This is Our Life

I've realized over the years that there are three things that I need to function normally and stay somewhat sane....sleep, some sense of routine, and the sense of being settled. Take those away over a longer period of time and add sickness, pregnancy, low back pain, and stress of almost every kind, and I just about lose it. We just returned from a week long trip to California for Matt's younger brother, Andy's, wedding. Before I go into some of the highlights of the trip, in addition to the fact that it was probably one of the most beautiful wedding settings I have ever seen, I'm going to describe some of the events that almost brought me to the breaking point. This is only some of the chaos that occurred...there was much more that I won't mention. I will warn you that this includes talking about pee and poo, one of the realities of being a parent, so if you can't handle it you may want to stop reading!

Let me start by going back to the few weeks prior to the wedding. We have been laboring away at clearing out our house of all of the stuff we have been collecting over the last seven years, holding garage sales, and finishing house projects in preparation to put the house on the market. It's amazing how much stuff we can accumulate over that period of time! In addition, we were juggling parenthood, building our support team, and preparing for the California trip. Every night we hit the pillow hard. In fact one night Matt was so tired, he didn't even have the energy to walk up the stairs after putting Blake to bed, so he just crashed on the floor in the downstairs room!

One of our lovely garage sales

Our trip to California began with driving the five hours to Seattle and flying out from there, flying the next day to San Jose, and then driving five hours to the wedding site in a small town called Biggs. Three days in a row of travel was pretty exhausting and tough on the kids (especially nap schedules), and if you've ever flown with kids you know how stressful that can be.

Andy and Jenny were married on her parent's farm in the walnut orchard (beautiful!) and Matt was the best man. Thanks to Jenny's family, we were able to stay with Matt's parents and Andy (his brother) in an extra house on their farm. The house had been uninhabited for a long time and some things we needed were brought in for the sole purpose of this event (furniture, kitchen utensils etc). The night we got there I felt so wiped out that I told Matt....."our life has got to slow down...I'm going to get sick!" Sure enough, the next morning I woke up with a sore throat and it went downhill from there. All four of us were in one room due to space, and I had to try not to cough or sneeze in fear of waking up the kids. The night before the wedding we only slept about 2 hours because we all kept waking each other up. Callie would cry and Blake would pop up in his bed, turn to us and say "whaaaat are you dooooooing?!!!" If I wasn't so tired and sick it would have been comical.

The ceremony site in the walnut orchard 

Before the wedding I spent a considerable amount of time preparing snacks for the kids in hopes that they would be quiet for the ceremony, but despite my efforts, they both were cranky as ever and fussing from the beginning. Just as Jenny was approaching the altar in dead silence, something irritated Callie and she started throwing her milk around, screaming and crying. I quickly picked her up and made my way through the crowd, losing my shoes in the process, and whisked her as far away as possible. In the meantime I realized that Blake, seeing that I was gone, had started to cry. I think at that point I heard some of the crowd start to chuckle. Matt's sweet cousin Jesse then brought Blake to me. With a pounding head, burning sore throat, and running on two hours of sleep, I can't even begin to describe how emotionally and physically drained I felt. Now that both of our kids had disrupted the ceremony and were gone, it proceeded normally and was  beautiful (from what I heard). I was pretty disappointed to have missed the entire thing. The reception was amazing and was full of great food, sparkling lights, and a beaming Andy and Jenny.

Andy and Jenny!

Before the dancing was over the kids were getting pretty tired and cranky, so I took them back to the house to give them a bath and put them to bed. I was ready to crash myself. As I'm running a bath and about to put them in, Callie peed all over me and my dress. Having to ingore the pee trickling down my legs, I quickly washed them (they were almost as dirty as their cousin Abby in the picture below!) and pulled Callie out of the tub. She then peed again all over the floor. After cleaning up I pulled Blake out....all the while Callie is getting into the garbage can and dropping things into my water glass.

The next night the kids started to get sick. Callie wouldn't stop crying in her bed, so we decided to give her some Tylenol. Realizing that we didn't have a dropper or the dose, Matt drove the several miles into town to get a dropper while I had to call my mom for the correct dose (no internet at the house). In addition to the chaos, earlier that evening Blake came out into the kitchen saying that he needed to be changed. We still don't have him potty trained because we have had too many transitions and haven't been home for a long enough period of time (we plan on starting that this week). We then noticed that he had poop down his leg and on his foot and had tracked it all through the living room, hallway, and bedroom. It was also on the wall because he was crouching in the corner! Finding no clean towels or washcloths to clean it up, we also realized there were no more paper towels and we only had two wipes left! AAAAHHHHH! Eventually we thoroughly cleaned everything.

A couple of days later it was time to drive the five hours back to San Jose and leave California. Somehow on the way to the airport we took some wrong turns and were running extremely late. Then in the security line Blake had a major meltdown and started screaming and stomping up and down, which lasted all the way to the gate....people staring at us and making comments the whole way. How embarrassing! To his credit, we had had an exhausting week and he was getting sick. Also along the way we realized that Callie had pooped and of course it had gotten on her clothes. In all the chaos we had forgotten to pack a clean change of clothes (usually we are much more organized), so we found another less dirty set of clothes and put those on. We made it to the gate just as people were boarding.

This doesn't cover all of the difficulties of the trip, but I will say that there were good things about this trip too. Andy and Jenny had the most amazing wedding and everything went smoothly. We were able to spend some quality time with family, Jennie's aunt and uncle put on an amazing barbecue for us with about thirty people and we shared about our ministry, and Matt's sister Jamie and brother-in-law Eric blessed us with a night's stay in a beautiful hotel the night before we left. I tried to focus on the things that we are thankful for. Sometimes we do better about having a good attitude than other times, and this was one of those times that I just didn't do too well. I don't have anything profound to say about all of this or any life lessons that I learned along the way.....sometimes life is just hard and we are just tired. Then we learn of something awful that someone else is going through, like our friend who's little girl is in the ICU and might lose her limbs. It puts things into perspective. We are blessed and God is still good. This is our life right now and I'm a work in progress, striving to praise God through the stress and the hard times.

Cousin Abby playing in the dirt at the reception

Blake and his cousin Zach having a great time on the ride-on tractor

  She loved the slide!

 Blake enjoying his cupcake

Matt on the cherry picker, helping set up for the wedding