Boogers on the Wall

Summer. I’ve always LOVED the idea of summer. Sleeping in ’til 10, staying in my pajamas all day as my kids play happily at my feet while I read a new best-selling novel. Ahh. Sounds wonderful.

Unfortunately, like Olaf from Frozen, I’m afraid I have very unrealistic expectations of what summer beholds for me.

There was no sleeping in until 10. No staying in my pajamas all day. My kids rarely played happily on their own and I didn’t spend very much time reading – unless my kids were in bed.

Normally when school starts I’m an emotional wreck – terribly sad that our summer is over. This year I’m emotional but I’m torn. Part of me will miss being with them all day – I love spending time with them and keeping a close watch over them. But the other part of me is ready for them to go learn and grow. I’ve realized this past week that I love the idea of summer. The idea that we all get along and have happy days relaxing and playing. But that idea is just that, and idea. Not a reality.

In reality my kids get up at the crack of dawn. Regardless of what time they go to bed. It’s the last week of our summer break and my oldest son has just barely figured out how to sleep past 7. Yesterday he got up at 7:30. Even on nights when we stayed up until midnight watching fireworks or looking at stars through our telescope, my kids still got up super early – before they were ready. Then they were grumpy all day because they were tired. And if you think my 8 and 6 year olds would take a nap, HA!

In reality my boys have spent 75 percent of their summer break mimicking, punching, yelling and beating the crap out of one another. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to intervene. There were rare moments when they’d play peacefully together, but that was the exception, not the rule.

In reality I’ve been more tired and sick this summer than any other year. I blame their little sister. And for some reason I think my kids can sense when I’m not feeling well. That’s when they go crazy.

In reality we bought a new house that has required a lot of unpacking, cleaning and yard work. And my kids hate yard work. Instead of digging out weeds next to me and “helping” they have fought, whined and bickered until I could take no more.

In reality I have had to force my boys to sit and read with me. My boys are amazing readers. But that doesn’t mean they wanted to crack a book on their “break.” They have cried and complained while we have taken turns reading very few books this summer. It has been more traumatic than therapeutic.

Finally, in reality my boys hate doing chores and helping me. A couple of weeks ago one of my sons asked me if I was lazy and that’s why I make him and his brother help clean up, make their beds and clear their dishes after each meal. Yep. I’m lazy. He nailed it.

Maybe they too had unrealistic expectations for summer. And I have failed them. They probably thought I’d let them sit and watch Netflix all day long (instead of just half of the day). They probably wanted me to pick up after them and wait on their every need. They probably wanted a mom who had the strength and energy to entertain them all day, every day. But I couldn’t do it this year. I have failed.

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve done a lot of fun things this summer. We’ve gone camping, to several movies, swimming, to the splash pad, to the park and on dozens of bike rides. We’ve had a few really fun family vacations and several exciting birthday celebrations.

But overall this has been the longest, hardest, most exhausting summer I can remember. I’m ready for a break. Maybe next summer my idea of a fun summer will magically transform into a reality. Then again maybe not.

I have been mourning my own death all week.

Sunday night I had a dream that I died. It wasn’t painful. It wasn’t scary. It wasn’t like the dreams I’d get in high school where I’d be falling off a cliff then black out at the bottom.

It was the kind of dream that made me wake up with a start, too sad to stay asleep.

I dreamt that Travis and I were in a fatal car accident. One minute we were on the road, the next we drove off a massive cliff. Then with a fluttering we were at our home.

My mom was there crying while she did our dishes and cleaned up our kitchen. She spoke to someone on the phone telling them that after 17 hours on the operating table, I didn’t make it.

Somehow she could sense I was there and she let me hug her while we both cried.

Then I walked into the room where all three of my boys were asleep. I watched over each of them for a while and just sobbed.

How was I going to leave them? Why couldn’t I stay? The most desperate, depressing feeling I have ever had in my life fell over me. How was I going to let them go on living without me?

I was going to have to miss everything. EVERYTHING! The good, the bad, everything.

I’d miss their awkward junior high years. I’d miss when their voices started to crack. I’d miss when they had their first real crush or when they went on their first date. I’d miss teaching them to drive.

I’d miss clapping for them at graduation. And I wouldn’t get to meet my daughters-in-law.

