Visualizing

Do you ever visualize yourself doing things? Sometimes I try to look into the future and see if I see myself doing a particular thing. Right now a lot of my visualizing centers around being a stay at home mom. Six years ago I couldn't visualize very clearly, now I can. I can see almost every aspect of it except for two things, one being the money part. I was recently told by a good friend who quit her job after the first of the year that it really is ok - we spend what we make and if we don't make it we don't spend it. It's a good theory that she is putting to the test right now and seems to be doing great. I think for me to do this God is going to have to hit me over the head with it, like a big FOR SALE sign in the office window when I pull up one Monday morning.


The second thing I'm having a hard time visualizing is another child to be at home with. No matter how hard I try I can't see another baby in our house, I can't see another car seat in my car, I can't see another child laying beside Cade as we read and pray with them each night. J tells me I'm crazy because he can see it ( I don't know if I can trust it because my vision is better than his!) He reminds me that we couldn't visualize Cade in our lives before we had him. That's not totally true, he probably couldn't visualize it before because he never tried. He was a little more reluctant about having a baby when we did but God smacked him in the head with Cade. I could see myself going to the mall pushing a baby in a stroller or taking it for a walk. I could see it very clearly. Right now I just can't see me doing that with another baby. I wonder if it's just that my brain that is trying to protect my heart or if it's God way of preparing me for what is ahead. I just don't know.....I hope that I'm wrong about it. I do hope it's just me being pessimistic because there are days it feels like it is never going to happen. Even though we are signed up with an adoption agency there are no guarantees, there are couples who never get picked. We are still early in our adoption journey, we've only been waiting 4 1/2 months which is nothing. It's just when you add that onto the months we dealt with infertility it seems forever.

Cade must not be having a problem visualizing it either because he's always talking about when he gets a brother...... One day he said something about him and his brother both being 5 together. I told him that when his brother's 5 he will probably be 12. It took awhile for him to process it, but now I've heard him say it several times.....When I'm 12 and my brother's 5 we'll play Transformers etc. I so hope that I was close when I gave him that age difference. I do want him to have a brother (or sister) before he reaches an age of where he is too old to play with them the way that he can visualize himself doing now.

Catch Up

It's been awhile since I've posted about some of the events that have happened the last few weeks.

• Avery spent Friday and Saturday nights Feb 15&16
• Cade tried to physically remove Avery from the kitchen on Sunday
• Avery screamed "No" at him and then pushed him
• Cade was glad when Avery left so he could sit in my lap again (but I missed her)
• Avery really was a very good girl, she even took a nap
• We had another bad winter storm last Thursday
• I missed another day of work because of it
• Cade started running another fever, so we are on our 4th round of medicine since Thanksgiving
• I had a flat tire on my car this past Sunday
• J had to meet me at a gas station to change it (in his good Sunday clothes)
• I had to drive Big Red to a baby shower, she and I have became good friends this past week
• J and Cade took my car, with the little bitty spare on it, to buy another tire
• We learned we will avoid purchasing 4 new tires at the same time for that car, WOW!
• I giggled through Cade's nightly prayer Sunday night, because I thanked God for not letting my flat be any worse than it was.....and the vision of J changing my tire came to me (those who know J, know what I'm talking about)
• We've been notified of 2 more potential adoption situations
• We have declined to have our profile shown in one of the situations
• We still haven't decided on the other situation, we have until Friday
• I just decided to use Cade's name in the post...this will be a test to see how often J reads this

My Sense of Humor

J always says I have a weird sense of humor and I'm sure he is right. All of us Fowler's seem to have a little different sense of humor. Today my car had to go into the shop so I dropped C and J off at school and drove "Big Red" to work today. I hate driving the truck, it is way too big for me. I prefer my short, small little car that I can zip around in. I think when I drive the truck I tend to go a little slower and don't accelerate quite as fast as I do in my car, but I still drive the speed limt. I was on my way back from getting the mail today and I was driving thru a school zone which is 20mph. I always slow down because I've seen several people stopped along that street. Once you get pass the school the limit goes up to 30mph. Big Red and I were puttering thru the school zone at 20mph when all of a sudden an Old Man in a white truck PASSED me. He looked over and gave me a dirty look. We still ended up at the Roundabout at the exact same time so he didn't gain anything. Every time I think about the look on his face when he passed me I laugh, like I was an Old Woman holding up traffic. I'm sure I'll be laughing about this for days, J on the other hand won't get why I'll still be laughing about this on Friday. You probably had to be there but it was the icing on my weird day.

