Gonna climb upon a soapbox for a moment…

The families in Colorado who were involved in the shooting need prayer.  Probably one of the very last things they need right now is a network of UNsupport – people using mass media to put down the people involved and some of their decisions.  Mainly, I’m bugged by those who say things like, “What was a 3-month-old doing at a movie theater anyway?  Especially a MIDNIGHT showing of a PG13 movie??”

What’s wrong with taking a baby to a movie?  As long as the parent(s) willingly leave before the baby causes a disruption, then I don’t understand what all the fuss is about.  I have 5 kids, none of whom have slept thru the night until they were over a year old (probably – my youngest is only 9 months old, but he’s the worst sleeper yet, so I’m guessing he won’t sleep thru the night until he’s a year).  So if I’m up at midnight anyway with the baby, I think it should be up to me if I want to spend my own money on a movie, knowing there is a chance that I won’t get to see the entire movie if I have to leave if the baby fusses.  Babies are not going to watch the movie; they’re not going to pick up any bad things from the screen at that age, and taking the baby to the movies late at night can actually be the ONLY time new parents can find to connect to each other while trying to balance the demands of parenthood and careers.

Or, take the situation of a big brother who REALLY wants to see the midnight showing of Batman.  Again, the parents feel they are going to be up anyway with the baby, so why not schedule in some family time at a most unusual, however more convenient, time.  Again, if kids (or babies) cause a disruption in the theater, they should be taken out immediately as a courtesy to others who have also paid to see a movie.

Well, that’s all I have time for now, just had to get that out – I just don’t see anything wrong with taking a baby to the movies, and it bugs me a tiny bit that people are so busy worrying about how others raise their children instead of getting out there themselves to improve our society’s crumbling family unit.  Please don’t attack the parents who are actually seeking to spend time with their children.

Dear Lord, Thank you so much for the gift of children.  We pray to you to continue to guide us to love them, to nurture them, and to lead them to you.  We pray for the comfort and healing of those involved in the Colorado shooting.  May they grow ever closer to you, Lord.  Amen.

We always knew that we were blessed with our 5 healthy babies, but the reality of how blessed we really were is beginning to sink in.  Our first 4 children were very easy, content, healthy babies, so our 5th child, Luke, has rocked our world a little bit.  He has always been an intense baby; very energetic, playful, sleepless, alert and specific about his wants and needs.  But during the past few months, he’s been sick as well, so the poor little guy is having  trouble being comforted.  We’ve taken him to the doctor a few times, and he’s been diagnosed with bronchitis and an ear infection.  As if these illnesses were not enough, his chest x-rays show he has an enlarged heart.  We are currently praying that this is not a symptom of something seriously wrong with little Luke’s health.  My husband made me promise not to google it since we’ve made a few medical scares in our family worse by scaring ourselves with random internet information.  We are currently waiting for our appointment with the pediatric cardiologist.  Scary stuff.

I will continue to update when I can.  In the meantime, prayers for Luke would be wonderful 🙂

Well, today I won’t be writing much. I haven’t been home much at all since I worked 9-5 at Goodwill and then went to see a house with Amie almost as soon as I got home and then there was church after that and then waiting for Tony to get off work! Whew, it seems that there are days that I am never at home and I miss my cats terribly! They are my babies, and they know it. Anyway, I have been trying to get ahold of my older sister to see if she has found me a job in Toledo but does she answer her phone? Noooooo. Though my other sister has found me a job in Florida. Tony really doesn’t want to move down there since it would be a pain to move all our stuff down there. It would be very expensive! I just know that we need insurance, very badly! I am over due for my check-up with the doctor and unless I see the doctor for this check-up, I can’t get any birth control! ARGH!!!!

I actually ran out of room in my previous post to talk about my little ones, my non-schoolers, so it’s time for an update!

The baby, soon to be toddler, Christopher (we call him Beeber since that’s what his big sister used to call him) is getting so big and is now probably closer to toddler than baby 🙁
He walks while holding onto things, and climbs onto anything within reach!  He has recently learned where his tongue is, and if you ask to see it, he will stick it out – awww!  He still loves most kinds of fruits; his favorites are strawberries, peaches, pears, and oranges, but he really doesn’t like cantaloupe nor tomatoes.

