Buyer of the Quarter

Aaron is the most humble and person I've ever known. It does not surprise me at all that he kept pretty quiet about receiving an award. I only found out about it because my neighbor's husband works for Walmart and she congratulated my parents, who told me. Ha! Nothing like finding out fourth hand!  Aaron works hard, he believes in the products he purchases, and he is a loyal associate who truly loves his company.  Congrats on a well earned recognition, Aaron! 

I also think it's worth mentioning that he's crushin' it at home, as well.  Aaron gives of his time and energy selflessly and serves our family and our ward with all that he has.  If such a thing as the good guy award exists, he deserves that one, too. 

Pools and Lakes

This summer was the summer of water. The kids asked to swim nearly every day. We bought out usual passes to Metfield pool, which were great because we live right  around the corner and can just go for an hour before bedtime occasionally. It's great and it's convenient, but it's twice as much for a family pass in Bella Vista as it is for one in Bentonville, and that's with my refusal to purchase a second family pass because the POA insists that a "family" should max out at 6 people. (Cue eye roll, as I have very little tolerance for this. I did not receive a discount when my family was only 2, 3, or 4 people, so why is it suddenly unacceptable to have more than 4 children? It makes me a bit crazy that when we buy passes to the Amazeum, the pool,or pretty much anywhere these days, I have to purchase extra tickets after the family pass because my family is over the six person limit. This is my immediate family. I'm not trying to work the system and sneak friends or neighbors or even grandparents in. Just parents and their children. I feel like this constantly sends a negative message to my children to hear so often that we are "too big" to be considered a normal family. So there's my opinion on that. Rant over...sort of.) 

Anyway, many of our other "big family" friends opted out of buying passes to the pool this summer, so we haven't had many friends to play with at Metfield, this year. We don't mind being "just us" at the pool, and have often had itto ourselves, this year, which is awesome! But when we want to swim with our bentonville friends, naturally we found ourselves going to the bentonville pool, since that's where they all have passes to swim.  

We started the summer out with Wednesday always being swim day, because baby W spent that day with dad, and the pool was a good distraction for grieving mom and kids, plus it's much easier for me to relax as responsie guardian with only 2 non-swimmers vs 3. Plus, a family pass was $130, (which I don't think we will never buy again, knowing how much cheaper it is for our family to swim at other pools) and that only covers 6 people. Since o refused to spend an additional $60 on single passes for the "extra" two people in our 8 person family, we always opted to swim on Wednesdays when I was without a baby, and aaron was at work, so we were under the 6 human limit.  Now we only have baby with us on weekends, but the children still opt for bentonville pools. The downside (other than a longer drive) is that they're crazy crowded and Bella Vista is a ghost town. 

But after being invited to swim at Memorial Pool (bentonville), I did the math and realized that one trip to Memorial plus one trip to the community center would more than pay for an entire month's membership to the community center. And since memberships are month to month, no contract, I signed us up! Now we can swim at Memorial Pool and the community center as often as we'd like!  AND they have free daycare, unlike the Walmart Fitness Center, so we can leave Baby in the child care center to nap for an hour and go swim and I don't feel the panic of holding a baby, chasing a toddler, and keeping eyes on my non-swimmer preschooler. Huge win.  

Also, all hats off to the bentonville community center! Not only did they add our entire family, no family size comments made, they also put our foster on the membership, no questions asked.  The manager just told us that when we have a placement change, to let them know and they'll adjust the family member info. THATS WHAT I'M TALKIN' ABOUT! Way to go Bentonville! 

We go to the community center to swim every week and it has been more than worth the $42 membership. Just one visit would have cost us $36, so we've really gotten our money's worth.  Yes, I wish it was closer to home, but we've also really loved being able to meet up with friends from all over NWA there and Memorial Pool to swim, so it's worth a little extra time in the car.  

The kids have loved meeting up with friends. Here's Minisha, Reese's friend from school, and neighbor and bestie Emma.  

