A Great Big Catch Up Post

The big photo catch-up from the past few weeks, aka "The Grandparents' Section"

Mmmm...powdered sugar doughnuts for Sunday breakfast. Her expression is so "Why are you taking my picture this early, lady?"

Helping me make cookies. This was interesting. She kept throwing in random spoonfuls of flour. (They actually did turn out nicely though!)


A family walk at Quarry Hills. Well, Tim and I walked. Addie ran.
At least she's running away from the light at the end of the tunnel!
Getting in the pack with Dad. She wasn't too happy about this, she wanted to keep running.
Free at last, and hanging out with "the boys"

My favorite series from the day

This one is so Addie, it makes me laugh out loud. What joy!


My sweet little girl
In other Ewald family news, I have to laugh at my little "journey to domestic goddess-hood" tag up on the top there. That was always firmly "tongue in cheek", but it seems even funnier now...given that I just got a job, that is.

The job itself is nothing too spectacular or demanding. I'm now an "internet evaluator", which is basically exactly what it sounds like. I work from home, make my own schedule, and I basically conduct searches for this company and rate tasks for them. They have a huge book of guidelines and I'm still learning their coding process. All of my free time in the past week or so was spent 1)applying to this job, 2) taking the 8 hour exam for this job, and 3) setting up my computer and accounts for this job after I got it. So that partially explains my delay in blogging.

If you're wondering "Why?", I think this is God's way of telling me not to even attempt to go for domestic goddess territory. I'm going to have to be content with domestic mortal, I'm afraid. :-) No, in all seriousness, this was something I wanted to do to supplement our family's income and to close my resume gap, just a little bit. And it's a nice compromise between a "real" job and my commitment to being with our little ones while they're so young.

And I do still plan to pursue my self designed curriculum for becoming a better cook, a greener cleaner, and a craftier mama but it's going to have to be at a slower pace. So I'll redesign that and I'll share it with you all. Or at least that's my plan.

The other delay in blogging has been that we all got our first nasty cold of the season. Poor Addie looks like she's wearing a mask these days. A nice balaclava composed of...well, you can guess. Girlfriend hates getting her nose wiped, but also hates having a runny nose. The kinda sorta funny thing is that she's learned how to blow her nose, which is great! "What could be bad about that?", you wonder. Well, she likes to seize any random piece of material that's handy...kitchen towels, washcloths, my pants, the couch cushions...and really go for it. She blows her nose with gusto, I'll say that for her. I have to laugh even when I'm really freakin' frustrated with the smears o snot everywhere. We're working on that.

As for as Baby E2 goes, he or she is kicking right along. I myself feel totally exhausted from being sick, but it doesn't seem to have gotten Little Nugget down a bit. This pumpkin is still doing its calisthenics on the regular, which I love. Poor Tim is probably tired of me insisting that he have his hand on my stomach for many long minutes at a time to marvel at yet another kick/stretch/roll. It just doesn't get old to me.

Even though we have three more months to go before E2 makes an appearance, I've already washed and hung up all the baby neutrals and dragged the baby girl stuff into a handy place...just in case. We've got a lot of moving to do to get things settled. The office is coming out into our new office space, the guest room is moving to the old office, and Adelaide is moving to the old guest room. The baby is going into Addie's nursery. I've got my "concept" for Addie's new room down, which I'll share at a later date. I just need OTS to end so that I can get my husband back and we can actually do some of our projects!

Heart Issues

So, my Dad had a heart attack on Sunday. It was a shock for everyone in our family, even those people like me that weren't that surprised. And lest that sound harsh, I just mean that I knew he was dealing with a ton of stress. And I had been concerned about his health for some time as a result.

But I was still shocked to get that call from my mother, because...he's Dad. And Dwight Shoe is nothing if not larger than life. He's a big guy (ex football player) with a big voice and a big personality. He's vital, he's funny, and he's almost always in perfect health. Trying to picture him in a hospital bed is nearly impossible. And yet it happened.

