Grateful

I never did get around to writing about everything I'm grateful for. I feel like I should. Here's the short list:

1. I'm grateful I didn't expect BYU to beat Utah this year. It makes the heartbreaking loss a little easier to handle.

2. I'm grateful that Jeff put a dvd player in our van last year, which makes it almost pleasant to travel to Las Vegas and back with 4 kids.

3. I'm grateful we got to spend Thanksgiving with some of my favorite people in the world--my whole family, minus Jonny, who is heating up in Argentina.

4. I'm grateful for weather forecasts (especially when they are right). We came home Saturday before the storm and woke up Sunday morning to 6 inches of snow in our front yard.

5. I'm grateful for Taylor Swift's new album that has gotten me through a lot of hours of cleaning.

6. I'm grateful for second trimesters. First and third trimesters are mise

rable, but second trimesters are nice.

7. I'm grateful to have two pair of non-maternity pants that fit me. Those, and the sweats I can wear, keep me from buying any more maternity clothes.

8. I'm grateful we have four more months before this baby comes. Along with having exactly ZERO names on the potential name list, I'm not even close to being ready.

9. I'm grateful that winter means we don't have to mow the lawn or pick weeds for at least four months.

10. I'm grateful for hard wood floors that hide dirt so well, and keep me from having to mop them daily.

And the REAL list, lest you think I am entirely superficial.

11. I'm grateful my mom is healthy this year. Life just wouldn't be the same without her. My kids adore her (Kyla prayed over breakfast one morning, "Bless I love Grandma Karen"), and I don't know what we'd do without her.

12. I'm grateful Jeff has a job he loves, and that we are able to live here close to family. I know we are really lucky.

13. I'm grateful for modern medicine. Without all the advances we have today, I doubt little (HUGE) Carter would be with us right now. He may not have survived birth, and he certainly wouldn't have survived RSV last winter.

14. I'm grateful to live in our dream house. It may be empty for years to

come, but I still drive around the corner and think, "wow. We live there. We're so lucky."

15. I'm grateful to be experiencing my life's journey with Jeff. We have had to really hang together as we have had more kids (lest they figure out how to divide us), and I feel like we are closer than ever.

16. I'm grateful for the opportunity to be a mom. I enjoy (most of) it so much, and know I'm so lucky to have such great (and crazy) kids to spend all my time with.

17. I'm grateful that my family is still hanging together. This has been a r

eal challenging year for the Esplin's, both publicly and privately. But I'm so grateful that we will always have each other, reminding each other that "in the end (we) want to be standing at the beginning" together.

18. And finally, I am grateful for my testimony of the Savior. It has grown tremendously this past year, as I have had many opportunities to get to know Him on a personal level. And I know that no matter what is thrown at us this year, or in years to come, we'll make it through, because of Him. I'll always be grateful for that.

Love Letters

I haven't said much this Thanksgiving about what I'm grateful for, but it sure has been on my mind. I have enjoyed reading all the daily posts about what you all are grateful for, and it has let me reflect on what is really important to me. Today I'm going to share one small thing I am thankful for. Not just in November, but all the time. And that is love letters

Jeff is not real big on love letters (although I do have a cherished few from our years together), so I found it quite thrilling when I found a love letter left on my pillow a few weeks ago.

Obviously, this one was from Allie. It says, " From Allie. I love mom. Der mom yro nice to me. Thanc yoo fr being nice to me. Luv Allie." I love kindergarten and the sudden fascination with literacy. I keep this in my drawer, as it is the first letter she has ever written to me. And sometimes it's nice to be reminded that I am loved and that, even better, she thinks I'm nice.