Disney is just about the sweetest thing imaginable.  Of course, she is still 2, so occasionally she gets loud, whiny, and insistent.  But she is a very thoughtful little girl, and a very unselfish 2-year-old.  Case in point:  the other day, the girls made macaroni necklaces at our church carnival, and a piece broke off of Sammie’s after we got home.  Sammie was launching into a tantrum, when all of a sudden, Disney jumps off my lap and starts to take her own necklace off, saying, “Here Sammie, you can have my necklace.”  I can’t imagine any other 2-year-old capable of such sweetness!  Add that to her little pageboy Buster Brown – as Carol calls it 🙂 – back-to-school haircut, and she is a living doll!  Oh, and I forgot to mention, Disney is much admired by her older sisters for her ability to whistle!

Having the two of them together during the day is so fun!  A lot of busyness and some mild frustration, but only because of the many messes Beeber makes and the fact that they’re both still in diapers.  I really need to work on Disney’s potty-training.  She has her little potty and likes to go in it, but it’s not always a priority for her…  One of the secrets to harmony in a family with more than a couple of small children is divide and conquer.  My children are so much better behaved when they are broken into groups of two or sometimes even three.  It’s really neat to give each sister the chance the be the BIG sister, and Sammie the Kindergartner gets her chance with Disney in the morning before her afternoon Kindergarten, and Disney gets to be Beeber’s big sister while the two older girls at school.  Back to school time is so fun, and my oldest daughter is really excited about attending her first football game Friday night!  I was a little hesitant to let her go; especially after Wednesday evening when I hung out with a pack of 10 seventh grade girls (a new endeavor of ours – we will be leading youth groups on Wednesday nights!  More on that later; I’m still grasping the um, entirety of the situation).  Seeing that my daughter is only 3 years away from the ages of these boy-crazy, cellphone-obsessed, “like”-spewing, makeup-toting ‘tweens tempted me to buy the totally awesome house on the way to Fort Wayne and lock my 9-year-old daughter in the top of the turret!

But I love where I live and wouldn’t dream of leaving, no matter how cool that house is (or how far it would leave us in debt).  The bottom line is, my daughter is a great kid, and I have to learn to trust her to hold her own – she’s not going to be that type of kid!  She acts mature and logical most of the time; helping her little sisters and brother and she deserves to get away from all the little kid stuff in our household to step out with her friends.  Perhaps volunteering with this (insanely girly) group of girls (have you ever noticed that if you close your eyes, you can mistake a group of pre-pubescent girls for a gang of wild turkeys??) will prepare me for what’s ahead with my 4 home-grown tweens and teens.  At least that’s what I’m hoping…

(In case you’re wondering about the title of this blog post…  Poults = baby turkeys.  I have 3 daughters and one son.  Within a decade, my house will no doubt sound something like a turkey farm!)

Because he’s a boy.

The other day, I  was sitting in the living room when some action in the area of my son’s walker (the thing the baby stands in that has wheels on it, allowing them to walk easier) caught my peripheral vision.  I silently watched as he turned around and proceeded to climb up and out of his walker, backed down the front of it, and quietly sat on the floor like nothing had happened.  Then it dawned on me that I hadn’t even put him IN the walker in the first place!  I checked with my husband, and he hadn’t put him in there either, and later that evening it was verified as we watched him do it again – my son had put himself in his walker in the first place before he climbed back out again.  He acted like a pro, so who knows how many times he’s done this, but needless to say, the walker has been packed away before he even used it to help himself walk.  But that leads me to my point – we’ve had 3 girls and now a boy, and we are starting to see the major differences between little boys and little girls;  the most noticeable at this point being that boys climb EVERYTHING! My son can climb before he can walk.  He’s been climbing stairs for awhile already, and the other day he climbed the table in the laundry room, and he can almost climb up onto the couch.  I can’t imagine what it will be like when he CAN walk, YIKES!!!

They don’t seem to be, they just like kids, I guess.  You might have heard of the Duggar family from Arkansas.  They are kind of like celebrites.  Their claim to fame?  Having 18 natural children.  No adoptees or fosters.  The 18 includes 2 sets of twins and one on the way; there are 7 girls and 11 boys – they don’t know the gender of the new baby yet.  Their story interests me because with 4 kids myself, I thought I had a lot of kids.  It’s interesting to me to see how they go about their daily lives with 20 people living in their house.  Their house is custom built, they actually built it themselves as a family project.  They have lots of things in their house that help organize their lives and make everything run more smoothly, for instance, they have 4 washers and 4 dryers in their laundry room and one communal family clothes closet where the clothes are sorted by size.  Their kitchen has 2 convection ovens, 2 microwaves, 2 warming drawers, 2 dishwashers, 2 sinks, and a fridge/freezer.  And that’s the small kitchen.  The industrial kitchen is outfitted with 4 ovens, 2 griddles, 4 freezers, 2 refrigerators, 2 sinks, a pizza oven, a deep fryer, and a popcorn machine.  They even have their own buffet line; that’s how they serve their food.  Each kid goes through the line and gets their own food, well, the ones who are old enough, anyway.   They also have a drink counter in their dining room with a fountain pop machine.

