This and That...

~I must say that I was rather embarrassed to HAVE to put up a whole end cap at Walmart that was solely devoted to Justin Bieber. I'm not a fan of the show, The Office, but Brian and Zack LOVE it so I just endure it each week.  :)  I will admit, though, that I laughed my butt off when Jim said something to Dwight about Justin Bieber and Dwight said, "What's a justice beaver?" LOL! So ever since then I call him Justice Beaver. It's not that I don't like HIM or anything, it's just that I just...don't "get" it. Last night Justice was on The Voice and his pants were so far down it was ridiculous. Seriously, below his entire butt. What is up with that? LAME!!! Just had to get that out... 

~That baseball craziness has begun. Zack's games are so much fun to watch now that he's older. Add the kids are more competitive and more able to execute awesome plays and such. I'm so proud of Zack because he got hit with a pitch the very first time he was up for bat this season. I figured it would be a very crappy hitting season for him because of being afraid but he is awesome and has hit most pitches since he's been up to bat. Max and Matty are on the same team this year also so that will be a TREMENDOUS help!! Only problem so far is that a lot of the games are scheduled right during Y.W.. Tonight Zack has a game in a town really close to ours from 6:00-8:00 and has to be there at 5:30 and Matty and Max have a practice at a baseball field near where my parents used to live here in town from 6:00-7:30. And I visit teach tonight at 4:00 and 5:00. I don't have to work today like I did last week, which is so nice with all of this going on.

~Brian still hasn't found work. I am stressing so much! Ever since the Priesthood Blessing I had last week I've felt a lot better but it's just so very hard to deal with! We HAVE to figure out what we are supposed to learn from this so we can stop having this same trial over and over and over and over. It's so draining/exhausting/stressful.

~My house is looking more in order now that I'm not working so much. It will get crazy again closer to Mother's Day but for now it's been nice to have more time to devote to cleaning the house and more energy. I've felt so much better lately. I've had my share of pain here and there but for the most part I can deal with life better than I could before. Bending down to pick stuff up is getting increasingly difficult again, which I hate. Feeling like my head and face are going to explode is just not my favorite, call me crazy. I really can't complain though because it is so much better than before and I know it can always be worse. I really need to be more positive!!

~I am always so terrified when it's my turn to teach the Young Women's lesson. I seriously stress out for at least a good week over it. This week when the girls heard it was my turn to give the lesson they all were really happy that it was my turn and were like "Yay, it's Sister Freeman's turn to give the lesson". It just made my whole week! They are such amazing girls and I really hope that my lessons help them and that they I'm not just a blithering idiot up there. LOL!!! We were really early for Sunday School this week. We were actually REALLY late for Sacrament Meeting, but I'm trying to be more positive.  :)

~So, when Gracie was about 2 months old or so, I bought at darling light pink tutu and some cute fairy wings to match, so that I could have her pictures taken in them. Well, she wore them for her Halloween costume when she was one year old, but other than that it has been hanging in her room waiting for us to be able to afford to have her picture taken again. The only time we had her pictures done was when she was a month old in her blessing dress. My parents had some pictures of them with their grand kids when Gracie was about 6 months old. Other than that, this poor little girl hasn't had her pics done in all that time. She will be 3 in May. Everyone thinks she looks like she's at least 4. I worry they'll expect more out of her. Trust me, she may look 4 but she acts like she's 2!  :) Anyhoo, I finally got her pictures done a while back and I'm so excited to share them!!! I can't tell you how happy I am about it!! I'm sure Brian is happy he doesn't have to hear me whine anymore about it. LOL!! I usually only leave my kids' pics up for a couple of days because I don't want creapos to see them.  :)  I got the disc so prepared for a plethora of pics. Who can pic just one. I mean really...  ;)

~Please excuse the grammer and incoherent sentences. I don't have time to proof read...

Randomness...

~There is a chick in our ward named Nicki who has the cutest hair! I asked her who she goes to, since I'm still trying to find someone to do my hair. She said she does it herself and that she works at a salon here in town. I figured if she can do her own hair that well, she must be GOOD!  Well, you can imagine how thrilled I was when she called me a couple of weeks ago and asked me if I would like to do a trade. I would watch her kids 1 or 2 days a week and she would do my family's hair.

Ummm, yeah!!!!

 To  be honest, I was a bit worried. I mean, you never know what you're gonna get when you watch other people's kids. But they are so well behaved. Ty is 8 years old and Max and Matthew LOVE playing with him. Tessa is going to turn 2 in July and she and Gracie get along really well too. I do have to save poor Tessa from my bully daughter, who has a hard time with this whole sharing thing, from time to time. But other than that they are getting along really well. Ty has great manners too. So far it's going great and everyone is happy!  It's been fun getting to know Nicki as well. I finally found a picture of what I want my hair to look like and I can't wait to have it done!