A few weeks later, these appeared on mine and Jeff's pillows:

These are from Damon. I know the second one is especially hard to read, but they say:
#1-to me: "I love you. You are a good mom. Thank you for paying the money for school. I love school. From Damon."
Comments-Typical Damon. He does love school. And I don't know why he thinks I pay for it, but still very sweet.
#2-to Jeff: "Thank you for paying for our house! I love you. Thank you for helping me with cub scouts. Cub scouts is a lot of fun. From Damon."
Comments-Apparently Damon thinks a lot about money. I'm a little surprised that both notes were about paying for things, but it was very sweet. I love the part about Cub Scouts. I already mentioned once how much Damon loves scouts. I thought it was so thoughtful that he realized how much Jeff helps him.

Again, priceless treasures.

Last, the younger two don't exactly write me love letters. But I keep this picture in my bathroom because I think it's so cute.

$.25 never went so far. Kyla's joy and Carter's disinterest sum them up perfectly. And are some of the reasons why I love them.

Straight from an Episode of Friends

A few days ago one of our smoke detectors started beeping and calling out "low battery." And we couldn't figure out which one it was for a couple of reasons:

1. Our house echoes like a cathedral due to the vast amount of hardwood and scant amount of furniture/decor it contains, making it beyond difficult to locate the source of the beeping.

2. It only beeped intermittently, about every 5 minutes or so, and would go hours at a time without beeping at all. We often just ignored it.

But after a few days, we decided it was time to solve the mystery and put the annoyance behind us. So we actively searched the house. And we took turns standing beneath the various detectors in the house, waiting for one to beep. Still, we couldn't find it. Wherever we stood in the house, the sound came from somewhere else. When we were upstairs, it sounded like it was downstairs, and when it was downstairs...you get the idea.

It was maddening. I wanted to disable the blasted thing, if only I could find it! But that didn't work very well for Phoebe Buffay, and I knew it wouldn't work for us. So, after a process of elimination, we decided it must be the smoke detector in Jeff's office, as it had a light that periodically flashed red, and Jeff got the ladder. We changed the battery, and hoped that the mystery was solved.

It wasn't. The beeping continued throughout the night, but abruptly stopped yesterday morning. All day long, I heard not one beep. I thought maybe it just took a while for the detector to reset and we had figured it out after all. Then it started beeping again last night, and continued throughout the day today. I offered the kids $5 if they could locate the offensive detector, sure it was sealed inside a wall somewhere in the house. But the kids came through. Tonight they were checking my tomatoes in the basement, and came up panicked. They had heard the "low battery" voice clearer than ever. Was there a smoke detector in the unfinished basement? Jeff and I had checked most of the rooms, but had failed to check them all.

For there, indeed, was the offensive detector. As soon as Jeff got home from the BYU game, we all went down and changed the battery together. At this point, we were all heavily involved. And when the beeping was at last silenced, there was much rejoicing. Allie and Damon were bragging about the $5 they get to split, and Jeff and I were thinking that $5 was a bargain for a little peace and quiet! Well, peace and quiet when everyone is sleeping, anyway. Peace and quiet during the daylight hours is still nothing but a dream.

More Feelings

I apologize if this post comes out a little disjointed. I feel a little disjointed when I think about all that I want to record for the future. First of all, thank you for your comments after my last venting session. It's always nice to know there are others out there who feel the same way I do, and I love blogging because it is a great way to encourage each other in our times of discouragement.

That being said, I must also admit that, for the first time in my life, am a bit envious of the gestational period of an elephant (close to two years). As we enter the busiest time of the year, I'm kind of wishing I could carry this baby until next spring. Of course, I would only want to agree to that if I knew I wouldn't have to deal with the uncomfortable third trimester for an entire year. Otherwise, that deal is off.

I also have been wishing time would slow down so I could enjoy the baby I already have. Carter is growing up way too fast. He is nine months old (nine and half, actually) and he is a busy, busy boy!

I haven't really compared him to other babies his age until this past Sunday, when I noticed a huge difference between his activity level and the activity level of a little girl just older than him. She crawled and walked around, exploring, but Carter was like a man possessed. He was all over the place, exploring everything, but getting bored quickly and moving on.