Even though they have all these things in their house that help to accomodate such a large family, it’s amazing to me that they can still function with all those kids.  The kids are home schooled and also take piano, violin, and harp lessons.  I think the key here is scheduling.  The family has a daily schedule that they follow which is supplemented with reward charts and checklists for each family member.  Each person has a jurisdiction within the house that they are responsible for cleaning during family cleaning time.  It sounds like a well-oiled machine, but I’m sure they run into their share of snags.  I just have so many questions about their situation, though, like how can a woman want to go through the birthing process 16 times (remember, 2 sets of twins)?  How is her body even able to carry and give birth to 18 children?  Is she addicted to pregnancy?  Do they have a money tree in their yard?  What is their grocery bill?  When do they have time for grocery shopping and who does it?  Do they have a vehicle that fits them all, or do they have to travel everywhere in a caravan?  Does Jim-Bob (the dad) work outside the home?  It’s kind of funny, isn’t it, that his name is Jim-Bob, he’s from the south, and he has 18 kids.  Talk about illustrating stereotypes. 

But seriously, they must be rich, or at least were rich before they had all those kids.  Not only would their grocery bill be outrageous, but they built their own large home and they need furniture to accomodate 20 people – that’s 19 beds alone!  Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that all the children’s names start with the letter j.  Well, anyway, I just thought I’d write a little about the lives of this interesting family.  If you want more information about them or want to look at pictures of them or their cool house, they have a pretty nice website.  They also make appearances on news shows frequently and had a reality show on the Discovery Channel that followed them as they built their house.  I wonder if they plan on sending all 18 kids to college?  And if all 18 share their parents’ views of contraception, they are going to have hundreds of grandchildren!

Yesterday we made a trip to our second-closest Walmart, and that location keeps their baby formula behind the counter, with the cigarettes.  I guess formula theft is rampant, at least at that Walmart location.  The cashier said something about it being used to make drugs, but I don’t know if that’s just her own hypothesis or if it’s true, but it doesn’t really make sense to me.  Whatever the reason, it’s so much more inconvenient for us regular shoppers.  Not only do I have to remember to get the formula on the way out, but we have to stand in a special line since only the one checkout lane has the formula.  Then you have to be clear on which kind you want, and you have to make sure the cashier knows what you’re talking about because there are at least 10 varieties.  It would stink to come home and find that you were given the wrong kind or had forgotten the formula altogether, which did happen to me last time I shopped at that Walmart location.  Anyone who has or has had little kids can understand how crazy kids can get in the checkout line.  Not only is it boring (especially at Walmart, where it often takes forever and a day also), but they’re nice enough to stock both sides of the aisle with plenty of tempting goodies for kids, conveniently all at eye level.  So the kids often are going crazy in the checkout line, and now the weary parent is expected to remember they still need their formula (and probably cigarettes, the way the shopping trip is going!) and to make sure they get the right kind of formula.  It’s a stupid set-up, and I really hope they don’t implement this change at my local Walmart where I do most of my shopping.  I have a suggestion that would make things a wee bit easier if they insist on keeping the formula behind the counter.  In the baby section of the store, have papers with bar codes on them corresponding to the different types of formulas.  That way, we can just grab the slip we need and put it in our cart, eliminating the need for remembering to get the formula later or confusion with the cashier.  This system works well when you buy large items, like swingsets, so why not try it with formula?

And while we got on the subject of drugs with the cashier, she told us an interesting tidbit about Walmart’s cash registers.  It seems they are trained to recognize the combination of supplies one needs to create a meth lab.  If someone buys this combination of items, the register will alert the employee.  Now I’m as opposed to meth labs as the next person, and I certainly don’t want them in my neighborhood, but when the Walmart cash register is programmed to tell you what not to buy…  I think that’s a little too much.  Big brother, here we come…

In the last few days, my recovery from tthe emergency c-section has not been going well.  I awoke from a nap Thursday night feeling awful, but luckily my medication kicked in, and I was able to enjoy the midnight showing of The Dark Knight – more on that later.  Friday we met Grandma in South Bend Indiana which is halfway between Chicago where she lives and Ohio where we live to transfer my kids for a week’s vacation with Grandma.  I felt awful all day, and I started shivering in the restaurant.  I knew there was something really wrong when I went outside into the 90° oven and actually enjoyed it – uh oh.

