catchin' up

It's been so long! I'm such a dork for going AWOL. But, you're so awesome for sticking around.

Thanks.

I'm not at all sure where to begin. I guess I'll let the photos lead the way. I organize mine in folders by month, so I'll just head on over to my May folder and we'll see where this post goes. Hopefully, we can getcha caught up with life over here in a post or two. We've had a great summer :)

Thanks for being patient with me.

Okay. Now.

May.



That's sushi. Weren't expecting that one, were you? Actually, that's not just any old sushi, that's my first sushi roll. Don't worry, it's a cooked one. It's really quite a long story, but I'll cut it really, really short and just say that apparently my pH changed significantly with this pregnancy and that led to issues with candida overgrowth. And that led to some pretty radical changes in my diet. "Candida wuh?" you say. I know. If you want to know more, you can find out more here. But the synopsis is that I didn't eat any fruit, sugar, gluten, dairy, corn, soy, vinegar, or anything fermented for several months. Even now, I still haven't had sugar or gluten. Since April 1st. No foolin'. It's made for a very interesting 5 months. May was especially "interesting" as I tried to learn how to feed myself. I ate a lot of veggies. A whole lot. And meat. And eggs. And nuts. Not a whole lot else. But, I'm better now. And that's worth it.



Also in May, we had 11 cubic yards of enriched DIRT delivered in our driveway. You know, right before we hosted a baby shower for my sister-in-law. Because it makes such good sense to have a huge pile of DIRT in your driveway before people come to your house for a party. And we have nothing if we don't have good sense, right?

Right?



I'd been longing for a flower garden since we moved in two and a half years ago. The children missed our flowers, too, and it was time. So, Sam worked like a maniac (and our brother-in-law, Brian, came to lend his brawn) and, miraculously, all of the dirt was out of the driveway by party time.



And I got it planted just a bit later. Doesn't look like much, I know. But these are baaaaaaaby plants here. I ordered them from Bluestone Perennials. Highly recommend. And that soil was tops! It's amazing how much everything took off this summer. The usual adage is "sleep, creep, leap", meaning that the first year everything kind of rests and gets settled in, the second year you start to see some real growth, and the third year the plants just grow like mad. We jumped straight to "leap" with this soil. Hope it didn't stress my little baby plants too much to grow so hugemongous right away. It was very gratifying for me, though, I must admit.

We had our 20 week ultrasound, too. We have never... never... found out the gender of any of the children beforehand. I love the surprise and Sam has always been willing to wait because, well, I love the surprise. But, here we were with Baby #5, feeling a little bit crazy. Wild. Zany. So, we decided to find out. And we did! I'll let the children tell you :)















And everyone was very excited :) We like to give the babies names while we're waiting for them to arrive. Since we've never known the gender before, we've never been able to call any of the babies by their real names before they were born, though. They wind up with creative "in the tummy" names. Names like Raisin. And Pumpkin. And Cletus (don't ask). This baby was Peep up until the ultrasound. After that, we started calling her by her real name. Wild and crazy, I tell you. Breaking all kinds of rules ;)

So, the summer got off to a very fun start. The days got hotter...

...and, of course, you know the POOL opens at the end of May. We were there.



Kind of a lot.



Sometimes for hours and hours. Once from open 'til close.



We met up with my sister and her girls a few times, too, which was extra fun.

Really, all summer, I felt pretty badly for my kids. I mean, life at the pool is...



just.


so.



hard.

Poor things.

Besides watching the flowers grow, rotting our teeth on candy at the pool, and growing a baby, we did a few others things over the summer. I decided to develop kidney stones and recurrent UTIs, for one. Had a trip to the ER for that one. Wanted to rule out early labor. Ouch. That was exciting.

And we visited Sam's parents in Door County :)

We also decided to do a Summer List this year, ala Meg Duerksen. We got it started a little late, so we decided to make our deadline the official last day of Summer instead of the first day of school. We still have a few items to go, and next Friday is the first day of Fall! Hop to it!

We've had a lot of fun with what we've been able to "checkmark" so far.















We're closing in on that list!

Well, that pretty much brings us up to speed. Up to late August at least. That's when a certain little someone decided to make her debut... 5 weeks early. I'll introduce you to her in the next post :)

Have a great one, guys!