Back to Real Life

Well, after six weeks of Family Medical Leave, Jeff headed back to work today, leaving me alone with Charlotte, Elijah, and Jeremy for the first time since the baby was born.

Sigh.

I can’t believe how the time has flown.  Jeremy turned seven weeks on Friday and already bears little resemblance to the wrinkly, skinny newborn he once was.  He is really filling out, sleeping better, and starting to eat a lot and very regularly!  He has also grown eyelashes and is beginning to have visible eyebrows.  (He was born without either one!)  He has cut his nighttime feedings down to one, and he really doesn’t wake up for those anymore.  Dare I hope that sleeping through the night is around the corner?!

I took my first trip to Walmart this morning by myself with three kids.  Before we arrived, both older ones promised that one or the other would push the stroller while I manned the cart.  This didn’t work out so well.  Elijah crashed the stroller into another lady’s cart when he didn’t look both ways before crossing an aisle.  Charlotte informed me that she had already said SHE didn’t want to push the stroller and that she had wanted me to put Jeremy’s car seat in the cart.  (I have no recollection of this conversation.)

As Charlotte and Elijah’s only reason for happily going to Walmart this morning was to purchase a Slip’n’Slide with their allowance money, neither much cared about the how’s and why’s of the rest of the shopping.  I guess it could have been worse, but we’d better not have another trip like that.  Charlotte and Elijah are way too old for that nonsense!

But now, both are out playing on the Slip’n’Slide, enjoying our ninety-degree, sunny, and humid temperatures, while I squeeze in some writing before Jeremy has to eat again.  All’s well that ends well.

The kids and I made a summer activity chart over breakfast this morning, in hopes of staving off the inevitable “I’m bored!” that happens a week into summer vacation.  The kids only get about 30 minutes of electronic time a day on vacations (it’s only on weekends during the school year), so they will need to find other ways to fill their time. 

We agreed that they would work on their multiplication tables twice a week (OK, I pretty much told them they were doing that), that we would try to do a water activity at least once a week, and that we would make it to the Peoria Zoo at least once before the summer is over.  These, in addition to their regular activities, should give all of us something to look forward to.

Bring on summer!

School’s Out! Scream and Shout!

It’s officially summer vacation at the Wilkes house!  One goal that Jeff had during his family leave was to get school done with the kids, so that I would have the summer to take care of Jeremy without having to worry about teaching.

Mission accomplished!

Charlotte and Elijah are pretty excited.  Having school done before the end of May meant doubling up on some subjects and extending our school day past our customary lunch-time finish.  But they worked hard and can now enjoy a nice long summer break.  As we speak, Elijah is happily using his electronics time, having finished all of his chores before 9:30 a.m. in order to do so!

So, what’s on the agenda for this summer?

We will continue French lessons one afternoon a week, which actually amounts to about two lessons a month when we take time out for the camps and travels for both families involved.  Charlotte will be participating in basketball and tennis camps, and Elijah will be attending soccer camp.  All of the athletic camps are sponsored by the local schools, so they are close by, which I like very much.

Both kids will continue with tae kwon do through the summer and will likely be testing for their purple belts before too long.  Charlotte will be working on her leadership project through August, at which time Elijah will probably begin his.

For Charlotte’s birthday weekend, we are planning to go to St. Louis for the first time.  We will spend a day at Six Flags and another at the zoo.  I’ve made our hotel reservations already and bought our Six Flags tickets.  It should be a good time.

Charlotte will also be attending Little Galilee Christian Camp for the first time this summer.  Because she’s never been to church camp before, she and we agreed to a two-night, introductory experience in August.  Another girl from church will also be attending, and Charlotte is very excited.  I have no doubt that she’ll love it and that we will be sending her off for the whole week next year.  She wanted to pack her bag in March when we got her confirmation notice, but I convinced her to wait a bit!

I asked Elijah if he wanted to go this year, to which he responded, “I don’t want you to drop me off anywhere for a couple nights!”

I guess it’s bit early for overnight camp for Elijah.

In between activities, I’m anticipating lots of time for outside play with the neighborhood kids, time to rest, and time to enjoy our expanded family.

Happy weekend!

Say Cheese!

I love it when this happens. 

 

It suddenly makes those sleepless nights seem worth it!

Speedy Racer

As you probably are aware, my kids both participate in tae kwon do.  This has, in so many ways, been a positive experience for them and for us.  One of the best things about the couple that teaches our kids is that they are just as focused on life skills and self-improvement as they are on tae kwon do.  To them, learning tae kwon do is important, but learning to be a good person is even more so.

I think that I blogged about the kids getting their black pants a couple of months ago, after finishing three “extra credit” sheets, which were 20 days each of working on a skill or behavior.  Attaining black-pant status means becoming an assistant leader, which means that Master and Mrs. Kurtz can call of them to perform a variety of leadership tasks. 