Not only was I going to miss out, who would be there for them?

Who would push them in the swing or catch them at the slide? Who would cut open their otter pops and wipe their juicy faces? Who would take them fishing and bait and cast their poles?

Who would lie by them at night when they couldn’t go to sleep?

It wasn’t going to be me.

In my dream my 6-year-old woke up and grabbed me by the shirt. I told him I couldn’t stay, that I’d be gone for a really long time and he cried and cried and cried.

I woke up with my heart broken. Broken by a stupid dream — a dream that has changed my way of thinking.

Heaven knows I’m tired these days. My 7-month-pregnant body is killing me, I’m sick of my kids fighting all the time and I can’t stand how messy my house keeps getting.

But despite all the aching, arguing and mess, I’m alive. I am here. Here to cuddle my boys to sleep. Here to read them stories in the afternoon. Here to try to figure out Pokemon and the best bait to use for a large-mouth bass.

Here to enjoy the ups and downs.

There are a lot of things about motherhood that irritate me, but this week I’ve been reminded that it all could end in an instant. I could be forced to skip all the good, the bad and the ugly.

I’m sure my boys would have been well cared for had I really died, but I’m the one who wanted this. I want to be with them. I want to raise them. I want to experience life with them.

So bring on the laundry and the rings in the toilet. Bring on the wrestling matches and the never-ending sass. I get to live with my beautiful family. Hopefully for a really long time.

I make a lot of mistakes as a mother. I set off the fire alarm burning my children’s breakfast at least twice a week. I forget to switch the laundry all the time and end up with moldy, stinky clothes, and for some reason I can’t keep my boy’s toenails clean.

But despite all the motherly mishaps, I must be doing something right. Because my cute, little rainbow-baby two-year-old son “needs me.”

Normally I write about how crazy, unequipped and awkward I am as a parent. Today I’m going to write about how somehow in all the chaos, something good is sprouting.

My youngest little monkey actually needs me. He says so about a half dozen times a day. And every time he says it, it melts my heart.

“Mom I need you,” he’ll say. Sometimes it’s muffled by the bulk of his binky, sometimes it’s screamed while he’s running for his life from one of his brothers. But no matter how or why he says it, it is the best thing I have heard lately.

A lot of times he’ll reach his chubby arms up to me stretching for me to pick him up, “I need you,” he’ll say.

When I’m in my bedroom folding laundry or getting ready for the day I’ll hear him holler through the house, “Mom, I need you. Where are you?”

Then there’s the times he’s tired or sad. That’s when he’ll cuddle close and whisper, “I need you,” in a sweet, quiet voice while he plays with my hair.

Knowing that someone loves and wants you is the best feeling in the world -especially when you feel like you are screwing things up all the time.

It helps me on the days when I burn our food or ruin our clothing. I just want to wrap my arms around his cute little neck, place my forehead on his and whisper,

“No little buddy, I need YOU. “

What is it like to have absolutely every single thing you say repeated back to you? Just ask one of my boys. They live in a copycat bug-your-brother-to-death kind of world these days. And it’s starting to bug me to death too.

Nearly ninety-five percent of what one of my sons says is copied back to him by one of his siblings. Not in a nice, “Is this what you said?” kind of way. But in a snotty, high-pitched messed-up voice kind of way.

These annoying copying spells are always followed by shouts of, “Mom, he’s mimicking me again!” Then the victim will lash out, fists flying, beating his brother until I intervene.

It’s exhausting. And it’s happening all the time.

I just don’t get it.

What is so fun about copying your brother? Why do you use that mean, snotty voice? Why do you want to repeat everything he says? Why can’t you stop? How do you even know what the work mimicking means?

These are some serious questions I ask my kids on a regular basis.

I guess the positive side is if I don’t hear all of what one of my sons says I can wait about 5 seconds to hear it again. Granted it’s not in the same context or tone, but it’s verbatim.

I know if my mother is reading this she’ll agree that some of this is probably Karma. I both bugged my siblings as well as shouted, “Mom he’s copying me!” all throughout my childhood.

But that doesn’t mean I want my boys doing it. It doesn’t mean I can handle it any more. I’m about to go nuts. They have even started copying our new Furby – Da Ena U Te?

Seriously?