Since I realized how active he is, I have noticed it in other places as well. He can't hold still to drink his bottle and I thank my lucky stars every day that I'm not still nursing this octopus. I have to feed him in short shifts, because he gets distracted and has to do something else for several minutes before coming back to his bottle. And forget about him holding his own bottle. He will still only do this, flat on his back, for 1-2 minutes at a time before taking off to find something more worthy of his time and attention.

I have tried to use these feeding times to enjoy him as a baby. I look into his big eyes and rub his head, while he grabs my hand, and I can't help but feel a little sad that he won't get to be my baby for long. I have been in a dang rush for him to grow up, because I'm afraid of what it will be like to care for two babies, but I think I may need to just relax and let him take things at his own pace. He's growing up plenty without my encouragement.

(Take a look at Torso Man! His legs are short and stubby and he's pretty much all torso)

His appetite has returned full force and if he has finished his bottles, I usually let him eat whatever he likes. He prefers anything he can shove in his mouth. I think it was grape slices this day. He does this funny thing where he sucks in air, sort of like a panting dog, when he wants more food. And when people laugh, because it really is quite hilarious, he looks at them like they have some kind of problem. Doesn't everyone react with extreme excitement when they see food?

My kids all love to carry him around, which he cannot stand. He wants to be left alone to his devious ways, and doesn't appreciate Allie, and especially not Kyla, trying to carry him around the house. That doesn't stop them from trying, though. Allie asks me almost daily if she can hold him. I always let her try, but it always ends the same way: with Carter screaming and crawling off her lap. I hope she realizes it isn't personal. He just loves his mama and he loves his freedom.

We took the kids to the Gingerbread Festival on Friday, and found that the best way to carry Carter, without suffering severe arm cramps, is to put him in the backpack. He still loves it. And I love having Jeff with us so I'm not the one that has to tote him.


I love how Jeff is trying to stay out of the shot. Too bad, sometimes you have to show up on the blog to prove that you do exist and I'm not creating these children myself.

This was my favorite creation:

And because the artist was standing right next to us, gauging our reaction, I made sure to make a big deal of it and take a few extra pictures. It is pretty amazing.

Here's a quick update on Kyla: she has toned it down quite a bit with her "kill" and "death" lately. She still slips in a few comments here and there, but it seems like the extreme fascination has ended for now. I hope for good. She and Allie are both at the stage where they want to "be" someone else. Any show they watch, any game they play, even any magazine they look at, they are picking which person they want to be. Kyla will say, "I'm she and you're she" repeatedly each day. And her mixing up the pronouns drives me a little crazy, but not as crazy as the fighting that ensues over who gets to be Taylor Swift and who is Carrie Underwood. Seriously? Damon never did this. What is it with the girls?

Kyla has also had a hard time adjusting to Daylight Savings Time ending. She has still been waking up early and waking everyone else up, too. I had to put a clock in her room, with only the first digit showing, and she isn't allowed to get up or wake anyone else up until the number says 7. It seems to be working a little better, although she still wakes up when it is 6:00 from time to time. I'll give it another week before I write my strongly worded letter to the president about how destructive DST is to my life. Maybe things will work out. And I'm sure President Obama has a few other things he is dealing with.

Mostly, though, I just feel lucky. I know so many ladies who have a hard time getting pregnant or those haven't been as fortunate and haven't found their perfect match yet. So who am I to complain because I have been blessed with the opportunity to bring beautiful children into the world, and raise them with my very best friend? When I think of it that way, I feel sheepish that I ever had reason to complain. Those four sitting on the couch are my world. And as terrified as I am about helping them reach adulthood, I know I am so lucky to be their mom. They help me grow more than they'll ever know until they are parents themselves.

Do it all

When I was a kid, I had a very high opinion of myself. Truly, I believed I could do anything and be good at everything. I swallowed the line "you can be anything you want to be" like a hungry fish swallowing one of Jeff's fancy lures--without hesitation or second thought.