The next uniform step is working toward a black top or full leadership status.  The students are supposed to have their purple belts and be around 10 before being allowed to work on this.  Well, Charlotte is nothing if not motivated by awards, so, almost immediately after getting her black pants, she asked Mrs. Kurtz when she could begin working on her full leadership project.  Mrs. told her to come back and ask when Charlotte earned her blue belt.

Well, no sooner did she get her blue belt than she inquired again.  Even though Charlotte was still one level below purple belt, Mrs. Kurtz told me that she believed Charlotte was ready.  (Elijah, on the other hand, was not.  It was a tough call to let Charlotte go ahead of him, but she IS two years older and a lot more focused.  We think that Elijah might be ready by the end of summer.)

A leadership project is not so much working on leadership, per se, but more about goal-setting, diligence, and self-improvement.  The students set an approved, measurable goal and spend 100 days working toward it.  As very few people can work 100 straight days toward anything, this project usually takes four to five months.

Charlotte decided that she wanted to work on running as her project.  She set the goal of training for and running at least two, possibly three, 5K races.  Around this same time, Mike Fiedler, my running partner before I got pregnant, decided to start up a kids’ running group that included his own son, with the idea of training for a 5K race in early June.

Charlotte was off to (training for) the races!

So, I finally arrive at the point of this particular story…

Yesterday, Caterpillar had their annual CAT Power Run, which featured a 5K race, a one-mile fun run, and a 1/2 mile kids’ run for employees and their dependents in downtown Peoria.  Jeff and Charlotte signed up for the one-miler.  Mike and Andrew Fiedler also signed up.

At 8:30, the foursome took off.

Elijah, Jeremy, and I moved over to the finish line.  About seven or eight minutes in, the first finisher, a teenage girl, crossed the finish line, followed by a few men and boys.  Then, here came our girl, with her dad struggling valiantly to keep up!

 

Before long the race was finished, and we were preparing to walk back to the parking lot.  I asked Jeff if there were any prizes for the one-mile run, and he told me that he thought the top male and female finishers got a prize.

The first person to finish the race was female, but I had heard her say at the finish line that she had already run the 5K and that she had just done the one-mile for fun.  (She ended up winning her age division in the 5K.)  As participants were only allowed to compete in one race, I tried to remember if any other girls had finished before Charlotte…and I couldn’t remember any.

So, we decided to stick around for the awards presentation.  Sure enough, Charlotte was first female finisher!  Here she is, accepting her award and showing it off.

 

I’m not sure who was more surprised, us or Charlotte!  This was her very first competitive run, and she won!  Needless to say, we are very proud of her.  For her prize, she gets to pick between two tickets to a Peoria Chiefs baseball game and two movie passes.  She wants to go to a baseball game with her dad sometime around her birthday. 

Sounds like a good plan to me!

Celebration

As I mentioned in my previous post, May tends to be a good month for me, as we celebrate both my birthday and Mother’s Day.  And my wonderful husband made both quite lovely this year.

Saturday, May 1, was my 37th birthday.  I am officially in that murky land of pushing 40.  It’s kind of sobering, as I remember when 40 seemed…well…old.  Now it’s looking younger every day.  I’ll just say that I never expected to by in my late 30’s with a newborn, but it’s just one more adventure.  I’m grateful to still be healthy and whole and having adventures.

Anyway…

We spent the morning at Elijah’s soccer game and a good chunk of the afternoon at a tae kwon do black belt test.  The latter was not exactly my idea of a good time, but the kids begged to go.  As Jeff had to run our van title up to the car dealership in Bloomington, the three kids and I hung out at the test for three hours.

I must admit that it was pretty amazing.  By the time people test for a black belt in any martial art, they have acquired some pretty awesome skills.  One guy, who is about 15 and testing for his second-degree black belt, sparred with a fourth-degree black belt, who axe-kicked him in the head about three times.  Elijah was over the moon.

We also saw some pretty amazing breaks, including one guy who broke two concrete blocks with his hand.  At one point in the test, Elijah looked at me, inclined his head toward the actions, and stated with perfect confidence, “That’s me in a few years.”

I love that kid.

Before the test, we ate lunch, and I opened my gifts.  I received two board games, Apples to Apples and Last Word, from Charlotte and Elijah…

 

… the latest Karen Kingsbury book from Jeremy, who, as you can tell, is very much into celebrating my birthday…

…and three NeedToBreathe CD downloads, which Jeff burned to disks for me, for maximum listening flexibility!

We also ate some birthday brownies.

 

That evening, however, was the special part of my birthday.  Jeff made reservations for all of us at a Peoria restaurant called 2 Chez.  It’s an Americanized French restaurant, with great atmosphere and delicious food.  It is not exactly a kid-friendly place, but Charlotte and Elijah remembered well from France how to behave, and we had a lovely evening. 