What can I do to get my boys to show respect to one another? How can I get them to realize how annoying it is to have every word they say repeated?

Maybe I should start mimicking too. Maybe a taste of their own medicine would be just the ticket.

If I do it, maybe they’ll realize how stupid it looks and sounds and they’ll be horrified.

But I don’t know if I can do it. Can I stoop to that level? Can I make that same annoying voice that they make? Probably. Well, actually I’m almost certain I can, but will I? No, I doubt it. I can’t listen to it any longer let alone make that sound myself.

Help!

This is what the floor looked like after the first mopping. I got a two by two foot section done in one hour. It was pitiful.

I usually have some unrealistic expectations when it comes to getting stuff done. I always assume it will only take 20 minutes to weed my flowerbed, one hour to go grocery shopping and 2 hours to thaw a frozen solid pound of hamburger meat.

I’m usually way off.

Like when I decided to clean the cement floor in our rec room.

I started the first of July thinking I’d be done in less than an hour. Nearly one month later it’s finally done – even though I’m still not very proud of my work.

I seriously thought I’d be able to plop down on my hands and knees Cinderella style and happily and quickly mop it while sweetly singing something. I had a Lucifer dust-prints moment when I scrubbed for an hour and only got a two by two foot section done.

Now I don’t remember for sure how big our rec room is but I think it’s at least 600 square feet. I realized this was going to take a while.

Who knows when the floor was last cleaned? We moved into our house in the end of April. It could have been years since the floor’s been done. At one point there was carpet over the cement and so some grayish/black film was pooled in sections of the floor. Those sections were disgusting and wicked hard to scrub.

Over the course of a few weeks I tried a million different things. Ajax, Soft Scrub, bristled sponges, metal spatulas and I even borrowed a small buffer from my friend. Nothing worked.

Then last Saturday I was sitting at a Norwex party when a light bulb went on. When the demonstrator showed me the steel scrubby for grills/ovens I realized I might have something else to try – steel wool.

Which for some reason I happened to have in my craft closet.

That night I stayed up until 11:30 p.m. scratching and scrubbing the grime off. I did the same Tuesday night. I stayed up until midnight scrubbing on my hands and knees all the while sticking myself with steel wool slivers and scrubbing til my palms puffed up.

Besides being really hard on my 6-month pregnant boy, it was the most lonely, mundane chore I have done in a long, long time. Occasionally some nasty spiders would creep out from under the floorboards to watch me scrub. I didn’t want to stomp on them but they just sat and stared at me like I was crazy.

Here’s a picture I took of one of the spiders who crept out while I was cleaning. Disgusting!

And I was crazy. How could I scrub our entire rec room floor on my hands and knees with steel wool?

I couldn’t. Wednesday morning I went back downstairs, worked for an hour and then sat back and cried. I realized this was not going to happen. I needed the floor cleaned before two parties we are holding next week and I was out of time.

That’s when I finally caved and rented an industrial buffer. My husband had suggested it several times, but I didn’t want to spend the money. Let me tell you, it was well worth the $38.57 I ended up spending.

My boys and I picked it up after lunch and I had four hours to buff the floor. Luckily my youngest took a long nap. Unfortunately his brothers did not. It reminded me why I had been staying up so late to work on the floor. It’s much easier without their “help.”

They promised me they would play well on their own. Ha! They wanted to by right by me. It was awesome.

I wish all of you could have seen it when I flipped the safety switch and turned on the machine. It nearly pulled my arm out of its socket as it shot across the room. My husband warned me that it might take time to get used to but I shrugged it off. Man did it have a kick.

It took me a while to figure out how to keep it under control. My boys sat giggling at me every time it got away from me. Then I’d get mad at them and tell them to get out of there.

Good news is the buffer worked like a charm. Bad news is it worked so well it started to peel the paint off of the cement in powdery puffs. Mix that with the water that my boys so happily kept dumping periodically for me to keep the machine buffing well and we had a slippery, paint-filled mess. Wet paint was smearing across everywhere.

What more could go wrong with this floor? While I was trying to keep the machine under control my boys decided they want to help mop. They found rags and water and started splashing on the other side of the room.

Why did I let them? Because I couldn’t pay attention to what they were doing. I had to concentrate all of my efforts on keeping that machine in my grips. It was all I could do to keep it under control.

