg and some banana slices. jobot has his usual 2/3 of a banana mashed with some rice cereal, raw milk, and cinnamon. he also gets some egg pieces from my plate.

7:35. jeremy heads out the door for a full day of work. first he has to shovel all the snow that the plow has left at the end of our driveway. i get love dressed and cleanup from breakfast.

the kids are playing really well together, so i do some work in the kitchen. i make the day's batch of raw milk formula, throw a chicken carcass and some veggies in the crock pot to make a batch of chicken stock, sweep the floor, and double check my grocery list. i break up a few squabbles.

jobot starts to get tired. i somehow find motivation and decide that i am going to try to work on a house project while he naps. the kids and i head upstairs. i set love up in her room with a snack and the ipad (she watches veggietales). i nurse jobot, he falls asleep, and i lay him in bed. i check on love, who is doing just fine, and start the project...removing the caulk from the shower. (a project that we knew we had to do soon, but after a big piece broke off on friday, it wasn't something we could put off any longer, so it moved up in the priority list to this weekend. jeremy was planning to work on it when he got home from work, but i figured that it would make the day easier if i could at least get some of it done before he got home).

jobot wakes up after twenty minutes (the usual length of his nap). i have made some good headway on removing the caulk. i bring the exersaucer upstairs and put it in love's room. he is happy to sit in there for a while. when he starts to fuss, i bring the exersaucer into the bathroom and buy myself a few more minutes to work.

i think that jobot must be getting hungry, so we all head back downstairs. love's movie isn't quite finished, so we watch the rest of it while i give jobot a bottle. i make sure the diaper bag is packed with what we need, take love to the bathroom, and get boots, coats, and hats on everyone. we are headed to get groceries and meet jeremy for lunch at costco on his lunch break.

i get the kids out the door and leave love on the porch while i take jobot to the van to put him in. his door is frozen shut. so is love's. what a surprise. this happens almost every time we go out on these cold mornings. so...i put both kids in through the front seat. not easy, but it works.

love chatters the whole way to costco. she wants to listen to her kid's cd, but it won't work because it is too cold. it finally starts working.

we arrive at costco. i am there at just the right time and get a front row parking space. i get a cart. hurray - love's door isn't frozen anymore. it makes things much easier. we walk through the store getting the things we need. love samples a variety of foods (her favorite part!). the kids are very well behaved (which is not always how those trips go...especially since they sit in the cart together and can really annoy each other)!

shortly after noon, jeremy calls and says that he is on his way to meet us for lunch. we buy our groceries, and there he is waiting for us. the kids are both excited to see him, and so am i. my mom often sends love $10 to "take her parents out for a treat", which usually means lunch at costco or a trip to starbucks. jeremy and i both get salads and love gets cheese pizza. jobot eats the applesauce i brought for him. we sit and enjoy time together as a family. love eats almost all of her huge piece of pizza(!), with a potty break halfway through. jeremy has to leave before she is done eating, so we kiss him goodbye and sit for a bit longer.

i debate about just going to the grocery store to get the rest of the groceries i need (not very many). i hadn't planned on stopping at both places, but the kids are doing so well that i decide to just get it over with. and both doors on the van are working, so it's much easier to get the kids in and out of the van! on the short drive to the grocery store, jobot falls asleep.

we get to the grocery store and i try to figure out how to get groceries with a one-seat cart, a sleeping baby, and a two-year-old. i feel like a genius when i put our detachable stroller seat in the back of the cart, transfer a sleeping jobot into it, put love in the seat in the cart, and pull a small cart behind me as i go about my shopping. we stop by the bakery desk and get a free cookie for love. jobot wakes up in the produce section. we are almost done with our shopping trip. he happily sits in his seat in the back of the cart and eats snacks while we finish our shopping. we check out and then i realize i forgot something...so we head back to get it. the kids are fading a bit, it's good we are done.

we drive home. love chatters away. when we pull into the driveway, i realize that she has fallen asleep. i bring all the groceries up to the porch, get jobot and then love out of the car. i bring a sleeping love up to her room, lower her into her bed, and she suddenly wakes up and announces, "i want to play!" knowing that's the end of that nap, we head downstairs so she can do just that.

i bring all the groceries into the kitchen and then sit down to nurse jobot. after he nurses, he has a bottle. when he is done i change his diaper and then i start putting the groceries away. love plays and jobot crawls around on the floor playing with various items he finds in the grocery bags. i clean a few things out of the fridge and wash a few dishes.

