11-23-11 Every Once in a While . . .

I get a little bit domesticated and make bread. I don’t have a mixer, but my sweet Meridian friend Jenny Guthrie taught me how to make bread by hand when Easton was just a little baby. So I’ve continued to use her recipe since then. I spent today making rolls and cinnamon rolls, and let me just say that I made some mighty delicious cinnamon rolls with cream cheese frosting. A cinnamon roll has to have cream cheese frosting for it to be a really good cinnamon roll.

I was proud, and Jacob was pleased that his wife was barefoot and pregnant baking bread in in the kitchen all day. Don’t mind my misshapen rolls in the above picture. It’s been a few years since I’ve made rolls.

I baby-sat Jaedyn today for a few hours, and then the boys and I headed over to Jacob’s parents to drive to the temple with them for Edgel family pictures. I hate pictures of myself, this is no secret. But pregnant pictures of myself, the kind people hang on the wall, are on my Loathe List. After our pictures we ate dinner at Olive Garden (always a treat) with the whole Edgel clan and then headed back to Jacob’s parents’ to hang out and let the kids play with Janea and their cousin Gavin who are in town from Provo. After we got home I made a couple of cherry cheese pies and now I’m up writing on my blog before I head to bed to get a good night’s rest before tomorrow’s feasting. I love Thanksgiving, and we have Thanksgiving get-togethers  tomorrow, Friday, and Saturday. Maybe I will take my camera. But probably not.

11-15-11 Our Baby Boy

I had an ultrasound yesterday and I got to see a couple of cute shots of our little guy. Most likely his name will be Logan now. Logan Jacob. But if it’s not Logan it will be Ledger. So it will probably be Logan, like 90% sure, because Ledger just doesn’t work with Edgel the way I want to. So here is. Baby Logan.

He’s so cute, right?! I can’t wait to meet him in a gazillion months. Why do we have to be pregnant for so long?

Today I cooked twice. I made yummy salsa earlier in the day and yummy chicken stir-fry for dinner. It was a delicious dinner. Well I just wanted to share these pics, but I gotta get going. I’ve been walking Easton to school in the morning with some ladies in my ward and neighborhood, Melisa, Camille, and sometimes Brittany. My neighborhood is so hilly, so it’s a really good workout, and we walk at a good pace. Pushing a stroller a half mile up the hill is tough for a pregnant lady. I’ve still been going to the gym on days when I’m not walking. I ate way too much at Disneyland, so I have to make up for it. I ate a corn dog the size of my forearm, and that had to be about 5 gazillion calories. Anyway, I have to get up earlier to walk Easton to school because it’s a half hour walk there. And I don’t do mornings well. Let’s hope baby Logan will be good to me with his sleeping habits when he finally does come.

11-13-11 All Decorated For Christmas

Typically I don’t decorate this early for Christmas, but maybe all the decorations and music at Disneyland inspired me. We had stake conference today, so we came home from that, ate some lunch, and then I started getting the tree up. I love decorating the tree. When we were young we used to sip hot chocolate and put on Christmas music as we sat in the living room near the fireplace and watched my mom decorate the tree. Jacob thought that was weird that we just watched, and maybe we helped when we were really young, but as we got older we just loved the look of my mom’s fancy tree so we’d always sit and watch her do it. I think she preferred it that way so she didn’t have to rearrange all the ornaments when we weren’t looking. So I mainly did the decorating myself tonight, but Jacob did help me wrap the lights around the tree and get all the strands working. Every year there’s another strand not working even if we did just buy some the year before. Now my house looks all nice and cozy and ready for Christmas, and I’m excited to be able to enjoy the decorations for the next month and a half. I love all my little nativities and my pretty tree ornaments. Now I’ll just need to make a wreath for my door.

11-13-11 Disneyland!