~Between having Zack on a Cal Ripkin Majors team, Matthew on a Cal Ripkin Pee Wee team, and Max starting T-ball this week on a city league team, we go to a LOT of baseball games! We have 9 this week alone. Tonight will be #7. It's been a lot of fun watching the kids having such a great time! It's been really fun to see the different ability levels too. T-ball and Pee Wee are just so remedial compared to Majors. Everyone cheers for both teams and are just so positive and nice. There are a few overzealous (crazy) parents who expect super great things out of their poor kids at this level and are continuously disappointed when it just doesn't work out the way they want it to. It cracks me up to listen to them! Then you go to the Majors and h-o-l-y  c-o-w! The parents REALLY get into it! Last year was really fun to watch but this year is AWESOME!!! All of the players finally really get how to play and they make some incredibly awesome plays! It's exciting to watch and I don't dread the games like I used to. I think a lot of why I dreaded them so much in the past was the way I felt physically. It has been so incredible, the contrast between how I feel this year as compared to how I felt last year. It was bad! It just makes me so grateful each and every day that I feel better. I still have some sporadic pain here and there most days but most of the time I feel great! It's truly a blessing!!! An answer to prayer for sure!!! 

~I have finally started trying to lose some weight. I have gained 20 lbs since November and I can't fit my fat butt into any of my jeans except my maternity ones and ones that have that stretchiness to them. Definite low point!!! And I saw some very cute, thin, girls I went to high school with and I looked like the stay puffed marshmallow man. So humiliating!!! So, I decided I have to do something about it! I've been trying to exercise and I have made some minor changes with my eating habits. I lost 10 lbs!!! Which inspired me to keep at it! Brian has lost some weight too. We both need to be healthier for sure!

~My kids have finally figured out that it's so much more fun to play outside than it is to stay in the house, which is a huge plus! Last year I had to force them to play outside.

~We were able to find Matthew's backpack that he left at school on the last day of school. It had his inhaler in it and some other medicine equaling about $70. I was totally freaking out. We looked in the lost and found 2 different times before we found it.

~I feel like we live at the dentist office. Matty and Zack both have retainers. Both of them have broken them twice. They have only had them since like April or something. Matthew even threw his away at school and the super nice janitor spotted it on his tray in the garbage can and took it out. Thankfully! Course, about 3 hours later he broke it. I tell ya, this could drive a mom to drink!

~So we all know it's not good for us to eat fried foods. I rarely fry. Maybe a few times a year. I found another reason not to do it a few weeks when I was frying some chicken for my family to have between baseball games while I was at a Young Women's barbecue and homework burn. I placed a wing in the front of the pan and reached over it to put another one on the other side of it at the back of the pan and right when my hand was about an inch above the first wing, it popped. Oil splattered on my wrist. It burned it bad! It blistered up and has gone through some interesting changes over the past 2 weeks. Not fun! There is one part that I can't get to heal and it was the most blistered. So frying is not my friend! I feel so bad for people who are burned in accidents.I can only imagine what they must go through!

~Oh, and for those of you wondering, the Essure thing has been wonderful!Just make sure you get everything worked out with your insurance company and your drs office before having it done.

A little catching up...