i decide to try to get some more done in the bathroom, so i bring the kids upstairs. i set love up with another veggietale movie and leave jobot in her room in the exersaucer. he fusses, so i bring his exersaucer into the bathroom. he plays for about fifteen minutes and starts fussing. i'm almost done and i really want to finish, but his fusses soon turn into screams, so i stop and we all go back downstairs. love finishes her movie and i get jobot's dinner ready - homemade pureed butternut squash mixed with some rice cereal and raw milk, mashed up raspberries, and some wheat-free puffs.

the kids and i play on the floor for a bit. then...jeremy comes home! everyone is excited. after some playtime, jobot is getting tired. jeremy gets his pjs on, i nurse him, and jeremy brings him upstairs to give him his last bottle and put him in bed. i get started on supper. we have homemade pizza. low carb and sugar and gluten free (more on this some other time).

after we eat and have devotions, love has her mug of warm milk before bed while i read to her. (we do this almost every night and we usually read poetry. she loves it.) jeremy washes the dishes during that time. then it's on to love's extensive bedtime routine (it's complicated, but it works for her and us)...

she cleans up the toys and gets a sticker on her chart. she brushes her teeth and gets another sticker. and finally, she gets her pajamas on and gets another sticker. she chooses two books for us to read to her, says goodnight to me (i'm in the kitchen putting my freshly made chicken broth into mason jars) and we sing our song twice ("all praise to you my God this night"). she does two flips (she runs to jeremy and he flips her over his shoulder and around) while i watch and cheer, and then jeremy takes her up to bed.

after i wash the dishes from the chicken broth project, i make some chai tea for us and we collapse on the couch. we drink our tea, eat a brownie (low carb, sugar, and gluten free, of course...and it even had cauliflower in it!), and watch an episode of alias, our show for this winter. we had planned to work on the bathroom, but realize it would make a lot of noise while the kids were sleeping upstairs, and we were both exhausted anyway, so that didn't happen.


we sit on the couch, jeremy gives me a backrub (as he does just about every night), and we relax a bit. we start a second episode of alias, but jeremy starts to fall asleep, so we turn it off. we head up to bed and i read for a few minutes in bed, but start drifting off after a couple of pages so i turn out the light and go to sleep.



whew! what a day.

february 4

i have been neglecting this blog. it's been a bit of a depressing winter and i just haven't felt much like posting lately. that's ok.

we've been getting lots of snow and playing in it. jeremy started orientation for his new part-time job on saturday. he has four full days in a row of training this week, then several more over next weekend and the following week. quite a lot of training. unfortunately, it has been snowing every day, so he has also been doing his snow plow job for the last four nights in a row. it's great because he is making money, but it's really hard because he hardly gets any sleep! he goes out to plow in the middle of the night (starts at 4 am on weekends and 2 am on weekdays), stops by the house in the morning for ten minutes to change clothes and brush his teeth, and heads to a full day of training for his other job.

it was a bummer last night with the superbowl. he has looked forward to the superbowl for months and was all settled in to watch when they unexpectedly called during half-time to say that they were going out to plow. it hadn't been snowing much so we thought he would get a night off. so...instead of watching the rest of the game, he headed straight to bed. i felt really bad for him.

i have been having crazy, long days with the kiddos. i took them to church by myself yesterday, which was quite an adventure. we don't have the easiest children in the world, and taking them out by myself is quite an undertaking (if only for the simple fact that jobot weighs approximately 24 pounds now and i just can't carry him around for very long!). we were running a few minutes late for church, but everyone was finally ready and we headed out the door. i left love on the front porch and went to put jobot in his car seat. his door of the van was frozen. problem. i tried love's door. frozen too. only the front doors of the van would open. i briefly considered just staying home, but there we were...i had gone to all the work of getting us ready for church and i was not going to give up that easily...so we climbed in through the front seat. it was quite a sight, i am sure. we slipped and slid to church (the roads were more slippery than i expected!), but we arrived, made it inside, and i was glad we went.

it's been challenging with jobot lately. he hardly naps. yesterday he woke up at 5:15 am and napped for 15 minutes out of the entire day. seriously. he goes to bed around 6 or 6:30 and {finally} sleeps all night, so that is good, but i wish he would take better naps! love was the same way at his age, so apparently we just create kids who aren't nappers. she didn't start taking reliable naps until she was one, so i guess we can hope that he at least follows her with that as well.

here are a few recent pics:

snow fun!

bubble baths!

eight months old!

he is crawling all over and recently started trying to pull himself up on the furniture (there is a lot of grunting involved with that!). he says ma, da, ah duh (all done), and we think he has said dog. quite the boy!