Fortunately, he's doing just fine. He was allowed to come home yesterday and there doesn't seem to be much permanent damage to his heart. He had a stent placed and they were able to completely remove the blockage that was causing the problems. Of course, he'll have medications to take, and it will take some time for him to fully recover his strength. But thankfully, he's going to be fine.

I haven't said much about Dad's situation to anyone. So if you didn't know, don't feel offended. You're not out of the inner circle of trust, I promise. There are basically two reasons why I've kept quiet.

The first is that our world is so interconnected. If I put something "out there", I just made the decision to "talk about it" for everyone involved. And so I wanted to wait, to make sure that all of our family and friends that were on a need-to-know basis actually did know before I indulged my own desire to share. And I have to give credit to my oh-so-intelligent husband for articulating this for me, because I was really fumbling for a way to explain it. And while I fumbled around clumsily, he summed it all up neatly.

And secondly, I didn't have much of a pressing need to share. Obviously, this was hugely important to me, but I didn't want to talk about it until I felt more ...settled. And I still don't feel all that settled. We know that my father is going to be all right. But it is still early days and I don't know how this changes my family in the long term, or if it does change us at all. So I'm watching and waiting and allowing time to do its thing. What that entails, I haven't a clue.

And praying, of course. Even before this happened to Dad, I felt a pressing need to pray for my family. Let me specify here that I'm talking about the family I was born into, not the one Tim and I are making, or the one that I inherited (happily!) when we got married. Those folks are all my family as well, but this particular section isn't talking about them specifically.

The word that constantly echoes in my head is "restoration". I felt very strongly that God desired...and certainly I desired....restoration for our family, both as individuals and as a unit. It's hard to articulate what that even means to me. I know that it doesn't mean a return to the way things used to be. I think it instead means a restoration of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health to each person in my immediate family. And with that comes a restoration of the bonds that have been stretched to the limits in the last six years or so.

These issues aren't something that I discuss much on my blog, for obvious reasons. First, as I mentioned before, I don't feel comfortable making the decision to share for everyone. And more importantly, I think that every family experiences adversity at some point. Illness, financial difficulty, a vicious family feud, poor decisions by certain family members...whatever it may be, it's usually complicated and painful. And feelings run high and they fluctuate. Whatever I felt yesterday may or may not be the same tomorrow. But if I blog about yesterday, well that's the version that survives, regardless of whether it's fair or justified.

So, I don't blog much about family matters, in that sense. (Annnnnd I just got that theme song in my head, great!). But in this case, I think it's ok to say that I am praying for restoration, not just for my Dad, but for all of us. Because that's what my dad's heart attack really brought home to me. That a family is precious and our time together (at least here on Earth!) is not infinite. And that the most important thing is not figuring out who is responsible for what, or what this person could do differently, or how the situation could be better, but figuring out how to serve each person in your family with love and appreciation while you've got them close.

And speaking of love and appreciation, let me just say "out of the mouths of babes..."! Addie and I were saying her bedtime prayers last night, and I asked who she would like to pray for tonight. Usually she says something like "Kermy" (her lovie) or "Rocky" (our dog), but last night she said "Dillon" (my brother). I was surprised and touched and said "OK. Anyone else?" She said "Hebby. Sick!" And I had to fight back tears that she remembered that her "Heavy" wasn't feeling good, and that she wanted to pray for him. She really does still have her sweet moments, even in the midst of her crazy Terrible Twos!

So, in closing, I'd like to quote the Avett Brothers, North Carolina boys with a knack for hitting the nail on the head. This is from "Murder in the City", an older song of theirs that I love.

"Always remember, there is nothing worth sharing like the love that lets us share our name."

Going Home Again: Friends and Family

I took this picture of my dad on one of the last nights I was home. It was just after a thunderstorm, and we were taking in the view.

It's always difficult to summarize a visit to North Carolina. In some ways, nothing "blogworthy" happens...we visit family and friends. We eat a lot. There is a whole lot of catching up and just soaking up the presence of loved ones. Kind of like I'm a big sponge...just eatin' and soakin' like sponges do.