Ice Storm

Here are some pictures from our latest ice storm this week. I don't know the official results, but I think it was close to being as thick as the one last January. The thing that saved us was that we had lost so many trees a year ago that the branches had been cleared away from the power lines. I can't remember from last year, but it also seems like the ice melted quicker with this last storm. It was completely gone by yesterday. I don't know how our landscaping will fare after this storm. It had taken a beating last year and it didn't look very good last summer. We also had a late freeze last spring so I don't know how much that had to do with the sad shape of our shrubs. My Rose of Sharon's were completely laid over again. We'll see what happens this spring.

You could hear the branches breaking everytime we walked by this shrub. It was kinds of like grass breaking.

This was looking across the road at our neighbor's house

The Valentines Box

Thanks for all the ideas for the box. Kristy, Leslie and Charity all had some good ideas that I'll have to remember for future use. Last night on the way home from work an idea finally came to me (one that I already had the stuff for) C fell asleep and he slept the whole time I was working on the box. I decided it wasn't worth waking him up to have him help because that would've been a miserable experience for all involved.

J dropped C off at school today and he said there were some neat boxes. I think he finally realized how serious of a business valentine boxes are. He said one looked like a John Deere tractor. We had briefly talked about trying to make one look like a Pirate Ship, but I don't think J was fully into that and it overwhelmed me so I let it go. J said we should've done a Pirate Ship, but one consolation was that the Tractor box threw a wheel. The kindergartner asked Jay to glue it back for him. J told him Mrs L was a better gluer than he was. Don't you know Mrs L probably lost her mind today with box fix-ups. J called once C got over to the high school and said there was a homemade blue ribbon on the box that said Most Lovliest. One down 6more to go.

HAPPY VALENTINES DAY

On Raising a Boy.....

As many of you know I really didn't know what I was going to do when we found out C was going to be a boy. My own family only consisted of girls, even the majority of the cousins my age were girls. I had no idea what to do with a boy. After he was born and I got settled into the motherhood thing, I feel like I adjusted pretty well to having a boy. There are still a few things I don't understand, like the constant machine gun noise that comes from his mouth, but I've learned to live with it. Looking back over the last 6 years I don't think I've done too many things that would've have scarred him....until now. I'm at a total loss of what to do, we have to make a Valentine Box for school tomorrow.

I asked J last week what we should do. The response I got was "I don't know" then it passed out of his mind as quickly as it had entered it. I on the other hand have been stewing about this box for a week because I knew it was ultimately going to be my responsibility. For a girl the pinker and frillier the better, for a boy I knew that wasn't going to cut it. How do you make a masculine valentine box? I'm a 50/50creative person, which means 50% of the time I can have some really good ideas. The other 50% of the time I'm completely clueless. Right now I'm in the other 50%. Sunday afternoon I took C to Wal-Mart to pick out his valentines and to get something to decorate the box with. I asked J to go with us, but he wanted to work outside so I faced picking out the decorations alone. I brought them home and showed them to J and he told me absolutely not was I going to do that for a boy's box. So I'm back to square one. J will be home late tonight so that leaves me to decorate the box alone, after he assured me on Sunday he would "make it happen" (as he was laughing at my idea). I love my boy more than anything in the world and I wouldn't trade him for anything, but this is one of those times I like remind his father he was the one that wanted a boy so bad - he can deal with the valentine box. But then the perfectionist side of me comes out. If I leave J and C to deal with the box C will be sent to school with a Wal-Mart sack which would reflect badly on his mother. I guess I'm stuck decorating a box that looks like a valentine box, but yet still remains masculine. Maybe it will ice again tonight????

Does Your House Suffer from CHAOS?