When I finally stopped for a second to see what they were doing they had paint splashes up and down their legs and they were creating a pond in the middle of the floor.

At that point I kicked them out. I couldn’t take it any more. I only had four precious hours with that machine and I didn’t have time to stop and clean up after them.

Too bad they don’t know how to play on their own. They kept coming to the rec room door every couple of minutes whining that they were bored.

When my 5-year-old darted across the paint-streaked floor behind me I nearly lost it. His bare feet were covered in grayish blue paint and I thought I was going to scream. I sat him down, wiped off the paint with some toilet paper, told him if he came in there one more time I was going to make him nap upstairs with his brother and got back to my buffer.

I buffed in peace for about five more minutes then decided I had to be done. I had earned my janitorial badge for the day.

But the floor still didn’t look very good and there were pools of wet paint everywhere. The stupid paint streaks were drying and it looked like one big smeared mess. It a rec room, it’s OK, right? Well it’s just going to have to be OK.

I needed to clean up the wet-paint streaks so I grabbed my mop bucket, my bottle of pine sol and mopped the entire floor one more time. My knees were killing me by the end and my hands were super swollen, but I did it.

I have scrubbed, buffed, mopped then scrubbed buffed and mopped again. The stupid floor might not “look” clean but it’s as clean as I can get it. And that’s going to be good enough.

It took way more time and energy than I thought it would and I had a major melt down at the end but you better believe that if I accidently drop something on the floor next week during one of our scheduled parties I would dare pick it up and eat it. That’s how good I feel about it.

Now it’s time to move on to getting the yard ready for the parties. That will only take me a few hours, right?

The finished floor. Sadly, I couldn’t buff up the black widow. I guess he’s around to stay for a little while longer.

Author’s note: I wrote this post then decided not to post it. Then changed my mind and decided to post it. Hey, I might be bitter and harsh and jealous but today that’s me and I haven’t censored myself yet on this blog. So read on if you dare. Just know that I don’t always feel like this, sometimes life just gets to me.

I have heard a lot of miraculous stories in my life. People living through fires, car accidents, tragic medical conditions, you name it – stories of humans surviving the most horrific and tragic of circumstances. Uplifting stories where you can’t help but be excited that these people pulled through. And although I am thrilled for them, I can’t help but wonder why not me.

I read a story yesterday that really struck me. A little baby survived in the womb living through its twin’s miscarriage and its mother taking two abortion pills. (You can read more about that here.)

Seriously? How exciting for that mom. At 6 weeks she though she had lost everything only to find out later that she had another life growing inside her – a life that is now four months old and healthy.

But I’m not only excited for her, I’m extremely jealous of her. Her baby lived through the most crazy medical situation possible. Yet my son died from an umbilical cord accident. An accident where fetal demise is so rare it’s not even funny.

Babies are born and live though knots in their cords all of the time. My own brother had his cord wrapped around his neck. But for some reason my little guy’s knot was too tight. Why?

I know what you’re thinking, “Give it up already!” I can’t. For some reason I have been bitten by the bitter bug.

Why can other people live through horrendous conditions and yet I had to give birth to a stillborn baby?

Now our family has not been without miracles. I’ve seen the hand of God in my life many times. Just last year my father-in-law walked out of a rehab center after suffering a ruptured aorta and multiple strokes. That has been one of the biggest miracles I have witnessed.

But I just can’t help but wonder why not Luca? Why couldn’t I have miraculously delivered my little boy BEFORE the knot cinched down too tight? Why couldn’t he be added to the list of babies who miraculously came back to life while his mother held him on her chest?

Heaven knows while I held his still, little body I thought that any moment his chest was going to move up and down.

But it didn’t.

I know that things happen for a reason but I still can’t figure this one out. Why do some people live while others die?

Uggh. I’ll never understand.

I will always wish my little Luca could have been saved by a miracle.

Here is a picture of the second craziest thing I have seen in a campsite bathroom. This squirrel was drowned in the toilet.

My boys are always telling me how brave they are. They swear they are brave enough to watch scary shows on Netflix, brave enough to tell scary stories with their friends, etc. But when it all comes down to it, they are chicken.