K so I know I haven't blogged in a really long time, it's actually been almost a whole month! Crazy for me! But my medicine has been working REALLY well...most of the time anyway. I still have some really bad days, sometimes for several days in a row. But I'm definitely having more good days than bad days...I'll take it!!!! On the really good days I think of a zillion things to blog about but I'm running around doing all the things I can't do on the bad days. I still try to just work through life in pain on those days, I'm just a LOT slower! I have to sit down more often and rest. Thank goodness for recliners! I just try to find joy on those bad days by spending more time with the kids. Reading to them. We like to watch movies and eat popcorn together when it hurts too much. I love the chance that those bad days give me to just spend time with the kids, snuggling 1 or 2 kids on the recliner while we watch our movies. The good days have been like a dream come true! I can mow weeds, clean more deeply, run errands, organize our house better. When we moved in a year ago we just haphazardly put things away just to get rid of the piles boxes in the house. I have reorganized most closets, drawers, cabinets, to make them more functional. I just get so much more done on good days than I do on bad days for sure!!! I have caught myself feeling FANTASTIC many times and doing things I couldn't for so long and I just feel so incredibly happy that it always brings tears to my eyes to feel NO PAIN and I feel like myself for a change! Then when I go back to having my Trigeminal Neuralgia pain on bad days that brings tears to my eyes too. I am so grateful to have found a wonderful doctor who knew what was wrong with me AND how to help me! I am grateful to a wonderful friend who, when I mentioned I didn't have a dishwasher, gave us a dishwasher that they had in their garage that was from a different house they had. Her very clever husband build a cover for it since it is the kind of dishwasher that is meant to be built in to your cabinets. We had to have it as a portable one so he made it portable. He also came over to our house 2 evenings in a row hooking it up. I cannot begin to tell you how grateful I am to have a dishwasher!!! As you might imagine, we have a LOT of dishes around here seeing as how there are 6 of us and we eat out once or twice a month, if that often. So 3 meals a day for 6 people.....fun stuff!! I have spent more hours washing dishes this past year than I care to think about. What a time saver a dishwasher is! I feel giddy every time I close the dishwasher door and press the buttons to start it and walk away after spending a few minutes loading it! It's unbelievably freeing! And I am so incredibly grateful that they so generously gave us the dishwasher and that he sacrificed 2 evenings hooking it up!!!

Baseball season has been going on and tonight Matty has his second game at 7:00 and Zack has a game at 6:00 to make up for the game they couldn't play yesterday because of rain. Matty is a natural when it comes to hitting! He's awesome! Zack has been playing second base this year. He has always played third base before so it's a bit different but he likes it and does a good job! He's been hitting the ball, being pitched to him since he was 2 years old but he's been hit by the ball a couple of times from some wild pitches and he has not hit much at all for 2 or 3 years. It drives us nuts because we know he can do it he just needed to get past the fear of getting hit. I finally told him a couple of weeks ago to just forget everything his different coaches have told him about how to stand and stuff and just watch the ball. It doesn't matter how he stands or what he does if he doesn't watch the ball. I told him baseball is meant to be fun and if you aren't having fun then what's the point?! And I told him that the worst case scenario is that he gets hit by a ball. He's done that and he lived so don't worry! It did the trick! That night he actually hit the ball!!! We were so excited for him! He has been hitting the ball at games ever since! They had a tournament last week. Friday night his team won which meant he had a game Saturday morning at 9:00. That was Gracie's bday and I had a zillion things to do so I couldn't go to the game. He hit the ball way out to right field and made it to 2nd base and 2 of his teammates scored off of that hit! What a confidence boost for him! I was so happy for him! His team lost but they still have the best record in the league for the tournament  with only one loss, so they play tonight again. They would have been finished last week but with all the cancelled games because of rain, the tournament is still going on. I can't wait to see how his team fares!

Can you believe Gracie is 2 now?! It just blows my mind! I'll try to post some of the fun pics of her bday. For now I have to go...busy, busy, busy!!! :)

AAAHHH!!!

~It seems the older I get the better it feels to crawl into my bed at night.  When I was a kid I HATED crawling into my bed when the sheets are cold.  Now I LOVE how that feels!   It soothes my aching knees and the muscles in my legs. It's the BEST!!!
~Today is Zack's last baseball game of the season.  His coach (Andy) is so awesome!  He's wonderful with the boys.  The game the other night was intense.  This was a rival team and the coach and team REALLY wanted the win bad!!! The coach isn't usually driven by that but this game was different.  They tied and had to play an inning in overtime.  INTENSE!!  Zack's team won by 3 points!!!  I have no idea what Andy said to the team during the game but he is usually really positive with them no matter what but apparently he said something he wasn't feeling good about because he apologized to the kids and was so great with them.  I was so glad to have heard that because it just made me even happier that he was our boys coach.  We were already so impressed with him after the coach Zack had last year.  Sure, they took 2nd in the division and made it to the state tournament so he was a "good coach".  But he was such a jerk to the boys and especially his son.  His poor son (the pitcher) SOBBED for at least 15 minutes after they were eliminated in the state tournament.  I looked at that poor boy, with the weight of the world on his poor little shoulders, and realized at that moment that I NEVER want to put that kind of pressure on my children with sports or anything else in this life.  Andy would NEVER do that to a child and I am so grateful Zack had such a great guy coaching him this year!  They are playing for 3rd place in the division today.  Last night was a fun skills competition and Zack's team won the "around the horn" event.  So fun!!! They had a BBQ with brats and burgers.  Course we were sweltering at the game on Thursday and it was in the 50s with strong wind and some rain last night.  Fun times!!  Zack's team has played 22 games since April and, as much fun as it has been wrestling a baby girl in the car most of the games because of cold, windy weather I am glad it is coming to an end.  It has been awesome watching him play and watching the team progress and everything but it will be nice to say goodbye to baseball season until next spring.  It won't be completely over until Max finishes tball and Matty finishes soccer at the end of the month but no more, 2 games a night, so that will be a relief!!!
~It's amazing how calming a priesthood blessing can be to the soul!!! It's just wonderful! I am so grateful that my husband honors his priesthood and can give us blessings when we need them!!!

