The good and the sad

This was a hard week. My heart has been heavy. The woman I threw a baby shower for had her twins a few weeks back. The twin girls are beautiful and healthy. Their mother is not doing well. Her kidneys aren’t working very well and she has some sort of rare pregnancy induced heart failure and other health problems at this point. She was in the hospital for I think two weeks, several days in the ICU. She is finally home but she is on oxygen and is weak. The whole situation breaks my heart. I have found solace in seeing the loving service that has been performed by my ward to help take care of these babies and bring meals into their family. For 12 hours a day, 5 days a week, there is someone from the ward in the home helping care for these precious babies. I have a testimony that the relief society organization is divinely inspired and facilitates women becoming angels for their neighbors and friends. If you have a spare moment, pray for this sister, her husband, and her babies. I don’t know her long term prognosis, I just pray that she will have the ability be with her babies.

I have been running more lately. I’m trying to get in shape for a 5k in two weeks. It’s a Halloween run so I need a costume. Saturday I ran 3 miles in 42 minutes. That’s not great for me, but I was glad to make the distance, however slow, without walking. I don’t think I ran at all the first 6 months of Jackson’s life so this is progress. I might be a little faster in the race because I won’t be pushing this, as cute as she is. Thank you for the hat Amanda!

 

Annie was very grumpy this week. I was this close to legally changing her name to Grumpers. I don’t know if the cause was teething or gastrointestinal in nature, but it meant that Jackson got neglected. A lot. I felt bad, so Friday night I let Jackson stay up late to have some one on one time with me. We snuggled in my bed, told stories, Jackson decided he’s going to be a doctor when he gets big, and then we played with my paperweight glass balls and a flash light. They make nebulas and vortexes to other dimensions on the ceiling.

 

 

I keep expecting Annie to start looking more like me as she gets older. She hasn’t. She looks like her daddy. A lot. Someone at church said it, so it has to be so.

 

Jackson’s potty training is, well, going. He’s learning to listen to his body cues to go potty and I’m learning patience. I suppose it is going well in that he isn’t fighting me at all. He’s just not picking it up as quickly as I would like. If you are curious what our current strategy is, here’s the poop, I mean scoop: He wears big-boy panties during the day and diapers during naps (in theory) and at night time. He has had lots of accidents, but he’s also had a lot of successes so we are sticking with it. He gets to pick a treat out of the treat box every time he goes potty and he gets a big treat at the end of the day if he’s gone the entire day staying clean and dry. He loves Pez dispensers and so that is the big treat at the end of the day right now. He’s getting quite the collection. He likes his big-boy panties so much, he often wants to just wear those around the house.

 

My house never seems to be clean anymore, at any given moment one or both of my kid’s faces really need to be cleaned, and too many meals this week were “fend for yourself”, but other than that, I think we are doing pretty good. I can’t wait for conference next week. We need all the help we can get.