They won’t even stay in the house by themselves after we put them in bed if my husband and I are outside working in the yard. One night they sat on the top step of our deck in their pajamas getting eaten alive by mosquitoes while we bagged up weeds in the backyard – all because they heard “noises” in the house.

I have to give them some credit. They will kill spiders and chase away snakes for me. But I was reminded just how scared they truly are when we were face-to-face with a flapping fanged creature this past weekend during a camping trip.

It was late at night and we all went to the bathrooms to get ready for bed. I headed to the women’s but then forgot that my toothbrush was with my husband and our boys. So I went to the men’s restroom (there were no other men around.)

As if the smell and sight of the men’s bathroom wasn’t scary enough – there wasn’t even soap by the dingy sink – there was a small, furry nocturnal animal hanging from the corner of the ceiling.

My boys wouldn’t take their eyes off it as they brushed their teeth. It was fine for a while, until it started twitching. That’s when my oldest son started screaming and the brown and black creature took flight.

We were trapped in a small cement room with a swooping bat. It was flapping and flying all over our heads. My boys were all screaming at the top of their lungs – which probably only made the bat flap harder. I’m sure it couldn’t echo locate its way out of that room.

While all four of the men in my life stood screaming with their hands over their heads I took quick action. I hunched over, opened the bathroom door and the spooky little thing flew out into the night.

It was the craziest thing I have ever seen in a campsite bathroom. And I once found a drowned squirrel in a toilet staring straight up at me.

My boys proved how brave they were that night. Now I’ll admit it was thrilling and shocking, but they were SO scared. I thought they would have been more intrigued than terrified. They love animals and they love capturing animals.

Besides my second son dressed up like Dracula for nearly a year straight. Isn’t he half bat?

We will never forget the night we were attacked by a bat in the bathroom. Luckily I could think clearly enough to rescue our family. I guess I am the only one who is bat brave.

I’m pretty sure I’m the only mother on Earth who doesn’t pay her children an allowance. Just ask my kids – they’ll verify it. Because according to them EVERYONE is getting paid.

Paid for what? For being a decent human being? For contributing to the daily work flow of the house? For learning enough in school to earn top grades?

I’m not paying them for that.

I’ve slowly started adding a few jobs for my oldest two boys to do and you would think I’m robbing them. Robbing them of their time, robbing them of some fun and robbing them by not paying them.

My boys have had it easy. They are almost 6 and 8 years old and up until two months ago I still made their beds. (Granted they had bunk beds that were a little difficult to make, but still.)

I’ve started making them make their own beds – without pay. I know the outrage! This has led to grumbling and crying on some mornings, but I don’t care. They are old enough to tuck in some sheets.

This has also led to them sleeping on top of their covers – luckily it’s summer. They are trying and learning and improving. (I made the mistake one day of getting after my 5-year-old because he hadn’t made his bed yet. Apparently he had – Oops.)

But even if they get so good that I don’t even have to remind them seven times, I’m not going to pay them to make their own bed.

Secondly, I’ve started having them collect one of our garbage cans and dump out its contents every week before garbage day. Yet another chore they thought they should earn some dough doing. No. I’m sorry.

Have you seen the amount of garbage my two boys can produce? They should be helping me pay our monthly utility bill. They can fill a trashcan in minutes. You better believe I’m going to have them help take out the trash – without pay.

Finally, I’ve decided to have them help me fold laundry. Now this is a fun one. I got sick of sitting by myself sorting through and laying out clothes while they got to veg out on the couch watching TV. If I have to fold laundry, they have to fold laundry.

And if you thought the amount of garbage those two produced is impressive, you should check out the amount of laundry they go through. And they aren’t even teenagers.

Folding laundry stinks. I have to tell my sons repeatedly that I hate it too. It’s not like I WANT to fold laundry. But if we didn’t fold it, we’d all have to go naked.

So once again, they are asked to do a regular reoccurring chore without pay. The agony!

About a month ago I caved. I had been sick throwing up all day and couldn’t get off the couch. The living room was a mess and it was driving me crazy. I told them if they could clean up all of their toys in five minutes, they could each earn 25 cents. My youngest was thrilled, my oldest wanted 50 cents.

He argued with me for 10 minutes about how he needed more money while his little brother cleaned up the toys.

So my oldest walked away with nothing.

