Tea and Sweatpants...

The boys for the most part have given up naps. This is both good and bad. Good things include; early bed time and more flexibility within our day. Bad things include; rough afternoon from about 2:00 on, limits what we can do in the evenings (which for our ministry is really tough). They still have a regular one hour "rest" time in the day so we can all mellow for a bit. Sometimes they still sleep, yesterday was one of those great days:)

Today I got them both in their places for resting time. Eli gets the boy's room and Dom gets our room. After somewhere around 30 min I heard commotion from both rooms. Let me interrupt and say I've heard it said that toddler years are the precursor to teenage years, today I truly believe it. Dom had found a fresh roll of T.P. and decided to practice his T.P. skills for his teen years. He managed to unroll that sucker in a matter of minutes! A huge heaping pile of T.P. was there to greet me when I walked into the room. Awesome. Then I heard a crash from the other room. Eli decided to practice his climbing skills, I think this kid is going to do extreme sports of some kind. First, when I entered the room I was hit with poopy diaper stink, nasty! Second thing I noticed was that Eli was sitting in the top drawer of his dresser looking at me with big owl eyes. I quickly scanned the rest of the room to calculate other damage. He climbed the dresser to reach all the thing on the top bunk including the ladder. Somehow he managed to pull that off without falling and it hit the overhead light scattering bits of light bulb all over the room which happened to be sprinkled over the heaps of clothes that once occupied the drawer that Eli was sitting in.

Somehow I missed the secret signals at lunch today indicating today was the day:)

We are almost at 12 weeks now, this is very exciting! I've had a fairly sick free pregnancy with the exception of nausea spurred on by certain smells in the kitchen. Nick has been amazing though and for the most part has been doing the cooking and cleaning so I don't have to deal with that.

Other early symptoms that I've been experiencing are weird dreams and body image issues. I feel as if I'm in the "fat" stage of pregnancy. I have a slight bulge and feel bloated all over. I've been struggling with this feeling and being concerned that I've gained too much weight already. I have an amazing friend who just wrote a blog about this that completely blessed my heart here. Thank you Lauren for sharing your journey so the Lord can teach me about mine.

Dreams. I've always had weird/graphic dreams. Nearly every morning I can report at least one of my dreams from the night before. Due to the surge of hormones as of late my dreams have been VERY odd.

For a good laugh here is a preview of my dream journey last night:
Dream 1: I am a 17 year old girl named Beth and I have an 11 year old brother and I live in a small house with my parents (who look/act nothing like any of my actual family or anyone I know). My dad is a police officer who was trying to chase down this 11 year old red head crazy kid killer. My brother and I were trying to help him because he was after me next. In the middle of the night he snuck in, attacked my brother, left him with a cracked rib, and came to get me. I tackled him down and called out SEVERAL times for my dad to come and after a long 5 min he came and got the kid.

Dream 2: I'm walking in a bikini with my pregnant self and a friend to a resort to say farewell to friends who just got kicked out of their apt. After a dip in the pool I realized I forgot a change of clothes so as we were pushed on to the party I was standing in a mass of people trying to "play it cool" while they were dressed formal for a farewell party and I stood in a bikini with a slightly pregnant belly! I went on to the rest of the party, which was odd in itself, ended up at least partially dressed and the guests of honor never did arrive.

Dream 3: I was with 2 old friends from Elementary school in Manhattan and we were meeting a 3rd friend from my childhood who just opened her club. When we saw her she was now a man! She led us into the club which was REALLY cool by the way, and we sat and had margaritas (mine a virgin of course) and chatted about love and life and such.

Yep, those were all from last night! I left out tons of detail because the blog would have been pages long:)

It's paying off!

Finances are a taboo subject, and rightly so, but it is my duty to report the goodness of God and a bit of our journey that we are on. Also, I can hardly hold it in:)

We've been living in the "cheap" category for the full (almost 5 years) of our young marriage and young family. Honestly I think most young marrieds, especially if they have kids, live on a strict budget or beyond their means. For the first few years of marriage we floundered our way through our finances. We stumbled through some financial classes and learned how to be responsible and to talk to each other about money without yelling. We acquired some minor debt with the purchase of our car, the move to Portland, and some other things. This was all manageable (yet irresponsible) until about 18 months ago. We hit a rough patch financially, the boys moved in, I became full time mom and our journey to extreme frugality began in order for us to stay above water. Now, also in the last 18 months we've found ways to aquire some more income and to receive some financial support from other avenues.

The combination of frugal living, financial blessings from God, and a bit of creativity has given us this day debt free! We still owe an arm and leg to our private Nazarene schools but other than that the car is ours and every penny of loose debt is gone!!! Yesterday we paid off the last few pieces of that and are praising God for this financial journey we've been on. In a few months we'll be buying a van (yup, family of 5 with 3 car seats don't fit in a small car) in 100% cash! Our money from the sale of the Blazer will fill our emergency fund and we'll begin saving to buy a house.

What a huge relief, a huge burden lifted!

Anyway, with the exception of a few things I've still been striving to be eco friendly about our home and body products. Not only is this good for all our growth and living but also for our budget. I can't even tell you how much we have saved on our "household" budget by taking a few minutes to make these products.

Two more ways to save:
1. Face Wash: I have been using honey as face wash. I put some in one of those plastic travel shampoo containers to keep in the shower, it works as well as any other cleanser and is very gentile on my face.
2. Eye Makeup Remover: I put a small dot of the boy's tear free baby shampoo on a tissue and it wipes all eye makeup right off.
3. Hand lotion: It's really dry these days in the NW so instead of stocking up on travel size lotions (they are overpriced) I buy a travel container and fill it with my favorite body lotion and keep that in the car/purse. This is MUCH cheaper.
4. Reed diffusers: Our reed diffusers get all nasty after a while from getting flipped so much. We bought a bulk size bottle of scent and we fill a small container with it. I found that wooden bamboo secures (that you use for kabobs and such) work great. I'm sure wooden chopsticks ("gifted" from your favorite take out) would work as diffusers as well.