DPP 12/6/2011: After bedtime

A quiet moment snuggling after the big girls were in bed and I was relaxing before heading there myself. Please excuse the slightly annoyed expression and messy hair; I'd been dealing with a horrible migraine the entire day.

DPP 12/5/2011: Catching up...

I completely missed last night's posting! Oops. :) That whole four kids under six thing kind of gets in the way of being a consistent blogger sometimes.

This weekend we saw our first real snowfall of the year. Hubby and the big girls had an AMAZING time getting to play in the snow. Including building the first snowman of the year. We're looking forward to much more winter fun in the next few months.

The fact that hubby was out playing with the kids? An amazing blessing. He really hasn't been able to do that in about a year and a half. Last week he had an injection of lidocaine and steroids injected into the cyst on his spinal cord. His pain went from being uncontrollable even with extremely strong medications to being a 4-6 on the traditional pain scale. Four with his pain medication (which has been stepped down in the start of weaning him off of them), and six without. I seriously feel like I've been given my husband back.

He goes in for a second injection before Christmas and the radiologist thinks at that point he can be virtually pain free without pain medication! Praise God! This is the blessing, the miracle that we've been waiting for.

DPP 12/4/2011: Introducing Zane

I know I'm posting these consistently a day late...but if I haven't been to sleep I don't count it as a new day just because it's after midnight. (See: blog name)

Today I took baby's first photo shoot. I confess: I hate doing newborn pictures. Even in a studio, where I didn't have to worry about lighting (it was dreary today so this was hard since I have no reflectors or flash equipment at all), I hated it. Newborns are delicious and wonderful and very photogenic, don't get me wrong. BUT, it's all posed pictures. And I prefer candids. Not easy with someone who doesn't really move. Add in that it took until he was 3 weeks to get to do them and that upped the difficulty. He was so squirmy and isn't AS floppy anymore.

But, even with those obstacles, and the fact that I am nowhere NEAR experienced, I am pretty happy with them.

DPP Day 3 (12/3/11)

Playing catch up as we had the toddler and baby trading off wakings last night. We decided to let Z-man try out the beanbag we got for his newborn photos.

DPP Day 2

Ah, peaceful baby slumber. He's been on a super fussy growth spurt so I wanted to capture the rare nap.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

Okay, not really. Because our (almost!) 4 year old has an early.December birthday, our celebrating begins after HER celebration. But we have begun the Christmas shopping. Tonight I scored a kid's game system and nine games for $30 from Craigslist. The price on the box for the system alone was $84! We are trying to do as much secondhand and small business shopping as we can to keep as much of our spending dollars in the pockets of individuals rather than large corporations. That brings my first, rather boring December Photo Project post to an end.

Sweet Productivity...

Oh, how I've missed contributing to our household! As I've blogged about before, between the Hyperemesis Gravidarum and the Symphysis Pubis Dysfunction, I was really out of commission to some extent most of my pregnancy. I think there were 8 weeks in the second trimester where I felt great, and a week or two from 32-34 weeks. This really affected how much, and in what ways, I could contribute to the running of the house. Many weeks, it was simply my job to keep the kids and I fed and alive while my wonderful husband was at work. When he was home he did was much as he could to keep up with the cooking, cleaning, and caring for the kids. But it's definitely a two person job! I'm ever grateful for him for letting me flounder and just survive; I know plenty of husbands just don't understand how difficult growing a human can be under the best of circumstances, not to mention when the pregnancy itself is difficult, too!

Baby Zane was born on November 12. The entire week before he was born, I was out of commission. Almost completely. My pain levels, and the prodromal contractions had me mostly bed ridden. I was contracting every 10 minutes around the clock with many multi-hour episodes of very hard contractions every 3-5 minutes. And of course these were overnight when I needed to be sleeping to care for the kids the next day. I was exhausted, which made the pain worse. I was basically put on bedrest, taking sleeping medicine to knock out the prodromal contractions, and pain medicine so I could not be in pain that was excruciating. If I took them, I was too tired and out of it to be present for the big girls, but without it I was too tired and in too much pain to care for any of the kids. My mom and her husband took the big girls, since Lucy was happy playing in bed with me, watching Netflix, and still takes two naps a day.

Then I've been recovering from the birth (which I'm still revising my birth story and will post it when I'm done), and adjusting to four kids. It's been time consuming just meeting everyone's needs. So not much has gotten done. The house isn't as messy, but the day-to-day tasks that keep a home running just weren't always getting done.

This week the big girls went back with my mom and her husband. They went on Sunday night and will come home Thursday after we all go over for breakfast and Thanksgiving celebrating. They got to go out of town to pick up their aunt, so for them it was a vacation! And for me it has been a chance to contribute again!

I've gotten laundry 95% done. I will be finished tomorrow to the point that everything but what we're wearing is washed, sorted, and put away. Laundry was a huge issue because of the bending and stooping involved in using our washer/dryer. And it's the chore I've felt the most guilty about letting fall by the wayside. So getting this caught up, more caught up than I think I've been since having children, is huge to me!

I'm also getting the big girls' room clean. Including their toybox, which is covered in bits and pieces of broken toys at the bottom. In their room are a lot of our DVDs. I'll be gathering up all the scratched and damaged Disney ones to send in to be replaced. I'm hoping we can get the replacements before Christmas; hello easy/free Christmas gifts!

I'm going to try to post more in the New Year, but for now am taking time to focus on our family. <3