When I got back to Ohio, I had an appointment with my doctor for her to take out my staples (yes, they had to actually use staples to put me back together, yuck) and that actually went well.  Hardly hurt at all, just a little pinch, and it didn’t take long.  I brought up my symptoms to my doctor and she said everything was normal, and I believed her because when I had my other babies, I would heal up right away, so I figured these were all just side effects from the cesarean.  But I took another nap when I got home and when I woke up, I felt like I was dying – that’s really the only way to describe it.  We took my temperature and it was 102.7°, so of course I had chills, the sweats, headache, and pain.  A quick look on the internet gave us the diagnosis:  mastitis – a common infection often suffered by breast-feeding mothers.  We called the doctor and they wouldn’t prescribe any antibiotics over the phone, so we headed to the hospital for the 2nd time in a week…

The admissions people panicked when they saw us coming in with the baby, but we quickly explained it wasn’t him, thank goodness.  Anyway, after a quick look, the ER doctor confirmed our internet diagnosis and sent us home with a prescription.  But since all the pharmacies were closed in our town, they gave me some medicine right then and there.  “Name and birthdate”, they always ask at the hospital before they give you your meds, and I was like, FLASHBACK!  I thought I was done with this for awhile!  But for spending a Friday night in the ER, it wasn’t so bad; we were actually in and out in an hour.  If this had happened in suburban Chicago where I used to live, it would have taken 3-4 hours to wait our turn in the ER, and they would have wheeled a few body bags past us while we were waiting.  So today, I feel much better comparatively, and since the girls are with grandma, I slept until 11:30, so I’m sure that also helped.  The antibiotics seem to be working already, and it was nice to wake up and not feel like I was dying, something that hasn’t happened for a few days.  I also feel better that now I think my recovery from everything is headed in the right direction, whereas when I felt crappy and didn’t know why, it was discouraging because I was thinking, will I ever feel better?

My husband is peeved at my OB-GYN for not checking me more thoroughly during my visit with her yesterday.  I agree; Idid mention my symptoms and she was too dismissive, but being a man (especially one who won’t listen to doctor’s orders – if the doctor tells him to do something or recommends some sort of exam or test and he doesn’t want to do it, he just won’t) I don’t think he understands how important to me it is to have a woman OB-GYN, and she is the only one in town.  Besides, I do like her, she is gentle and she has been through 3 c-sections herself, so she knew exactly what to tell me about what to expect.  If we do have any more children, there will be some debate about which doctor we will use.  Well, anyway…  off to Walmart to get my third prescription this week!

When I was in high school, I was in a peer group called Snowball and one of our activities was to write “warm fuzzies” about each other.  Warm fuzzies are kind thoughts.  When we told family and friends we are now expecting a boy instead of a girl, we got lots of warm fuzzies, so I decided to collect them in one place so baby Christopher can read them someday.

Lisa,
How exciting to find out about your new son, we are so excited for you.
Love, Linda
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YES!!!!!!!
I knew you guys could do it! Congratulations!!
Mary Beth
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Hooray!!!
That is sooooo great. I can’t wait for HIS arrival. I sure Dad is as excited.
Jamy
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Wow!  No wonder you are in shock!  I’m excited for you.  I had 3 boys and the last was a girl, and I didn’t know till she was born – no ultrasounds in those days.  All I can tell you from my experience is the girl was nothing like her brothers, from day one.  For me, 3 boys were easier than one girl!  I’ll be interested to see how your experience is.  Can’t wait to meet little Christopher.  I have one of those as well. (He is and was the “toughest”, most bull-headed of my boys.)
Shirley
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  You are going to love having a son. I know I was very nervous about having a son because I wasn’t sure if I could feel the same way about a boy as I did about Abby.  Because she was a girl, I thought we had this unusual bond that couldn’t possibly exist between a mother and a son, but it turns out that gender has nothing to do with it.   I knew I’d love him, but I wasn’t sure that there’d be that “click” I had with Abby.  I’m glad to reports I was very wrong.  I’m positively in love with my son and couldn’t imagine life without a boy to raise.  I’ve often said that I’d have a whole ball team of boys before I’d have another girl, so if that tells you anything, you’ll LOVE having a son.  HOORAY for you!
Tracy
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