Are you done yet?

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, called Columbia, MD, a man and woman got married and dreamed of someday having a family.  The man, we'll call him "J", was an only child and as a result of the childhood trauma of never getting away with anything, wanted to make certain he had enough kids to spread blame around.  The woman, we'll call her "E", had not much opinion on the subject, though she had once made a deal with her friend Heather that Heather would be pregnant with all the kids and E would raise them. 

You may have guessed, I'm talking about us.  I really didn't have much desire to have kids until Jeff and I got together.  Those of you that know Jeff will understand immediately how I knew that having kids with him would be an adventure I didn't want to miss.  We were married in September 2003, and didn't decide to "try" to have kids right away, so much as we didn't try to prevent things.  Those of you that know me well will know that after a month or two of that not working, my goal-oriented personality kicked in and we got serious about the matter.  Elizabeth Helen, "Scout" as we called her then, was discovered to exist right around May of 2004 and was born on January 4, 2005.  The second she was in my arms, I knew that we would have another baby, and soon.  I knew it like I knew that I was going to marry Jeff after one phone conversation. 

Sure enough, nine short months later, I woke up in the middle of the night to the knowledge that I could smell the entire contents of my fridge from my bed and I knew that I was pregnant.  Margaret Leigh was born in July 2006.  Poor Maggie's "in utero" nickname was Avis - cause number 2 has to try harder.  As anyone who has had a second child knows, the transition from one to two kids is as earth shaking as from zero to one.  Maggie came out with definite opinions and an altimeter that prevented her from sleeping unless being held between 4'4" and 4'8" inches off the ground.  There was a definite learning curve and Jeff and I struggled to catch up to our much smarter baby. 

However on Maggie's first birthday, when it came time to throw away the "1" candle that I had used for both girls cakes, I hesitated.  Partially cause Maggie had slept like a dollbaby through the whole party, her peaches and cream complexion glowing in the summer sun, but mostly cause I knew in my heart I wasn't done.  Our family wasn't complete.  Two months later, we were blessed with our third baby.

Jack came to us in June 2008, and he is truly a character.  I am constantly amazed at how different all three of my kids are - from the way they were born to the way they play.  People said to us all the time, "Guess you can stop, you have the boy!" and I would get pissed.  Like my girls weren't enough for me.  Coming from a matriarchal family, I can't understand the whole "carry on the family name" thing.  My grandfather had three daughters, and I can't imagine that a son with the last name Hoover could do better at carrying on family traditions and teaching the generations about what it is to be a close family.  I would joke with Jeff that the only way to shut people up would be to have another baby, to make it clear that we weren't "trying for a boy".  The only other good reason to have a fourth baby was to make sure that our Mags didn't suffer too much from middle child syndrome.  The list of reasons to not have more kids was endless.  But yet, neither of us could say - to each other - that we were done.  We told everyone else we were done of course, cause when you start talking about wanting a fourth child people start looking at you like you might have something contagious. 

We finally decided we'd give it one month.  And voila, fouth child.  AKA Bullseye, due March 9th

People are funny creatures.  When they see that I'm pregnant, (and you can tell from space that I'm pregnant right now, I'm as big as the damned Great Wall), people say "Oh how exciting!  Your first?" and when I say, "No, it's my fourth" the smile freezes in that same way that smiles freeze when you give someone a really crappy Christmas present.  "Oh, wow, you will have your hands full" is almost ALWAYS the response I get.  Except for the old people, they always get happy about it and want to tell me how they're one of umpteen kids and that's the way it should be. 

And just like I knew that I wanted another when Ellie was born, and like I knew that I wanted to marry Jeff, I KNOW that I'm not having anymore kids!  I knew if from the start, but this pregnancy has been far and away the most difficult of the four.  First I was sick for 12 weeks, then, I got a blood clot in my leg.  Got the clot resolved, then I got an "incarcerated" hernia which hurt like a bitch, and for my latest trick, now I'm anemic.  The ironic part of the anemia thing is that the blood clot was going to preclude me from giving birth at the Birth Center cause of the possibility of another clot.  Now I'm at risk because anemia can cause you to not clot enough, and bleed out.  Sheesh.  Will my body make up it's mind?  I'm "advanced maternal age" now - which is what they call you when you're 35, and I think that we've caught our limit.