The big playground is fun. Soren loves it. I strap him in a life jacket and he takes off for the blue slide. 


After a long afternoon of swimming with the Aase's and the Crabb's at Memorial. 

It's also a nice perk when your next door neighbor/friend has a pool! 

One afternoon, Reese and Quincy got invited over to swim with Finley. Emma was there too and the girls had a blast. 

Britney's Lake

My friend Britney, recently built a beautiful home on Lake Ann in Bella Vista and invited us over to play! What a dreamy backyard! This day was just the best. Sloane needed a bit of convincing about the life jacket, but eventually warmed up to the water, and then didn't want to leave. Thanks for the awesome day B!

And finally, Kasey's lake. This special place has been a bit of medicine for me, this summer. With all the changes and trauma of court happenings with baby W, Kasey seems to always know right when I need some solace and invites me over for a paddle.  Last Wednesday, we got out at 6am and did an early lap before the work day. Aaron and I went kayaking for a date 2 weeks ago. He took a fishing pole and within 10 minutes had caught a fish! 

With kids, without kids, this place is THE reason to fall in love with Bella Vista. Kasey's new backyard is a retreat and I'm so grateful she generously shares it with my family! 

It's been a good summer. 

Summer Days in McKissik Creek, Wishing Springs, and Blowing Springs

The local hot spot (or I should say, "cool" spot since the water is from a natural spring and totally freezing) this year is McKissick creek, or "blue hole", "the water hole" or "the swimming hole" as its fondly referred to by the teens in the area. We checked it out last week. The kids swam around and loved it. I was freezing but only had so wade up to my thighs to get out to a little sand/rock bar for Sloane and I to play on.

The rope swing was the height of entertainment for the kids.  Yes. Of course I almost had a heart attack. That goes without saying, but I did watch and the swinging boys survived, so all is well. I wasn't impressed with the afternoon crowd of rude and crass teens who gathered there to have a little too much fun though, so we left after the coolers showed up. 

Up the creek to the Wishing Springs swimming hole!  This plavebwas full of fish and crawdads to be captured, birds to watch catch their dinner, and rocks to build little damns with in shallow areas. 

Finley is a true critter lover. I love this about her! 


Reese is officially "constantly begging for a dog" years old. Camp Wild in the Creeks are always good times! 

Another day, I met Danielle P at Blowing Springs for water play, critter catching, and a little spelunking and trail hiking. 

I think it is magnificent that it can be 103* outside, and we can feel completely comfortable standing in the chilly stream. The cool breeze and canopy of shade were just wonderful, too. And the company! I went to the bank on my way and ran into a mom friend of Quincy's School pal, Millie. We invited them to join us and Danielle, Heidi, and I had a great afternoon together with our children. 

Corbin fond a BellaVista Rock st Blosung Sorings and re-hid if on the hiking trail. 

Sloane and Evie hit it off. 

Days like these have come to define Summer for us. They're magical.

Sometimes 6

Here are Aaron and I on Novenber 29, 2016 after stepping off the NICU elevator and moments before we met Baby W. We received "the call" the day before and knew our lives were going to change. We picked out a name, stuffed the tiniest baby I've ever seen inside our shirts for baby's first ever skin to skin contact. We said "I love you", and officially "took hold" on our pre-adoptive foster placement that night. We drove home in a daze. We have a baby! A 4lb, barely thriving, 13 day old little fighter. A tiny miracle. Aaron chose his name. We learned that baby W began gaining his weight back the night he met us.  Baby was still being tube fed when we met. We gave him his first bottle: 1oz of donated breast milk that he wasn't able to finish in 30 minutes, so the rest was put in his tube. 

 

 

 The next two weeks were a blur of back and forth between home and fayetteville. If I left Soren and Sloane for 2 hours with a sitter or my parents or a play date, then after driving time and scrubing in, I had about 40-45 minutes to spend with the baby. I went almost every day during naptime for his lunch time feeding, and then every night after the kids went to bed, I'd drive back down and stay from 8:30pm until around 12:30 and come home after doing the midnight feeding. 