Well, we are home from our super awesome trip to Disneyland. It was so much fun, I can’t even write about it. The boys were so awesome! They didn’t whine or complain in the lines or cry for toys or cry that they were tired, and we were there from 10am to 10pm both days. Our original plan was to go for 3 days, but after 2 days we decided that we had done a whole lot. So we’re saving a day for when the boys go out of town for Christmas. That way Jacob and I won’t be sitting around feeling depressed. Instead we’ll be living it up in Disneyland. Anyway, we arrived in L.A. late Wednesday night. We love our road trips. We always eat In N Out on the way out of town and then stuff our faces with junk on the rest of the drive. The boys get to watch movies and stay up late eating food that is bad for them. We sure like our road trips. We stayed with my friend Anisha, and my boys had fun playing with her little boy Max. On Thursday we got to Disneyland at about 10am, maybe 11, and we met up with Bec, Jud, Sadie, Colleen, and Jud’s nieces Brighton and Britten. We spent the day just riding rides, taking potty brakes, eating more junk, riding more rides, and finally left the park about 9:30 that night. I brought my camera with me only on Thursday because I hate lugging it around worrying about keeping it safe. So I left it home on Friday. The boys loved the Disneyland Railrod, Finding Nemo submarine ride, Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters, and anything that spun in circles like the tea cups and flying dumbo ride. It was so cute to see their excitement at the parade and watch their faces light up as they saw all their favorite Disney characters.  It was all decorated for Christmas so their was Christmas music playing which made it feel really nice. Thursday wasn’t too busy, but Friday was Veteran’s Day, and it was super busy. But the lines didn’t seem to be that bad either day. There were several things that I couldn’t ride on, which made me sad, but I still had so much fun riding all the other things. Easton rode on Splash Mountain and Space Mountain with Bec and Jud and their nieces, and I think they said he seemed pretty terrified on both of them. But he later said he liked them. We went on the Ferris Wheel at California Adventure, and let me tell you – it was no regular ferris wheel. It was pretty scary for Jacob, Easton, and me because the cage swung back and forth really high which we weren’t expecting, but my little Teagan just laughed with pure delight, saying, “Dis is so fun!!” He was hysterical with delight while the rest of us were too afraid to look over the side. At one point Easton clung to me in terror and said, “I can’t breathe.” But after the ride he said he liked it. So we had so much darn fun. Teags got scared on several rides that weren’t scary at all, but the dark kinda threw him off I guess. And the Bug’s Life 3D movie thing puffed bursts of air at us, which he didn’t like along with the water the bugs squirt at us. He still had a ton of fun though. We left Saturday around 1pm and got home last night about 7 pm. We stopped and ate lunch and stopped several times for bathroom breaks, so that made our trip 6 hours.  But we had so much fun rocking Disneyland till we dropped. Teagan asked me if I could just put him in my purse after we had been waiting in line for a while for the Haunted Mansion. Poor guy was so tired and was trying to think of ways to get off his feet. On Friday night Teags fell asleep on the train, but he loved the train so much and wanted to stay on it the whole time. We ended our Disneyland trip with a train ride a couple times around, and little Teags was just pooped and fell right asleep. Such fun memories with my 3 favorite boys. 

11-6-11 What Messes Really Mean

You know what I am grateful for? Messes around my house that I can complain about. Like little crumpled up socks on the bathroom floor because Teags always has to strip down when he poops on the potty but never remembers to put his socks back on when he gets dressed again. It makes me smile when I find army or combat guys in the refrigerator, and I know Easton’s been in there. I complain about my downstairs bathroom smelling like pee every day even if I just mopped it because Teags can’t seem to get his aim right, but I love it because it means he’s just a little boy who’s trying to figure out how to be a big boy. I love cleaning up at night and finding stray toys that the boys forgot to clean up and thinking back to earlier in the day when those toys were engaged in all sorts of imaginary battles that I listened to Easton narrate. I love folding green Hulk pajama pants that Teagan just looks so cute in.  And Jacob and I always smile if we lay down on something poky or sharp in our bed at night and find little toy figures or cars or batmans hiding under our sheets because Teagan watched a movie in our bed. All of these things just mean that I have two little boys who bless my home with their innocence and purity, two little boys whose smiles, and even whines and cries, fill my life with purpose and the pure joy that being a mother brings. I get caught up in the things that don’t matter, like cleaning and all sorts of other things. I remember telling my mom one day, “My children think I have nothing better to do than to tend to their whines and complaints all day.  They think my world revolves around them. ” And my sweet mother said, “Well, you really don’t have anything better to do. Being a mom is the best and most important thing you can do.” I loved it when she said that to me. Because what matters most is that there are little children running wild in my house (ok, they aren’t really wild and my house isn’t in shambles) being boys, making messes, leaving soapy handprints on my freshly-wiped mirrors. And one day those things will all be gone. My house will stay clean when I clean it, toys will no longer be strewn across the living room floor, and my bathroom won’t smell like pee from little boys who can’t get their aim right. And just thinking about those things being gone makes me miss them. Not everyone gets to be a mom. Or some moms lose children, and I’m sure they long for the whines and complaints and messy handprints and little shoes left on the floor and toys in the tub that the rest of us complain about because it gives us more work to do. But I have figured out that I love that work. I love that work because of the little ones that create all this work for me to do in my day like I have nothing better to do with my time because in all actuality I don’t have anything better to do. I’m doing the best thing I can be doing.

Another added bonus to my blessed life is going in to the boys room at night to check on them and finding Teagan asleep on Easton’s shoulder. I had heard Teags crying, and then I heard a soft sweet voice comforting him, like is just so typical of my sweet Easton, and later found them sleeping like this (The flash kind of startled them). Who cares if my house doesn’t look like it did before I had children. Who cares if I don’t have vacuum lines in my carpet anymore. Who cares if there are soapy handprints on the mirror in the boys’ bathroom. At the end of the day, they – those sweet boys of mine – are the result of my toils, the sweet fruit of my labors.

11-6-11

Here I am at 18 weeks 2 days pregnant with baby boy #3. Baby boy has no name yet, but we still like Ledger and sometimes Logan.