And it was a bit of a rude awakening as I got older and realized that a lot of people can do things I can't do. And a lot of people can do the same things I CAN do, only they can do it better. It was hard for me to accept that not everyone was going to like me, and certainly not everyone was going to think I was all that great. A brutal life lesson.

As an adult, I still think I harbor a little of that belief that I can do anything, and I can do it well. I watch design shows on tv and think, I could do that, when the reality is I could NEVER do that. And sometimes I get myself in trouble when I try to do things that seem so easy, yet turn out to be much more difficult.

The perfect example was at the beginning of the summer when the kids wanted to start riding their bikes. Because of all the thorns that litter our neighborhood, there wasn't a working tire on any of their bikes and I decided to remedy that. I could have waited for Jeff to get home from work and do things the right way, but there were those hours after school when the kids could be riding and I could be sitting on the couch enjoying a glass of lemonade the way you can only when there are no children in the house. So I went to the store, bought new tubes for the bikes, as well as the green globby stuff that claims to fix holes in tires, and went at it. I followed the directions, making sure to keep myself in a well-ventilated area, as I was (as always) pregnant and not anxious to expose my tender fetus to harmful chemicals. All was going smoothly, until it was time to put the tubes back on the bikes. That is where I ran into problems. And in trying to "fix" the broken bikes, I actually compounded the problem. The screwdriver I was using to try to pry the tires back into place punctured my new tubes, and no green globby stuff can seal holes the size of pennies.

Jeff rolled his eyes when he got home, and told me, in effect, that I need to stop doing things I can't actually do and let him handle it. Apparently, I never fully accepted the fact that I can't do everything. Brutal lesson repeated.

I kept all this in mind last week when I decided I needed to use the 101 tomatoes we have ripening in our basement, the remnants of our mildly successful garden this year, and can salsa. But instead of asking someone with any experience for help, I was confident that I could manage. I mean, I had spent several minutes researching on the internet. How hard could it be?

Contrary to where you think this story is headed, things actually went very well. Maybe that's because canning really isn't as scary as it seems, and maybe everyone can do it without problem. But with the help of good-looking assistants like this one... (his job was to clean anything that fell on the floor. He's good at this job)

...I was able to take the tomatoes from this stage...(tomatoes all peeled after a quick bath in boiling water and a soak in ice water)

...to this without much difficulty at all.

The hard part was just the amount of work it took to can 8 pints of salsa. But the results were well worth it and I'm sure I will be repeating this process soon with the other 101 tomatoes still ripening in the basement.

It's probably experiences like these that keep me from learning the brutal lessons, and keep me trying things that I may or may not be successful doing. These small successes fuel the fire, and keep me believing that I CAN do anything I set my mind to...

...and then there is the rest of the time. The last week or so has been a major reality check for me, and probably not for the better. We have been dealing with one sickness after another (nothing major, just alternating stomach viruses with cold viruses) and no one has been 100% in our home. It's amazing how much a little sickness (multiplied by 4 or 5) can really add to the normal stress I experience all the time. Add to that the two incidents this week where I failed to do something I had committed to, thus letting down people I really care about, and I have really started feeling discouraged.

I mean, I have been able to convince myself that I'll be able to handle 5 kids, two of which will be, essentially, still babies. But after this week, I have been having serious doubts. I have started really noticing all the things I just can't seem to do--I can't keep up with the messes, I don't have the energy to do everything I want to do with the kids, and yet I'm supposed to believe that I'll be able to do it when we have one more? I don't see how.

Deep down, I know that everything is going to be alright. Things will work out. The people I have let down will forgive me and we'll move on. The kids are going to get what they need and the messes will, eventually, get cleaned up. But in the short term, it's hard not to feel discouraged. I am wishing I was more like my 10-year old self, because I'm pretty sure she would still feel like she can do it. She felt like she could do anything.