He cried and cried because his brother got paid and he didn’t.

This clinched it for me. I have been anti-allowance my entire parenting life, but this proved to me that my boys have way too much. They always beg for more. Nothing I offer or do is good enough for them.

And so they can continue doing slave labor.

Maybe I’ll change my mind someday, I doubt it, but maybe.

For now they are getting a pretty good allowance. I ALLOW them to sleep under my roof. I ALLOW them to eat three home cooked meals a day. I ALLOW them to get new school clothes, shoes, underwear, etc. I ALLOW them to watch Netflix, play the Wii, Ipad and Kindle.

The list could go on and on. You get the point. As far as I’m concerned, they get plenty of ALLOWance.

This is what happens when we try to do yard work. One of my boys ends up getting into some serious mischief. I swear they are attracted to mud piles.

When I’m older I’m going to start a yard-tending business. Well maybe it won’t be a business, I might actually do it for free.

I’m not talking about tending yards I’m talking about tending so people can work in their own yards. Children. I’ll tend people’s children while they work in their yard.

Maybe I’ll even start tending before I’m older. Maybe I can kick it into gear when my own yard is in shape.

Because if anyone has ever tried doing heavy yard work with three young boys they will know it’s nearly impossible.

One of my boys is either beating someone up, flicking mud on his brother or falling out of a tree. It’s wild, it’s crazy and it’s really hard to get anything done.

I love to work in the yard. It relieves my stress and makes me happy. Unfortunately I’m afraid my boys are deathly allergic to yard work. At least they think they are.

This summer has been a killer. We bought a house a couple of months ago that has a yard that has been neglected. I’m talking about vine/weed/shrub overload. It took us one whole month to find all of our sprinkler valves – valves that probably haven’t been used once in the past decade.

But my husband and I knew what we were getting into. Like I said earlier, I love yard work. We knew we’d have plenty of it and we were OK with that. We just didn’t know how much fun it would be to work beside our children.

At the first of summer I had to threaten my boys to stay outside with me. I gave us a working-in-the-yard time limit and they couldn’t go inside until that time was over. Oh how they hated it. They whined, they cried. You would have thought they were going to melt or shrivel up in the sun – and we always went out before 10 a.m.

It was disastrous. I couldn’t pull one weed between complaints.

I seriously wondered what was wrong with them. Why didn’t they want to be outside? I told them they didn’t even have to help me work, they just needed to be out there getting some fresh air.

They still hated it. I was ruining their lives.

One day I got so sick of it I let them cut out early. I told them to go in and put a show on while I wrapped things up. I told the oldest two to take care of their brother and come and get me if he started crying like a maniac.

Not two minutes later I thought I heard a child crying. I shrugged it off thinking it was probably a neighbor kid. But it didn’t go away.

I put down my tools and ran to the kitchen sliding door only to find my almost two-year-old screaming at the top of his lungs. What did his brothers say about that? They didn’t think he was screaming like a maniac – yet. Apparently we have different definitions of maniac screaming. I’ll have to be more specific next time.

My youngest is actually the most helpful of the three. He loves to dig in the dirt. I can put a shovel in his hand and sit him down by me for at least 15 minutes. (At that point he wants to go run after his brothers.) But those 15 minutes are golden. Sometimes if I give him an Otter Pop he’ll last 30 minutes. That’s even better.

The older two just get into mischief while we work. They are definitely not helpful.

We had to make a no-playing-in-the-house rule while we are outside doing yard work after I came inside a few times to find that a tornado had struck our home. There’s nothing like coming inside dirty and tired only to find you have a giant mess welcoming you – seriously not helpful.

The night we finally hooked up the sprinkler control box to all of our valves we turned the water on and had two giant fountains in the front yard right by the curb. They were spewing water all over into the street and mixing the nearby dirt into thick, solid mud. What did my boys do? They turned it into a messy street race, racing their scooters back and forth in the river of muddy water – once again, not helpful.

Last night my husband and I were in the back yard ripping out some more bushes and vines when my 5-year-old volunteered to push his younger brother around the cul-de-sac on our miniature tricycle. We were thrilled. That would keep both of the busy and out of our way. My husband had the sudden urge to check on them and luckily he did. The older brother had unstrapped my baby and convinced him to ride in the rickety tipping bucket on the back of the trike then he buckled himself behind the wheel. Like I said – not helpful.