And in other ways, it's difficult to blog about because so many thoughts are racing through my mind. A visit home always spurs a lot of deep thinking about the nature of family and home and friendship and faith and happiness and love and life. You know, just your basic life-defining questions. :-)

This is my usual conundrum when I go home and I miss a lot of blogging time. How to catch up on all of it? Do I just stick to the facts..."went here, saw this person, ate this, went here, saw this person, ate this"? Or do I ignore the facts and go straight for the thoughts, which are probably more worthy of recording than my menus? Maybe try for a mixture that will inevitably leave someone out? Ignore all of it and start with life now?

I don't think there is a right or wrong answer here, it's really just about what feels most comfortable to me. So I'm going to use my pictures as a guide and go from there. We'll see what emerges.

I always like to take walks around my parents' neighborhood. The air just smells so good in North Carolina. If I could bottle it, I'd make a mint! I think it's because there are so many flowers and good growing things. It's one of those details that you don't miss until you're away from it.

Here we are, taking a walk with "Heavy" aka my dad

Addie likes to run up to people's houses, and I don't just mean casually stepping into their yard. I mean that she'll go all the way up the front door, if given the chance. This causes some confusion, as you can imagine. And while she occasionally listens when told to come back, about 50% of the time she has to be re-directed.

She's not often that happy about it.


Caught in the act! These boundary flag thingamajigs are irresistible to little ones.

An important life milestone. The first "peg game" at Cracker Barrel.

One of the best parts of the visit was getting to see my friend Leslie and her brand new baby, Tanner. I never got to see her previous two little ones as newborns, so it was really nice to see just-a-few-days-old Tanner. And it just happened to be Leslie's birthday, which was the icing on the cake. Pun intended. I took a lot of pictures, but I thought this one was the funniest. Sam, her two year old, just blew out the candles on her cookie cake.

That's motherhood.

Addie loved seeing Shelby and Sam (the older two kids) and kept asking for more playdates. She was especially taken with Sam, which is kind of funny, because she normally gravitates to the older girls. Sam is quite a character, and I guess Addie appreciated that.


This little cutie is my friend Ashley's baby, Ben. Addie was quite taken with this little charmer also.
She looks so big next to Ben!

"Come here, little baby."

"Let me love you."

You have to wonder what they're thinking here.

Nothing too hostile, because the love fest continued. I've never seen her hug another little one quite so much. It touched my heart! Ashley and I met when we were roughly the same age as Addie is, so it was really sweet to see our little ones together.

I hope they'll be friends for life too!

And finally, a few shots that I was able to grab of my brother.

These are my "brothers". The one on the right is actually my brother, Dillon. Patrick, on the left, is basically a family member. He and Dillon are best friends and my parents are best friends with his parents. Our lake houses were right beside each other, so Dillon and Patrick grew up together.

Addie's only uncle! She's being her usual cooperative self here. :-)

I haven't even touched my "beach pictures" yet, but Addie is up. These "catch up" posts always drag on and on. Sorry, I'm doing my best to power through!

Wordless Wedsnesday

The two faces of my nearly-two-year old:

Quiet and contemplative (and cute!)

Irritated and defiant (and ridiculously cute!)

A Cup that Runneth Over

I have been ruminating a lot on "fullness" lately. In particular, I've been wondering what it means to me to live life fully.

My days are certainly full of tasks, I know that! A lot of you can relate to the Daily List "breakfast, clean up, morning errands, lunch, clean up, laundry, naps, afternoon errands, dinner, clean up, baths, bedtime, time with husband, sleep. Rinse and repeat with some play dates and vacations for variance". The days fly by and I feel like I'm always doing something. And yet, somewhere in there, life itself is escaping me. More and more, I find myself thinking that there has to be more to this life...this making a home...than simply running through the list every day.

To be completely honest, I have struggled with being a stay-at-home mom. I find the mom part to be easy. Well, let me rephrase that. It's not "easy" to be a parent, but I find being a mother to be fulfilling and rewarding. I am never bored with Adelaide and I'm never left feeling that there is somewhere better to be when I'm with her. It feels right that I'm her primary caretaker. For our family, for this time, it's the perfect arrangement.

