Baby Bump

My good friend Kristy agreed to take some maternity photos of Josh and I.  It was a great day with great company.  These photos turned out great and it was AWESOME to get to take these pictures.  Without Kristy taking some of us, we would not have been able to get these taken.  She did a great job and I am so happy to document this time in my family's life.  It was hard work and it was truly appreciated. 

Home Sweet Home

My house is a hot mess.  I am not sure if it is really a hot mess or if this is just something I create in my head. 

I worry about my house more than anything else in my world. I am not sure where this comes from but my husband can attest of the annoyingness of my thought process regarding our home.  I constantly feel like it is not clean enough, comfortable enough, big enough, and so on.  In the past it has actually stopped me from having people over or even letting people into the house period.  It is weird because with the exception of a few times I can remember, our house is usually fairly well maintained.  I also have no worries about going over to someone else home and seeing it in disarray. It is a "me" problem as usual.

 This is a common conversation that occurs after I come home from working a full day with 6 rowdy boys.

Me: I need to clean this house!
Josh: Why?
Me: It is a mess! Look at this place! (grand gesture of the arms with exaggerated facial expression)
Josh: It doesn't look so bad.
Me: Are you kidding?! Look at that (insert any item) sitting on the (insert any place)!
Josh: Go sit down.

Josh does a really good job of keeping me calm when I get in crazy mode but I feel like I am in crazy mode a lot more often.  I would blame it on hormones but it is just a bad attitude.

Instead of saying to myself "I am so blessed to have this awesome home."  I am constantly saying "I hate this couch/carpet/closet/desk/table/room/dishes we need a better one."  The list can really go on and on.  I have no idea where the sudden desire to have the BEST and NEWEST things is coming from but I gotta cool it.  I even find myself saying things to Josh like "We should have never redone the floors, we are just going to ruin them." STOP... ALREADY...JENNY! (I say this in my head like Stevie from Malcolm in the Middle)  

As I look around, my house looks pretty good.  Sure there is crafting items on the kitchen table and shoes by the door but it is fine.  I gotta get over this! Comparing myself to my friends and worrying about what others think is make me nuts.  Many (more than 5) people have told me "Well, you are going to have move once that baby comes." This is starting to get to me and I start thinking that my home is not fit for our family. (Let alone the other baby I am going to care for starting in the winter!) I need to stop listening to them and start relying on what I know is true.  What my kid will need most is Jesus and everything else is a bonus.  Yeah, yeah, don't worry. We have bottles, and clothes, and diapers... but I do need to get my priorities strait.

Current Action/Lack of Action Shot in the Howard living room

I am 8 months pregnant.

I am pregnant.  I am so tired!  I am not talking about the "I need to go to sleep" kind of tired.  I mean the "why wont my body keep going?" kind of tired. I think this is normal but I sometimes feel like I am going to fall over. 

The weird part is that I don't really mind this feeling. It has just become the normal state for me.  Today at work for example I sat down on the carpet to sing the Fire Truck Song like every other day. At the end of it I looked one of my students and said "Mrs. Howard can't get up right now. What do you want to do?" The kid just looked at me and kept singing.  It was a great moment. 

I also need a good half an hour after work to decompress. That is what I am doing right now.  I just hit this wall and say to Josh, "I cannot get up until 5:30, sorry." Josh is so great about it.  He usually says ok and sits with me or cooks dinner like he is doing right now.  Tonight I think it is "kielbasa surprise!"  He is a pretty good cook so I am not so worried.

I assume that this fatigue is not going away anytime soon so I will just continue to enjoy milking it. No, napping does not help me at all.  If nap I might as well just wake up in the middle of night and run a marathon, it feels about the same. 

 

This is NOT my pug. 

Time keeps on slippin' slippin' slippin'...

Well, here I am again.  Attempting to start a new blog.  "Blog" is not a good word to describe what I want to get out of this.   When I was in college I kept a LiveJournal (so cool, I know) It was a great place for me to journal about what was going on in my life.  I could sit down at the end of the day and write a little bit in order to reflect of what has happening in my life. At the time, I was not a very deep thinking individual and that has not necessary changed in the past 10 years. So I should not expect much.

 This is a picture of me at 18. Whoa Baby!

I can say that many things have changed for me though.  I am married, have a career, am a pug owner, and have a baby on the way.  Those things make my life very different today and I cannot believe how changed I am than when I left my home town.  I feel that this time went so fast!   I know that my life is not going to slow down and what needs to happen is that I become more intentional with the minutes I have.   I want to use this blog to help me stay focused on what is currently happening in my world and to quit wishing time to speed up.   I think that the "next step' will make my life easier but it really doesn't get easy. It is changes to a new kind of hard.  I don't mean hard as in painful or unjust.  I just mean hard as in the constant work that goes into being a human on earth. It is really an awesome process.

 

This is a picture of me at 28.


So, with all this being said,  I am going to start this journal/blog to help me remember how great life is RIGHT NOW and how blessed I am.  I know that my life is great and I want to remember that.