 

I spent the next couple weeks power pumping and mastering the Supplemental Nursing System: an elevated bottle of donated breast milk (mixed with my collected pumped milk) attached to a tube taped to my breast for baby to be fed through. Through dedicated pumping and two awesome Lactation specialists, I was able to relactate. The human body is a miraculous thing. What a gift. Once he was off the GI tube, I was allowed to begin every feeding with breast feeding, and after 20 minutes had to finish with a bottle of enfacare formula to make sure he got enough nutrients to fatten up. At 5 weeks before his actual "due date" Baby came home with us on December 9th, right as everyone left for school. He was 5lbs even and 18.5 inches long and just 15 minutes after coming home from the hospital I was home all alone with 3 littles for the day. Surprise, kids, here's a brother! Hahaha. That was quite an adventure and very different than the other times I've come home from the hospital with a newborn! 

In February, a putative father came forward. Nothing can accurately describe how it feels to take "your" baby to a Starbucks at 9:30 pm to meet a genetics specialist in a parking lot for a DNA swab. Nothing prepares you for that. 

The results were positive. Paternity was established later in court and I stopped breastfeeding, both out of fairness to a father who obviously would need his baby to take a bottle, but also out of exhaustion. Baby had an awful case of reflux and some aspirating problems.  He cried all the time. All the time. Refused a pacifier. Those were some scarily sleepless months that I'm so thankful and impressed that we endured. Ive never felt so desperate for help with mothering as I did during that time, and I'm grateful for my parents and friends who, like angels, provided the help that kept us functioning. Now, I know we can survive hard things. I know without a doubt that we gave 100% effort and all that we could, all of the time. It was a lesson of sacrifice and at times, felt like long suffering.  I'm so impressed with how my little family handled everything. We learned much about one another's strengths and weaknesses. They are capable of living in the chaos of the unknown. They did well with a sleep deprived and emotionally stressed out weepy mother.  These children and husband of mine are truly incredible people. Not only can they survive life on the fiery hot sun, they can thrive there as long as we are asked to. Fostering is a love that allows you to expose yourself to be burned and burned and burned again and all of it is worth it. Someone asked me just last week if I felt like the blessings of fostering have been worth the risks to my family. I share my experiences for a journaling with a taste of our perspective and how it has affected us, but again I answer that fostering question with it's not about us. I cannot weigh how I feel about all of this against a human life. Loving God's children will always always be worth it, every time. The risks of heartache in this life are 100% inevitable. No one is immune to grief.  I can't buy the argument that "I could never do that [foster] because I couldn't handle the loss" argument, because we are all going to face loss in this life. Every one of us. My little baby experienced huge losses the first 12 days of his life. No one is immune. So I can't really call fostering a risk. Fostering provided us with an opportunity to keep a covenant we've made and through our obedience, we accessed  a love like we have ever experienced before. Intense, vulnerable love. 

And here we are now. Last night was our first night since December without an infant in our bedroom. 

I can't write about all of the events that brought us to this point because legally, I cannot. And also because I. just. cannot. 

But yesterday was the first official day of baby's trial home placement with his biological father. We will not see baby again until Friday night. We will now only have baby with us on Friday night-Sunday mornings until early October, and we just have to miss seeing him the two weekends we will be on vacation in Utah. We counted it up and I think we'll get to see him for 9 Saturdays days over the next 3 months. I miss him and I ache for him and feeling all the things a mother feels when one day she has a baby and then the next day she doesn't have a baby. 

Yesterday, before church, I packed him a bag for the week and when aaron asked "what did you send?"  All I could reply with us "it's basically just full of my tears. " 

We sent him off for the week with so much love. The kids each smothered Baby W with kisses and hugs and prayers and tears and love love love and then I drove him to DHS and handed him to a social worker I have never 

met in a parking lot while it poured rain on us. Because of course it was raining. 

