Thankful!

We have so much to be thankful for this year! I think it is important to look for and appreciate the blessings in our lives throughout the year, but I don’t mind taking an extra day in November to put this thankfulness up on a pedestal. We had a nice thanksgiving this year, hosting a dinner at the farmhouse. We are very grateful that nearly all of our family (on both sides) from the Spokane area was able to join us to feast on lots of great eats!

This list is just something that has been bouncing around in my head as I think specifically about the blessings in our life this year. It is by no means comprehensive and is not entirely in order of importance but I hope you find it a small inspiration to think of all the wonderful things you have in your life, not just on one day in November, but all year long!

And of course if you make it through all my wordiness, you will be reward with a few JJ pictures at the end :)

-          Our God, which is ultimately the source of every blessing on this list, and the giver of a future beyond this life. There isn’t anything worth being thankful for more than that!

-          My husband, he is the hardest working, most loving man I have ever met and I am so glad he is mine! Plus he is a pretty awesome dad to our little girl. I could go on about how wonderful he is in many ways, but I don’t want to make other wives jealous so I will just stop there.

-          Our special Jayney Joy and all the fun, craziness and love she brings into our life. It is hard to remember what life was like before she was in it, because she just makes our family feel a little bit more complete. I am so thankful for what a happy, easy-going little lady she has been since day one!

-          Having LOTS of family very nearly by. Seriously close in fact! We have four family members (two households) within walking distance of our house. If we take a short drive of less than 15 minutes we can add eight more family members (four households) to that list. It is wonderful to know there are so many people we can count on, such a short distance away. It also makes finding a babysitter quite simple too!

-          The tiny “Tin Box” we call home. Despite its phone call dropping properties, sometimes slightly soggy ceilings, and limited square footage, I wouldn’t trade it for the world! No, it won’t be our home forever but it is just perfect for the three of us right now.  We are very thankful to be on the farm, not to have to rent and can instead save for our future house, whatever that may look like.

-          Dusty’s job working on the farm with his dad. Even though at times I do get frustrated with the long summer hours and drop-in hay pickups, I know that it is truly a career path that Dusty has happily chosen. I couldn’t ask for a much better blessing than Dusty having a job that he loves going to and doing every day. I am also thankful for the way Dusty (and Tim) have managed the farm finances/crops so responsibly to provide well for our families.

-           I am thankful I can be a stay at home mom! I do have days where I miss my classroom life and teacher friends but they don’t even compare to how glad I am that I’m able to play and watch Jayney grow everyday! I can’t even imagine missing all the special moments I get with JJ if I had to go to work away from home. I am glad Dusty has accepted and supported the sacrifices we will have to make, in addition to shouldering the extra finical accountability that comes along with only one income maker in the house.

-          Our health has been great over the last year. As I quickly turn into a seriously big whiner when it comes to being sick and I am not very sensitive to anyone else being ill either, I am especially thankful that through my whole pregnancy, labor/recovery, Dusty’s hectic summer work, and the first ten months of JJ’s life we have not experienced anything worse than a headache or slight sniffle here and there.  Such a huge blessing to be healthy!

-          Friends! We are so thankful to have some great friends both close to home and those that are far away. It is really fun right now, as we seem to be at a stage where many of our friends are soon or have recently started expanding their family too. I look forward to the years ahead when our kids will all be running around and playing together. It is truly a blessing to have people to share the joys of life with, now we just wish they all lived a really close to us! 

Ready to start getting some chow!

"Hand over another roll and nobody gets hurt!"

Uh oh! Turkey coma in T-minus five seconds...

Thankful for our family of three!

9 Month+ Update

Nine months old! I seriously do not know how that happened. The time just goes to fast and now so does our 17 pound, 27.5 inch tall, busy little bee!

         I feel like when JJ reached her 9 month date on the calendar she flipped a switch of some sort, because the little girl we have getting into EVERYTHING in our house is not the same as the lazy baby we had up until then. At about eight and a half months we had the most chill, calm, content baby that was happy to just sit or lay for ridiculous lengths of time wherever we plopped her down with a few toys. Then one day, which happen to be on my birthday, Jayney FINALLY figured out how to go from laying down to sitting up without us helping her make the transition.