I got more work done in my yard the day my friend came over to help and brought with her her kids than I have the whole time we have lived here. Her kids played with my boys for hours while we weeded my jungle. They kept each other occupied so we could keep going. It was amazing.

That’s when I got the idea for my yard-tending service. I’m going to help other people out who don’t have the child-free time they need to get their work done. I’ll watch their kids while they weed. My boys and I will entertain their children while they mow their lawn. And we’ll bring Otter Pops.

Because heaven knows I would LOVE it if someone would do that for me. But then again considering the state of my yard, I’d need them to do it for me all summer long.

What is it like to be pregnant again after a baby has already died in your womb? It’s terrifying. Some days it’s almost crippling.

I know what some of you are thinking – Get over it! I can’t. My pregnancy consumes me. It worries me both day and night.

I have a handful of amazing friends who can relate. Who have dared to bear another child after losing one while pregnant. But for the rest of you I thought I’d give you a glimpse into what it’s like for me these days.

I’m about 24 weeks along now and each day is a stressful waiting, watching game.

Most of you probably already know that my third son, Luca, was born stillborn at 37 weeks. I noticed he stopped moving around as frequently and one day couldn’t feel him move. I had been getting really bad side aches for a while and the day he died I felt achy and sick all over.

He had a true knot in his extra long umbilical cord. Something that is extremely rare. And he couldn’t live with it. It closed off too tight – something that is even more rare.

But no matter how rare, it still happened to my baby. I don’t care how uncommon, it happened to our family.

The odds of something like that happening a second time are microscopic. But I can’t get my mind to realize that. Besides, I have had friends who have lost more than one child.

And so I walk around stressed out each and every day these days while playing a constant movement waiting game. That’s really the only way I can tell if my baby – a little girl – is alive and well.

I wake up in the morning and wait. I think she’s probably a lot like me and likes to sleep in because many mornings I have to wait a long time before I first feel her move. Some days I’d like to lie and wait in my bed all day. But obviously I cant.

I wait while I cook my boys breakfast. I wait while I get them dressed. I wait while we’re watching TV or reading a book. I wait while I’m getting ready and I wait while we’re playing a game. I’m always waiting and watching the clock. Trying to feel her move and note what time it was when I last noticed.

It’s exhausting. Some days it’s nearly paralyzing. But I can’t stop.

There will be days when I’m really busy running errands or working in my yard. Hours will go by and I don’t realize it. Some days I’d like to stay busy and distracted all day but then I pay for it later. When I finally stop and sit down I am terrified. Did I feel her move while at the grocery store? Did she kick me while I was weeding the flowerbed?

If I’m ever feeling sick I get really worried. Is it because something is going wrong? Does my side ache because there’s a problem?

Sometimes I sit and wonder why I put myself through this – again! Sometimes I could scream.

My husband and I have been blessed with four boys – this will be our first girl. I know I should be getting ready for pink and purple to enter our home, but I just can’t. Not yet. I just can’t wrap my mind around bringing her home until I actually do.

People ask me all the time if I’m excited for this baby. Excited? That’s not the word I would choose. They look at me funny when I just shrug my shoulders. It’s hard to get excited about something I’m unsure about. If I knew without a doubt that my little baby girl was going to come home and sleep in her crib, that she’d wear the clothes and suck on the binkies I buy for her, that she’d snuggle up to me while wrapped in her new pink blankets, then yes! I’d be excited! But as the mom of an angel baby I know that doesn’t always happen.

So right now I’m just taking it one day at a time. One hour at a time.

At my last doctor’s appointment my doctor told me to make sure I felt her move at least once a day. Ha! I kind of chuckled at him and told him that I make sure she moves a lot more than that – if he only knew.

I have 16 weeks left. How am I going to make it? Why did I do this?

Probably because I love my kids and I knew I wanted one more. I’ve been blessed with the cutest little 2-year-old who was born two years after we lost Luca. Every time I think that I’m not going to make it through the day, when I’m stressed out beyond belief, I think of my toddler. He is the cutest, happiest, sweetest little thing you will ever meet. He brings me love and peace. Hopefully his little sister will too.