Halloween

Are you sick of reading about everyone's Halloween yet? Here's a quick recap of ours:

We carved pumpkins...

We had a Sumo Wrestler...

...a Hannah Montana...

...a Cinderella...

...and a pumpkin.

We had trick-or-treating in the pouring rain (hail at times), enjoyed a fabulous chili dinner at Jeff's sister's, complete with our homemade root beer, and more candy than any family needs.

Jeff and I were both feeling sick on Sunday morning, so we told Damon to watch the kids so we could sleep in a little longer. We woke up to find that they had fed themselves breakfast: root beer and candy. Ah to be young and have no parental supervision...

Shocker?

You came here expecting Halloween pictures, right? Well, I'll get to that. But I'm finally ready to write another post.

After I had Carter, Jeff told me he was ready to be done having kids. He said four kids was more than enough for him, and he didn't feel the need to have any more. For the first time, I thought and prayed long and hard about whether or not our family was complete, and I just wasn't convinced. Even when bribed with things like a boob job and a new car if I wouldn't have any more kids (he was kidding. I think.), I just felt like there was one more waiting to come to our family. But not any time soon.

Here are some of the reasons why I felt like we should have one more kid:
1. I have always wanted a little blondie, and our kids seem to get lighter and lighter each time. Maybe #5 would be a towhead.
2. Carter needs a buddy. While Kyla loves and adores him to the point of smothering, she will always want to be doing what Allie is doing. And brother or sister, I would love Carter to have a friend close in age.
3. While I have had my fair share of experiences with pregnancy, I'm sure there are a few things I haven't yet to experience. I would like to give myself every opportunity available to me. Perhaps a C-section would be fun.
4. We have 7 seats in the van. Someone needs to fill that last seat.
5. With two boys and two girls (on earth, that is), we need someone to break the tie, thus giving either Jeff or I the majority when votes are cast.

With the exception of #2, this list is a complete joke, and my decision that I wanted one more baby was in no way based on any of these factors. It was just a general feeling that our family wasn't yet complete.

Jeff wasn't too hard to convince. He just wanted to do it sooner rather than later. He has always had the number 35 in his head as the age HE wanted to be done having kids. And he just turned 34. So his biological clock was apparently ticking.

And so I agreed to go off birth control, just to let my body adjust and get regular again. I was confident that it would be at least six months before we were able to get pregnant (based on past experience--after Chance and after my ectopic pregnancy it took at least 6 months of trying to get pregnant again. My body typically needs a little bit of time to recover).

I'm sure you know what's coming next. But I was shocked to find out that the very first month of FAILING TO PREVENT (not TRYING), I got pregnant. And began the difficult task of living in denial while wanting to puke my guts out all the live long day.

I don't know why, but I didn't want anyone to know (other than my brother and my next door neighbor--a girl needs a few confidants when scheduling doctor's appointments). And so we didn't tell anyone. I thought maybe after the first trimester, I would feel like it. But I really didn't. And so we didn't. It wasn't until a few weeks ago, when it became much harder to conceal physically, did I break the news to my family. But not to my friends via the Blogger world. I did write a couple of posts that I saved as drafts, just for my own record, which I will now publish. If you care to, you can read them HERE and HERE.

Today, though, I decided (as did my sister, who is also a private blogger) it was time to share. I had my 20 week ultrasound today. And it's a little hard to live in denial when you actually see what has been causing the nausea, the weight gain, the heartburn (already?) and the physical pain for the last 4 months. And now that I have passed from denial to acceptance, I can tell you that I'm equal parts excited and terrified.

But ready or not, by March 23rd we are going to be a family of 7 (plus one angel). The big question, is it a boy or girl, will be answered then. Because I was strong and brave and didn't look when I had the choice to find out today.

Oh, and I am definitely feeling like this is it for us. Everyone told me I would just know when it was time. And I think this is it. Maybe that's why I didn't want everyone to know just yet. I wanted to keep it to myself, selfishly, for just a little while.