I cried the ugly cries as I drove my big empty van back home. I prayed. "I know this is your will for me. I know you have a plan. I know you see us and are mindful of us. I did everything I could for this child. I did everything you asked of me. I know you are good but this does not feel good. Help me to know our offering was enough. Remind me that you see us and that you see our baby and will take care of him. I'm weary. Show me hope." 

And I turned the corner to see this. This beautiful rainbow. The simplest reminder that the Lord always keeps his promises. 

 

In Young Women, we studied President Henry B. Eyring's talk "Making Covenants with God". Eyring talks a lot about how the Lord allows us to feel an "upward pull" to be better than we were, and rise to a higher spiritual plane. I feel like the last 8 months have been an upward pull. Heavenly Father knows I am capable of so much more than I think I can do or handle.  I have risen and fallen so many times, but even in my "failures" I have changed. I am learning that success is not attaining a desired outcome, but offering my will to attempt the task before me, and my growth in the process of trying. My covenants with God are sacred. That rainbow over John de Shields road was a basic and timely reminder that as I keep my promises to God, He will keep his. I needed to see the bigger picture to broaden my perspective from the narrow view of "this does not feel good" that I had closed myself to seeing. 

Elder Eyring says, "...the promise that is in all the covenants that God offers to us to make with him: keeping them will draw us up, closer to him. And even a small recognition of his love makes us want to make covenants with him and to keep them. That love more than wipes out the fear that the magnitude of our promises and the severity of the penalties for failure could create in us." 

My fears are erased when I make even a small recognition of God's love. And I want to do it all over again.  Eyring later says, "We promise to give him all that we have and are and all that we may ever have and ever achieve. So the promise is that we may have have all that he has by our giving all that we have. The almost unimaginable imbalance of that exchange, all we have for all he has, is a measure of his love for us." 

The challenges of the past 8 months and counting have changed us so much. We love differently because we are different now.  I say I don't know how to go back to having 5 kids...and on the weekends I do still have 6. I count heads all day long, and feel incomplete without our baby. I didn't know how to answer "how many children do you have?" When I met a new friend last week, and again when I met a new neighbor yesterday...because no answer feels accurate. 

It's not about the number, it's about the change. Living on the sun has refined us. We are not "back to five" because we are different now. Not 5, not 6. "Had six" or "sometimes six" feel most correct, because it acknowledges a part of us that isn't always here presently, but is still ours and changed us forever. The commitment to mother Baby W has been part of my upward pull and I am forever grateful to him for helping me recognize a more beautiful love. 

So of course it rained yesterday. Showers put out flames, and I sense we are entering a cooling season of relief.  We'll soothe one another's wounds and let singed hearts continue to heal as we recognize and understand their purpose and the knowledge and testimonies gained of the Savior's beautiful and all encompassing Atonement in their scars. And when we are called back, we'll willingly step out into the fire again. 

Just Because

 I came home from Primrose Lane Bunco night tonight (with the grand prize for most buncos....a cute hummingbird stake for my garden) and found these pretties on my counter. Just because. I don't deserve the wonderful man I get to spend forever with, but I'm thankful every day that he chose me. 

Summer cuts

Soren has begged for weeks to have his curls cut off. I cried as the beautiful red locks fell to the floor at my own hand, but I respect his wishes to be less shaggy. Both boys looks pretty sharp (and are significantly less sweaty) with shorter hair. I can't resist these freshly sheared boys.

 

 

 

The Dirty Dozen

Laura (Weezy) and Tiger convinced me to try their new workout regime. I say regime because it feels like death by boot camp. It's called the Dirty Dozen and the idea is that you do each exercise 12 times, and then each 11 times, then 10 times, and so forth. 

 

I saw them working the D12 in their garage a couple times a week and foolishly thought this was a good idea and set out to try it in my own garage. 

12 jumping jacks, 12 burpees, 12 lunges and so on. 11 jumping jacks, 11 burpees, 11 lunges, and so on.

This was me by the time I was down to round 8. 