Don't get me wrong, I know that I am blessed.  For all my problems, nothing is life threatening, to either me or the baby.  I'm just done.  I'm thrilled to have my "little" family, and ready to face the challenge that I'm sure four kids, aged 5 and under will be.  I'm doubly thrilled to face it with Jeff who is the best daddy in the world (besides my own of course) and the best husband a girl could ask for. 

Now... if I could just fast forward a couple more weeks and have this baby!!!!

This must be what it's like to the be cobbler's child.

If you're on Facebook, then you know that FB is a little bit of an obsession with me.  You'll also probably notice that I haven't been on in a few days.  Well.... it was a bad week for our computer.  Jeff is a computer guy, and a very, very good one at that.  He manages the team that manages thousands of desktops at Barclays.  So, since I'm married to a computer whiz, I've turned over all responsibility in that area to him.  Jeff likes to keep us up to date, and that means that we're always on the latest and greatest version of Windows and we just recently updated to Windows 7 - the OS to solve all problems.  Unfortunately, we had a mishap.  Accidentally, all of our pictures for the last two years (the pics that have been uploaded since the last update) were deleted. 

Now, I consider myself a rational person, I do have a temper, but my control over my inner monologue is good and I generally don't say things in anger.  I have to be pushed pretty darn far, and I have some friends who would be happy to attest to the fact that it's not pretty when I do lose control.  I can't recall a time in our marriage, or even before our marriage where I have yelled at Jeff with the spectacular variety of curse words and recriminations that I did the night before Thanksgiving when we realized what had happened.  All the while, I knew of course that Jeff would have turned himself inside out to undo the mistake, but I just wanted to be mad for a while.

So needless to say, I've mostly come to terms with it now and if you have any pictures of us from 2008- 2009, please forward them on!  Jeff is doing his best to try to recover things and that's why I haven't been online for the past few days.  Basically, until he could take the hard drive to work and see if anything is on there, we didn't want to write over any more old information.  It's our very own forensic computer search. 

Here's to a better week!!!

20 things I'm thankful for - not in any particular order

1.  Jeff
2.  The Kids
3.  My parents
4.  My in-laws
5.  My wacky family
6.  Jeff getting up with Maggie most days
7.  Coffee
8.  The dog not having cancer
9.  Facebook
10.  My friends, especially those that keep me sane on a daily basis
11.  Kraft Mac n Cheese
12.  PBS Kids
13.  The rare moments when my kids get along
14.  Contact lenses
15.  Instant oatmeal
16.  Health insurance
17.  Being born in America
18.  Travel mugs
19.  My sense of humor and the fact that I have people that get me
20.  Coffee.... it deserved two slots.

Certainly not my comprehensive list, but not bad for 1 cup of coffee and 8:30AM. 

Halloween

Ahh... another hurdle to Christmas is done.  Don't get me wrong, I love Halloween, but pretty much the second I get home from vacation, I'm ready to get out the sweaters and hang my stocking by the chimney.  I have almost no use for August and not much more for September.  I ADORE Christmas.  I love the shoppers, I love the decorations, I love the 24 hour Christmas music radio station.  I'm a serious dork. 


However, Halloween is where we are and we had a lovely evening with our friends.  Today, we babysat for my good friend Trish.  Her son Tyler is only a couple months older than Maggie, so needless to say there was a lot of talking about sharing.  The kids all do really well together though and it was actually a really great day with all four.  Gave me a little hope for my future! 