It's the "stay at home" part that chafes.

I miss working in many ways. I miss the people I used to work with, and I miss the hustle and bustle of the academic library world. I often check out job sites and I don't know why I would do that unless there is a need and desire to work.

And for me, that makes sense. I have a LOT of education. It's almost painful to mention how much, and it is definitely painful to think about the sheer amount of loans we'll be paying back. I spent so much time and money and effort getting an education, acquiring job skills, and launching myself on a career path...only to put all that abruptly aside when Addie arrived. It makes sense that there would be a void in my life. And that with that void would come a nagging sense of promise unfulfilled with attendant feelings of guilt and recrimination and anxiety.

And I know I am not alone in this. In fact, my life is chock full of bright and wonderful women that sacrifice a good chunk of their "career years" to stay home and raise kiddos. And like me, most of them adore being home with their children, and wouldn't change their situation for love or money, in its most literal sense! But I know many of them still feel a sense of conflict. It might not always stem from the same source as my own feelings, but it is still there. We women are hard on ourselves. We want to do it all, and do it all well.

So all that said, this is NOT a build up to announcing that I've decided to go back to work!

For one thing, I don't want to put Addie and our Expectant Happiness in daycare. Not only would we likely LOSE money (let me just interject that no one goes into the library world for its lucrative benefits!) but I just have no desire to be separated from the children on a regular basis. The time has already flown by so fast! Addie has only has a few more years of "little" left, before she's well launched onto her own academic career. And I'm sure I'll feel the same about little soon-to-come's youth also. So that is not the answer for our family.

Long story short, I've decided that I need a new focus for this phase of my life. Or, more accurately, a focus since I feel I've been lacking direction all along.

And here it is, the big announcement. I'm going to be a homemaker.

I'm sorry if that feels anticlimatic, because I know I've been "staying at home" for about 2 years or so. But I have never been a homemaker. Let me clarify. There are people out there that are born homemakers. I know these people. I am so not these people.

I'm an indifferent cook. I'm an OK housekeeper, but that's not my Zen place. I'm laughably bad at crafts. And lest you think I'm using "laughably" in some artistic sense, let me be clear here: you would actually laugh out loud at my crafting attempts. I know, because even I have to laugh. And in my mind, "gardening" is best done by a lawn service or old retired folks in strange hats and earth stained clothes.

But here I am. Staying at home. Raising kidlets. Cooking. Cleaning. Not crafting. Mowing the lawn when forced to by shame and husband's lack of time (that's garden-ish, right?). That's the list, right? The list composed of chores and things to do.

But that's not homemaking. Homemaking is something that you're proud of, something that you strive to achieve. It's a calling, and an art, and a science. And let me repeat this: it's a source of pride.

And I'm not sure that I'm really truly proud of my day-to-day life. Don't get me wrong, I think I'm a good mother. Can you say that out loud, or is it like saying that you think you've got an amazing body? Oh well, it's out there. And that's really the whole point of this exercise. I think I'm doing just fine with Adelaide. She's healthy, she's happy, she's on target developmentally...and let's face it, girlfriend has a pretty swell life. That is all as it should be. But she needs me to be fulfilled as well. And Tim needs that. And heck, people, I need that! Part of happiness...for me...is feeling proud and fulfilled by my daily life. And so, it's time to pursue happiness. I need my cup to runneth over.

So here's my plan and my experiment. Can an indifferent and mostly uninterested woman turn herself into a homemaker? Can I find real pleasure and pride in making a home? Can I teach myself new skills at the oh-so-advanced age of 30?

I don't know the answers to these questions. I expect this will be challenging, humorous, and at times, frustrating. But above all, it will be interesting. And that's the only thing missing from my life at this point...a little bit of interest and creativity.

So, I hope you will join me on my quest. Feel free to laugh and encourage and enjoy the ride. I plan to!