        From then on our life has been a whirlwind of change! Jayney had been rolling, slithering and scooting around for a while on her belly and bum but had not been very motivated to move much more. Over a short period of a week she suddenly became very ambitious. She learned to get off her belly to sitting up without help, then went to kneeling, started pulling up to standing, and walking along the side of any coffee table or couch we will let her get her hands on! We just kept asking “where did this come from!?” I think we dropped the height of her crib every day that week, because she was just making me too nervous! Don't get me wrong, I knew that a day would come where our easy baby would start getting into trouble. I just didn't think it would be a switch overnight. It was literally ONE day. Apparently Jayney had been watching our other baby friends her age as they learned to roll, crawl, stand and walk weeks if not months before her, all while taking many mental notes. JJ, now making a break to catch up to her peer group, is suddenly a busy bee and after chasing her, trying to keep her out of drawers/cupboards, and catching heavy things before she pulls them over on top of herself, I am one very tired mama.

         Oh! Our house is much noisier now too. Actually it started while we were at my parents’ cabin doing some work (more on that from Dusty soon) on the day of JJ turning 9 months when she said both Mama and Dada! I don’t mean that she was just babbling and making those sounds. Here is how it went down and yes there were several witnesses. She saw me walk into the room and loudly proclaimed “MAMA!” and later that same night she reached for Dusty and squealed with delight then said “Dada, Dada, DADA!” Yeah, it was a pretty big day!

All this extra talking and walking is making for a crabby little princess in the evenings. We recently moved bedtime up a bit and I have to say, I don’t hate it! The extra time after she is down for the night is quite helpful to mentally recover and pick up all the messes she made during the day. We were starting her bedtime routine about nine but have moved it up to about eight, if we are just home and not out doing something exciting to keep her awake. Our current daily routine is quite a regimented schedule and I think JJ is the one watching the clock. She is up at 7:30 to 8 nearly every day. Then during the day Jayney takes two naps of two-ish hours each, almost like clockwork at 10:15 and 3:30 each day. I can definitely tell she takes after Dusty, in the way that she LOVES having a schedule.

         Part of that schedule is still nursing about five times a day. I thought this would change more with adding snacks of, yogurt or baby food but I think she needs both since she is more active all the sudden. As mentioned in her 6^th month update, we are feeding her more food now. For a few weeks we tried making this a more substantial part of her nutritional intake. I wanted to start VERY slowly transitioning her to more solids so that by sometime around a year she could gradually be weaned from breastfeeding. This resulted in me being frustrated and having no time because she did not love eating a whole meals worth of baby approved food thus would dilly-dally through eating and she still was quite cranky unless I let her nurse in addition to each and every solid food meal. It felt like we had both barely gotten cleaned up from one meal and it was time for the next. Really just breastfeeding by itself is not bad. It is just the mess of trying to do solid food too. Nursing has actually gotten to be a mostly speedy process; especially compared to the nip and nap eater we had on our hands when she was a newborn. So now with regard to normal food, we are still giving her little nibbles of whatever she shows an interest in, and believe me when I tell you she loudly lets us know by doing her best baby bird impression, opening her mouth amazingly wide and saying “Aaaauuuuhhhh!” until we give her a taste of whatever we have. Even if the result is she usually doesn’t like it much. But we are not working too hard to get enough of these nibbles in to really count as a source of nourishment. At dinnertime we do manage to get her to cheerfully eat a bit of whatever we have plus whole jar of baby food if we mix it with some whole milk yogurt. So we will see if the transition of when Jayney actually wants to eat real food happens at a year or not but like her switch to being mobile, she may just wake up one day and decide she is geared up and wishing to use her three (almost four teeth) to chomp down a hamburger.

          Well about a month later we feel like we no longer have a "baby" to care for, rather a new little person to try and manage. We are learning slowly but are finding ways to keep Jayney happy and out of trouble at the same time. We rearranged furniture to better contain her and are more mindful of where we set our hot coco since she could get to it now, but overall life continues as blessed and smoothly as ever with our sweet, happy girl.

9 Months

9 Months

9 Months

9 Months

9 Months

9 Months

9 Months

9 Months

6 Month

4 Months

3 Months

2 Months