We did have a bit of a rough start with Jeremy, as he screamed as soon as we sat down.  He didn’t know that he was supposed to be quiet and well-behaved.  Jeff hustled him out of the restaurant under the baleful glares of people who hadn’t had babies in a very long time, got him back to sleep, and we didn’t hear a peep from him the rest of the supper.

2 Chez had no kids’ menu, but our kids have tried enough different foods over the past several years that they managed to find things to eat.  To our waiter’s credit, he hardly batted an eye when our kids ordered and snarfed down fried calamari (squid) for an appetizer, declaring it better than that they had tried in Egypt, and Elijah ate mussels in the shell for his entree!  Charlotte split a chicken and pasta dish with Jeff, and I enjoyed scallops.

Good times.

I forgot to mention that yesterday was Baby/Child Dedication at church.  There were 22 children dedicated between the two services, and Jeremy was the youngest one participating.  We have now dedicated three different children at three different churches:  North Boulevard Church of Christ in Murfreesboro, Meadowbrook Church of Christ in Jackson, and Richwoods Christian Church here in Peoria!  It was neat.

Have a good one!

New Wheels

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you moms out there! I hope that it’s been a good one, with a bit of relaxing and enjoying thrown in. Jeff told me to take it easy today, so I lay on the couch while he fed the baby and took a nap when he loaded all three kids in the car for a trip to Walmart. It doesn’t get much better than that!

May tends to be a good month for me. My birthday and Mother’s Day both fall in May, so it’s a bonanza by way of cards and gifts and celebrations. This year was no exception, although I ended up with a slightly bigger gift than usual this year!

We bought our 1998 Toyota Sienna back in 2006 from a coworker of Jeff’s right before we moved to Illinois, and it had been a great vehicle. However, it did not winter very well while we were in France, and, since we’ve been back, it has slowly been falling apart. Plastic pieces were breaking off with alarming frequency, and the passenger side front door handle cracked in two one day when I opened it. At one point, neither child could open the sliding doors from the inside. Aside from the safety issues involved with that, it was getting very aggravating having to open both doors from the outside.

So, yes, three out of four doors on the van were broken in some way. Jeff managed to fix one sliding door by rigging it with a piece of string (you’d have to see it) and the other by taking it apart and adjusting something, but still!

A couple of weeks ago, we started thinking about what we would like by way of replacement at some point in the future. Jeff and I really liked the Renault Scenic that we drove in France. It was a car, but it seated seven people with two jump seats in the rear. Jeff researched it and discovered that only two vehicles like that are sold in the US…the Mazda5 and the Kia Rondo.

The Rondo appeared more affordable, so Jeff continued researching. As we don’t generally buy new cars, the only used Rondo seven-seater that we could find close by was in Aurora, Illinois, a two-and-a-half hour drive from us! We looked at a five-seater in town, but it was not what we wanted.

Jeff finally found a new Rondo in Bloomington, which is only about 40 minutes from Peoria. So, last Friday, April 30, we drove over to take a look at it and maybe test drive it to see if it was, indeed, what we wanted. While we were test driving the car, the salesman offered to have his boss take a look at our van and tell us what the dealership could offer on a trade-in. I tried not to laugh as Jeff said, “Why not?”

Of course, this Rondo was exactly what we wanted and then some…leather seats, an iPod jack, black with chrome details. Of course, it was also brand new with only 39 miles on it. As I said earlier, after many years of listening to Dave Ramsey, we don’t buy new cars!

But the salesman, Paul, who had only been selling cars for about a week, asked the typical question, “What can we do to get you this car?”

Jeff told him how much we were willing to pay, which was the cost of a used Rondo with low miles. “I don’t think you can do that for me,” Jeff told Paul.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Paul replied and trotted off.

To make the rest of the story short, Paul returned and offered us the new Rondo for the price that Jeff had named, after raising the trade-in offer on the van and offering us every possible incentive. Essentially, we were offered the car as if it were used with low miles.

We figured a couple of factors went into this offer. It was the last day of the month, and there were quotas to fill. The Rondo is also not a very popular model, proven by the fact we were hard-pressed to find one. So, we seized the day and came home with a new car!

The whole situation ended up being rather comical. We had absolutely no intention of buying that day, so we had not fixed up or cleaned out the van at all, let alone carried the title with us to Bloomington. (Jeff ran that back up to the dealership the next afternoon.) That they offered what they did for trade-in was really funny.

Jeremy needed to be fed in the middle of this whole thing, as buying a car from a dealer is a three-hour ordeal even if you are paying cash, and that Friday was one of the windiest days I have ever seen. So, at one point, I was trying to join the conversation about the car with Paul and Jeff, while giving Jeremy his bottle, outside, in the middle of a windstorm. I finally gave up, went inside, and found a chair. My participation with car purchases is peripheral anyway, given Jeff’s expertise in that area! My contribution is usually, “I like it.”