Randomness...

~So, Brian and Zack spent the morning moving stuff from our storage unit to our house. It is such a tedious process seeing as how we don't have a truck and have to use the van with the back seats taken out. Well, they put everything on the driveway under the carport thinking we could look through things there and decide whether it needed to be taken in the house or stored in the cellar.  After a while we got sick of sorting and decided to go to Walmart for some much needed supplies. When we got back home we discovered that the STUPID wind had blown over my "special" box of memories from high school, etc.  Most of the contents had blown all over the driveway and across the street into the big open field that is surrounded by a barb wire fence. Luckily Brian was able to carefully lift Matthew over the fence and he collected everything he could find and Brian carefully lifted him back over the fence.  I am SOOOOO incredibly sick and tired of WIND!!!  First it was super cold wind. We have watched most of Zack's baseball games from the van where we wrestle Gracie. I don't want her out in that bitter wind!  Now it's fierce wind that's warm. I don't care what the temperature of the wind is....I...HATE...WIND!!! It reminds me of growing up in Kansas. I loved growing up in Kansas but I don't miss the wind!!! 
~I feel I should offer my condolences to my friend Emily. I hear her super fun, fellow Santaquin resident, Gary Coleman, has passed away. I am sure she'll miss his tirades and all that positive publicity he brought to the community.  ;)  HeHeHe  May he rest in peace...
~I'm wondering if the chick I saw today in town that rats her hair up in the back so that it makes sort of a tiara shaped ratty mound on top of her head, thinks she's a princess.  I think I would rather see her walking around with an actual tiara on her head than that mess. I know I am no beauty queen and certainly no princess but even I know that that looks ridiculous!!  I do think it is an improvement over the ratty, box on the head shaped mess people were doing for a while there, though. 
~There are tons of lizards (or maybe just the same creepy one) in our back yard. The boys are in HEAVEN!! They have had more fun chasing lizards the past few days.  I'm cool with them chasing them, touching them, holding them, whatever, but I about jumped out of my skin the other day when my nephew brought one in the house!!!  And when I took the garbage out and one scurried across the ground in front of me.  Shiver, shiver!!
~Just a little tip for the people at the dentist office...if you have like 12 patients in the building at the same time and there is only one dentist working...you MAY have overbooked.  I'm just sayin an hour and a half to glue Max's crown back on was a bit excessive!!!
~Have I mentioned how much I HATE moving?! We move so much you would think it is our favorite pass time but, no we really, really hate it! It's GLORIOUS to be in our own place again but I can't stand the state of disarray the house is in while we are trying to figure out where to put everything.  All the craziness going on in our lives right now and the every day duties of a mother with 4 kids that are all home for summer vacation keeps me busy enough!  This putting the house together thing feels like it is taking FOREVER!!!  Especially with my kids destroying all progress I seem to make as soon as I make it.  I told Brian the next time we move we better be able to eat out a lot because trying to cook for 6 people and clean up after 6 people with no dishwasher while trying to get a handle on this place is just TOO much!!! 
~June is going to be very interesting around here. It will be fun too but more than a little crazy. Zack is in baseball and has been since April, Matthew is in soccer, and Max is in Tball.  There is one game or another almost every night of the week in June. Sometimes there are 2 games a night. Sometimes both at the same time. I know many of you deal with the same thing.  My sypathies...jk.  It really is fun to see the kids having so much fun and progressing and succeeding at something they love so much. I just hope the weather in June is better than the weather in May has been so the games will be more fun to watch!!  I think May and June are busier than November and December are for us at this point in our lives. Crazy times but oh so fun!!!!  We love it and we LOVE our kids!!!  I'm planning to post some fun pictures on my Word From The Zoo blog soon. If anyone doesn't have an invite to it since it's a private blog feel free to request an invite from me.  Just give me your email address.  I just like to control who sees it so some wierdo from some crazy far off land isn't looking at pictures of my babies.  I once had several of those show up on my feedjit and that made me go private with the blog.  Anyway, I hope everyone is having a fun summer vacation so far. Hopefully soon the weather will actually act like summer so we can all enjoy all the really fun parts of summer!!!