I stubbornly kept going and finished the Dirty Dozen after nearly an hour and 20 minutes of exercise torture, and then cried when I walked the next day. Reese had joined me for part of it and was encouraging every time I needed to get up off the floor. 

 

"Well there's no way I'm ever doing THAT again!" I told them. That was when we realized I had been doing a true "Dirty Dozen" not "cheaper by the dozen" where you take away one of the exercises each round! No wonder it took me so long! I had done a total of 78 jumping jacks, 78 burpees, 78 lunges...down to 78 sprints!  So I did the workout again with Laura, Tiger, and Emma, and it was SO much easier, because you only do one of the exercises 78 times (sprints) and the others get erased off the list one by one with each round. Still the most difficult workout I've ever done, but I didn't think I was going to pass out after, and I wasn't icing my legs that night. 

I'm halfway through week 2 and Tiger changed up the exercises and increased the workout days on us. #5 (plank up downs) got erased after round one, because we could barely make it through 12 of them. I decided it's his dirty trick to keep burpees up there longer than 1 round, because we always want them gone right away. It's only been a short time, so obviously I don't see results, but oh boy, I can feel them! 

 

Weezy and I are on our own tomorrow. We're tempted to do a dirty 9...or perhaps a dirty 6 without Tiger there to hold us accountable ;) 

Cow Appreciation Day

Traditiooooooon. Tradition! 

 

My children are growing. We had to add a couple more cow shirts to our supply box that sits in the top of my closet, because the biggest shirts in there no longer fit my biggest children! Plus, we seem to add to our herd every year or so, so more shirts were a necessity. Ha. Reese, Quincy, and I had a late night mommy daughter date on Monday after the boys went to bed. We hit up JoAnne's for some patches for a craft project Q is working on during her sewing lessons with Eunice, and then picked up a couple cheap plain white tees and spotted em up before bed. 

 

In the morning I had a herd of heifers and bulls ready to bust down CFA. (Soren isn't mad, here, just mooing) We hit up bentonville for an early breakfast. After I picked Reese up from her phonics class, Danielle P and Jill S texted us to meet them at a park in Rogers. We went there to play (minus Q, who was now with Eunice on a date), and I got a text from Julie S asking to steal reese. They joined us at the park too! Great fun, my children love a new park and friends. The only pic I have is this fuzzy caterpillar Reese and Finley took a photo of. 

 

We then all went to the rogers CFA for lunch! 

 

 

Pictured above: Jill, Dean, and Rachel S, Danielle, Isabelle, and Bradley P.  

Pictured below: Ruby and Penny M, Finley S holding Sloane, Shirley M, Reese, Sully S, Corbin, Landan S, Sammy B, and Sam M. 

Eat Mor Chikin! 

 Reese went home with Shaws for the afternoon and reports they went to bentonville CFA for dinner! LOL she proudly ate CFA for breakfast lunch and dinner. 

 

 

I think my favorite story from the day is Reese enjoying her new freedom to text a couple of select friends. She sent her friend, Minisha, a text that said, "Happy Cow Day!" 

 Minisha laughed and said, "I can't eat cows, remember? I worship cows." 

Reese then, in an attempt to backpedal said, well we don't EAT cows, we dress up like cows and eat chicken. 

Minisha laughed again. "But I don't eat chicken on Tuesdays hahaha" 

Ahh! 

And this is when Reese came to me and "asked, what do I say now?!" 

Doh! Reese! Minisha is Hindu. 

It was a good opportunity for Reese to ask her friend some follow up questions and learned a little more about her religion. Her conclusion was "so like every day is cow appreciation day for Minisha. I knew she didn't eat meat or other foods on certain days, but I never knew why" 

This was  thought provoking to me as I wondered if if our Hindu friends find it insensitive at all that we romp around dressed like cows for free CFA, every summer.  Fortunately, Minisha is not unlike every other Hindu practicing person I've ever met: a promoter of peace. She told Reese to live it up and have fun!  I think we can learn from this response and be slow to take offense when we are the ones who have a difference.