Haws Life

Molly being adorable while eating a shake at lunch. 

These cute kids on a walk before church a couple of weeks ago. I thought I would really hate 11am church just because I LOVE 9am church so much. But...I really, really love it. Molly isn't taking naps anymore anyways, and Will can manage one day staying up, so we usually just chill and eat all afternoon (and have choir practice) and spend some really nice quality time with daddy. It's been great. 

We've been going through quite the bedtime transitions around our house. If you can see, Will's bed is the far left, Ruthie's is the far right, and Molly's is the trundle that pulls out of Ruth's bed, so it's basically all three of them right in a row. A few months ago Molly started refusing to go to sleep. So I did what any sane mother at her wit's end would do, haha, and started strapping her in a carseat. She'd fall asleep in less than five minutes without anything to occupy her, and we'd then transfer her back into her bed. Where she would stay for the rest of the night. Then she started waking up at around 430am thinking it was morning. It was not. So then I started strapping her back in her carseat in the mornings (because the alternative was wrestling with putting her back in bed five hundred times, or letting her kick and roll all over us, and none of those options proved very liveable). This was working well because again, once strapped in she was unoccupied and fell immediately back asleep until about 7am. But...then she started resisting the car seat more and more and I was feeling guilty and knowing that the carseat couldn't be a fix forever, so we started trying to decide how we could make this work. After three nights (about three hours each night) of having all three in a bedroom and Molly NOT asleep, I quickly realized I did not have the patience for that, and the kids' tempers the next day did not help. We were all on too low of sleep. Then Molly started missing naps. SOOOOO we cut out naps and started putting her to bed earlier. Before the other kids. This way, we could do our old trick we did with Ruthie (put a child lock on the inside of the door so she can't come out) and she learned in two days that she was either locked in, or she could have the door cracked if she stayed in bed. She now stays in bed. And falls asleep. And I read Ruth and Will a chapter of Little House in the Big Woods and by the time the chapter is over Molly is asleep and they go down without playing because they know it will be BIG trouble if they wake her up. And all seems to be SOOO much better in the world. Except that Molly keeps coming into our bed FREQUENTLY at night. The last two nights I just laid a quilt on the floor beside us and would lay her down there (because if I take her back to her bed she just continually comes out, and if she stays in bed with us no one sleeps) and she sleeps the night through. Molly has always been our toughest kid to sleep train and toughest kid to keep on any sort of schedule, so I'm just considering the fact that we aren't strapping her in for ten minutes every night a huge win!

These pictures are from a couple weeks ago after Sterling took a test and so we spent the evening outside and grilling. Which now is kind of a tradition because we did it on Monday after his big test, too. The weather is pretty much divine right now, and it's pretty much a crime to not be outside every possible second.

A game of Enchanted Forest before bed. We are so in love with this game.

This was before the last test when I knew I would have an entire Saturday of no husband. And so we headed to the park with bikes, chalk, and lunch to grab some sunshine and as many occupied hours as we could so I didn't feel quite so alone. It worked like a charm and the kids had a great day.

Kissy faces at church.

My friend sent me this text of Ruthie and the two girls her age looking up scriptures, it is super adorable.

Ruth let me know her hair is in braids. It's my favorite artwork she has done to date, I think.

Family home evening was supposed to just be little hearts with an 'i love you' written across. But Ruth had this ridiculous school assignment that was decorating a heart while having a family discussion about love. So FHE got MUCH more involved, which the kids of course loved, haha.

Ruth has had a loose tooth for quite some time and whenever she begged me to pull it out I told her it wasn't loose enough yet. But then she conked it on a pvc pipe while we were building a fort and it was MUCH more loose after that, haha. She was thrilled to have it pulled out! This is the before.

And after! It is the CUTEST toothless smile I have ever seen in my life! Sterling randomly asks her to smile all the time now and chuckles to himself because he loves it sooo much.

This most recent Sunday on a family walk before church. Yes, I'm looking pregnant. Yes, I'm still sick. Not as sick as before. But since I threw up twice yesterday and again this morning, can't really say that I'm all over it yet. Ruff. 19 weeks!