Then, after we had decided to buy the car and were trying to get the van cleaned out, Charlotte, for whom “change” is a dirty word, started crying and telling us, “I don’t WANT to get rid of the van! I love it! I don’t WANT a new car! I like this one!” She was not throwing a fit or shouting, just quietly weeping and begging us to reconsider.

What a zoo.

So, after signing and filling out a zillion forms, including one from a government database that was supposed to determine that we were not terrorists or money-launderers, we finally drove away from Extreme Kia in Bloomington with our new car.

In case you are wondering about Charlotte…by the time we got to Krispy Kreme Donuts about five minutes up the road (the closest one to us is in Bloomington and we never go there without getting a dozen!), she had changed her story. “I guess this car is OK,” she told us. By the time we were driving home, it had changed to “I really like this car. I’m glad you bought it.”

Good to know! So are we! And as May 1 was my birthday and as I will be the primary driver of this car, I told Jeff, “Hey, you can tell everybody that you got me a new car for my birthday!”

Everybody left happy.

When a Plan Comes Together

While Jeremy has always slept decently at night (pound on wood), he was not a good napper during the day.  He would fall asleep when we held him and even stay asleep when we would lay him in his crib…for about 30 minutes.  Then, he would wake up, crying and upset, and we would repeat the cycle.

Finally, we observed him as he slept and discovered that he is a very, very jumpy baby.  He would sleep for a bit, and then he would jump.  His arms would jerk, and he would smack himself in the face.  This would wake him up enough to cry, which would in turn wake him up enough to not be able to go back to sleep without being held and calmed down.

It’s not that we minded holding him when he was upset; in fact, it’s rather nice!  However, it is not always practical, as we have two other children who need to be schooled and stuff around the house that needs to be done.  I am not a baby-wearer either, so we needed another solution.

Our initial solution was swaddling, which we immediately tried.  If Jeremy’s arms are confined, he can’t smack himself, right?  So swaddled he was.

This is when we discovered that we have a little Houdini.  No matter how tightly we swaddled him, no matter what blankets we used, that child escaped. 

Every.  Single.  Time.

And, furthermore, the effort of escaping upset him, made him cry, and put us no better off than before!

Finally, I stumbled across a website for a product called the Woombie.  The Woombie is a zippered sleep sack that greatly resembles a straightjacket.  It zips all the way up to the baby’s chin, and, even cooler, it unzips from the top and the bottom to facilitate diaper changes.  It comes in several varieties, one of which is actually called the “Lil Houdini,” especially for babies who can escape most swaddles.

Jeff scoffed at first, so we didn’t order it.  After one particularly bad day, he relented, and I told him he could simply call it my birthday present.  I ordered a blue Lil Houdini Woombie, and it arrived last Friday, the day before my birthday!

So here is Jeremy, with our attempts at swaddling.

And here is Jeremy, in the Woombie.  Isn’t it GREAT?!

 

So, how is it working, you may ask?

Better than we expected!  The first night in the Woombie, Jeremy actually slept for four hours at a time.  He was able to go to sleep and stay asleep.  He didn’t much like being put in it, and he was very perplexed that he couldn’t get his hands out, but, once he settled down, he actually stayed asleep.

The second night wasn’t so great, but we think he had a tummy ache.  But since then, he has slept four hours at a time each night.  He still wakes up twice to eat (and probably will for a few more weeks), but, now that he is resting better at night, he is beginning to rest better during the day, too.  We are not using the Woombie during the day, but it seems to be working well at night.  Hopefully, it will continue to do so!

Since getting the Woombie, we have also been swaddling him during the day in a big, old blanket of Elijah’s.  We leave his legs free and wrap up his arms, which is also working pretty well.

Whew!

Here’s a picture to close.  Next time, I’ll fill you in on our new vehicle and on my birthday  Have a good one!

Things That Make You Ask, “Why?”

Well, we had a big weekend.  We bought a car, celebrated my 37th birthday, and implemented my diabolical, help-the-baby-sleep-better plan.  I will tell you all about all of that in a later post or two.

Today, a friend from church was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer that has metastasized to her bones.  Her name is Elizabeth Grant, and she beat her first round with breast cancer five or six years ago.  She is 35 years old, wife to Dale, and mother to Marielle and Josiah.  She is also wonderfully brave and determined to glorify God in this very difficult battle before her.

Those of us who know her are asking, “Why?”  I asked this same question when I found out about Lissy Edmondson and Kim Pequette, who both lost their battles late last year.  I struggle with why another young wife and mother has to face this, as I pray for healing and strength for this family.

If you think about it, say a prayer for Elizabeth.