Later, a whole gaggle of my friends and their kids arrived and I had the satisfaction of having more people than I have chairs for.  I seriously love to have everyone over.  A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I had a boyfriend who didn't like to have guests over.  That may be unfair, I tend to stress and get wound up before people come over, especially in my pre-children, neat house days, but he didn't seem to get the same kind of enjoyment I did from having a houseful.  My fantasy was that some day, I'd have the house in the neighborhood that everyone comes to and wants to hang around with us.  So far, so good.  Jeff is a natural entertainer and he understands that my freaking out is part of my enjoyment of the occasion :)

Well, the panic has begun.

I'm now about 17 weeks pregnant with "Bullseye" and the panic over having 4 kids under age 6 has begun.  How am I ever to give them all the attention they each deserve?  How can we afford to send them all to college?  How will I ever get a shower again? 

I know that when the time comes we'll just deal with things as they come, but I have all this time to think about things.  Especially with Maggie giving us such a hard time at bedtime and Jack is starting to become a light sleeper, I worry about how any of us are ever going to sleep again.  I know that Jeff and I are good parents and I'm soooo thankful that we have a good relationship, cause if we didn't, I think the stress of 4 kids would put a serious crimp in our style. 

Thankfully, we have many, many good friends and our parents are always there when we need them.   People keep offering help, they're going to be surprised how much we take them up on it!  I remind myself that there's a reason we don't really remember our early childhood and while my mom assures me it's cause I was perfect, I'm sure she yelled at me for not great reasons at times and I don't remember any of it.  As a matter of fact, my earliest memory of really getting yelled at wasn't until 6th grade, when I scratched my mother's brand new car (it was an accident, but wow, you'd have thought I took a screwdriver to the paint).  So in the end, hopefully, what they'll remember is the good times, not the crazy bedtimes or the not so great mornings before Mommy's had her coffee. 

So in the end, this is a blog about my panic, but also a warning... don't offer help unless you mean it, and I'm sorry for the crabby pregnant lady I'm going to be for the next couple months!

Wow....

you know that you're a mom when going to the dentist counts as "alone time".

Aahh... Fall

September is here and I'm so happy to say goodbye to the dreaded month of August. In my world, there should be no August. Actually I'd be happy to go right from Vacation (and I think of it like that, capital letters and all), straight to sweaters. I'd almost be willing to go right to Christmas, but I do like Halloween and the crunchy chill of autumn.

We haven't really been up to a whole lot since the reunion in Pulaski. Jeff and I did celebrate our 6th wedding anniversary on the 13th. I vacillate between feeling like it's been a blink of an eye, or feeling like it's been forever. Some days, I still think "wow, I married Jeff Lacey! That's really crazy!"

You see, Jeff and I met in college and, ahem, "dated." Since my mother may read this, I will not go into details, but suffice it to say, we weren't exactly a long term, meaningful relationship. However, when we did break up, it didn't go well, and we didn't speak again for 9 years.

Then one day in February 2002, I received an email from my good friend Annie Brown about some idiot frat guys in Frostburg who had torn up their frat house. I forwarded it on to a lot of my friends, and one of the people I sent it to was Jeff Lacey. Much to my great surprise, he emailed me back! Turns out he and his wife had just signed separation papers and he was SOOOO happy to hear from me. Strange as it sounds, it really seemed like fate at the time and in hindsight, still seems too good to be true. Our email relationship took off like gangbusters. I was in school at the time and I would rush to the library between classes to check my email to see if he had written me. When I was at work, we would IM constantly. Finally after a couple months, we actually spoke on the phone. When I heard his voice, I knew that I had to see him. And when, a month later, I flew to Maryland for my friend Heather's baby shower, I saw Jeff waiting at the airport with a daisy in his hand for me, I knew that I could never, never let this man go.

I moved back to Maryland on July 1, 2002 and we were married September 13, 2003 - 11 years after we had first met. Now, 6 years and almost 4 kids later, I am still surprised at our good fortune. I love Jeff with everything I've got and as I often tell my friends, I got a deluxe model husband!