Going Home Again: The Road Trip

And so it begins! Addie is in her car seat, ready to begin the long drive back to Minnesota. That thing in her lap, by the way, is a bathing suit (or bathing soup, as she calls it) that she wanted to hold. I guess even less-than-two-year-olds have a hard time saying goodbye to summer!

Yes, my friends, I DROVE to North Carolina. That's right, I tackled an 18 hour drive by myself with a toddler and a pregnancy. I can't decide whether I'm heroic or nuts. If you're wondering why, I didn't really have a good reason. Plane tickets were perfectly affordable. It just boiled down to " I wonder if I can do this".

And guess what? It was great. Really, it was. Addie was a star. She watched DVDs contentedly and ate snacks and doodled on her MagnaDoodle and slept VERY briefly in her car seat. She only cried twice out of a total of four driving days. She was such a good little travel companion. I was honestly delighted with her behavior in the car.

When she was released from that handy five point restraining harness, she was less well behaved, but I guess that is to be expected. She was WILD on our stops. She ran non-stop, refused to listen to a thing that I said, and was too busy to eat. So of course, I didn't get to eat much either. She also dumped a whole Coke on my lap on our first lunch break during a tantrum. That was awesome.

I quickly learned that stops needed to be about letting her exercise. She could always eat in her car seat when she was calmer. Granted, her once pristine Britax Marathon is now slightly less than clean. But we'll deal with that. And I also learned that stops needed to be "do it all" stops. Get your gas, go the bathroom/change diapers, get your food, get your trash cleared up, and re-boot before you started the next big push. Then don't stop again until it's time to do all of those things again.

Now is a good time to note that I am sincerely thankful for a hybrid vehicle. My little 14 gallon tank took me nearly 500 miles each time. Not bad for a small SUV. I highly recommend the Ford Escape hybrid. And no, I'm not getting any sponsorship.

We stopped in Indiana, roughly halfway, on each trip. I always chose an inn with a pool, so that Miss A could swim and get some exercise and we usually stopped fairly early each night, around 5 or 6. I just didn't think that she'd tolerate more than 10 hours or so in the car, and I didn't want to push her ...or myself...too hard.

Of course, the whole thing didn't go exactly as a I planned. I thought I'd take a lot of pictures and really record "Addie's First Road Trip" at every suitable point. That was a massive fail. The pictures you see? Yes, those are the ONLY pictures of her road trip that I took. I feel pretty disappointed in that, but honestly, it was enough to navigate and keep everyone fed and happy and reasonably clean. Making a scrapbook collection was a little too ambitious, though it would have been nice. If I'd had another adult along, I could have fulfilled that goal.

And here's Addie on our trip, ready to start Day Two of the drive down to NC. Well, except for being in her car seat. And you can see that she's already whining because I won't let her tackle the 9 hour drive in front of us by herself. Details.



It's really too bad, because we saw some awesome sights. We left at about 5:30 AM on Thursday morning under the auspices of the most gorgeous sunrise I've ever seen. I thought Addie would go back to sleep (wrong!) but she was very interested in everything and was obviously taking in the sunset. I noticed her watching the sky intently and when I asked her if she thought it was pretty, she calmly said "Painted." And yes, it really did look painted! Pretty astute little girl.

I'll spare you a state by state description of all the scenery, and just note that we live in a spectacularly beautiful country. Addie and I appreciated the chance to see it all. I still wish I could have/would have taken more pictures, but on the whole, the road trip was great in both directions.

And I've learned that I really like the flexibility of driving. I like being able to take as much with me as I want to take. I like being able to set my own schedule. I like being able to respond to Addie's needs as they arise. And I like that she can shout with glee or excitedly tell me that sees cows or fields (that wore off pretty quickly!) without me having to hush her because other passengers are around.

Long story short, I think driving is going to be the way to go for this family, provided that we're not on a tight schedule. Flying is definitely more efficient, but it's less fun and more stress. And as our family grows, driving will be cheaper for us. And it's more interesting. Hard to top that!

Our New Home

Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3!