At least one night a week our house turns into utter chaos, and it has been this way for years. Toys everywhere, laundry piled up (usually clean that no one has wanted to fold yet), mail on the counter, bathroom counter covered with my makeup and hair supplies, etc. This usually happens somewhere around Thursday evening when my work week has finally caught up with me and I'm exhausted. Also Thursday night is CSI night so nothing gets done around the house between 8 and 9, except with this writers strike I don't have an excuse at the moment. Normally by the weekend it's somewhat back in shape until the next Thursday rolls around. When I tell people this they don't believe me because anytime someone is over at our house it is always clean. I don't know if they've figured out that they were invited, so yes it is clean. I'm very much a perfectionist and when people come over I want it perfect, but after they leave chaos seems to reign once again. Today on another blog I learned what CHAOS stands for and it fits my house to a tee - Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome (I think that is so funny). Yes, my house suffers from CHAOS, I am admitting it. If you show up at my house uninvited you are very likely to see our CHAOS, but that's ok (or at least I'm telling myself that it is, but if anyone does see my house like that I will want to crawl in a hole) Does anyone else have a night that is utter CHAOS, surely I'm not the only one....

I think we've been rejected again

Over the last two weeks we agreed to have our profile shown in two different situations and since we haven't heard anything I'm guessing those weren't our babies. I know that God has a baby in mind for us and those weren't it. Both of these situation weren't exactly our "ideal" situation, but we decided to be shown anyway. J's probably relieved because he was a little unsure about both of them, but we stuck to our plan of "God knows what we need" and gave our agency the OK.

All that aside, we were rejected. I don't think there's many people in the world that like the feeling of being rejected. I remember when we were selling our house and people gave me the advice to find out from our relator what people looking at it were saying. What did they like, what didn't they like. I feel that way about our profile. I wish we could get some feedback on it, do they not like some of the pictures, do they not like my haircut, do they not like the fact that we have a biological child, etc. But like knowing what was right/wrong with our house, there also isn't much we can do about what people like and dislike about us. I was asking J last night if it was my hair - my hair was shorter and it was red, did that make me look like an unloving mother? The picture of the three of us in DC on their website - do we look like nerds in it? J of course thought this was the craziest thing that he had ever heard, which I know it is, but still it makes me wonder. I also know we haven't been doing this for very long. Once (if) we get to the 1 year mark I might start looking at making some changes, but until then we'll just ride it out. But still I ponder....What's wrong with us?

Ramblings from early morning....

I haven't been able to sleep the last few nights. I'm not sure why, but it's starting to get annoying. I was already awake, but it didn't help when our bed of 2 became a bed of 5 around 2:30 am. C came in with his stuffed penguin and dinosaur. I finally got tired of trying to fight Mr Dinosaur for a place in the bed so now I'm up. I have a boring meeting to sit through today so this is not going to be good.

I haven't been good about updating the blog so far this year, partly because things have been relatively quiet and then partly because work is so busy right now - I haven't had the time to try to make our day to day lives sound interesting. J's Grandmother did pass away two weeks ago. I hadn't said anything about that yet, not that we aren't missing her, but everyone who reads this blog already knew. The evening of her funeral we went through her pictures and I pulled out the ones she had of our family. She had some cute pictures of C that I hadn't seen before. I'm going to scan and post a few of them. I don't know which makes me sadder - how little C was or how thin I was! It's hard to believe we are approaching his 6th birthday. Where has the time gone?

Another thing that's going on is J's reached a point of frustration with some things right now. He's probably not going to like me typing that out for everyone to see, but it's part of the process. It's hard to say when you reach the point what caused it, is it the infertility, your job (we are going into his busiest time of the year), day to day frustrations, etc. It's like what came first - the chicken or the egg? But it can compound until the point of where you feel like you're doing nothing but beating your head against a wall. Things will turn around, they always do, but sometimes it's just so frustrating. I hate it because I know how he feels, I know that feeling of frustration so well because I've been there many times over the past almost 3 years. For me to have these cycles are nothing new, but it is different for J to have them. You hate to see anyone, especially loved ones, go through these times. So what do we do in these times....last night we played two competitive rounds of Memory. C just amazes me with that game. Once I turn my cards back over I can't even remember what they were. He on the other hand plays with his toys, watches commercials and just goofs around and he still can easily get matches. We all were close last night, but I think J won both games with C coming in second. I've just resigned myself to the fact that there is no way this almost 31 year old can keep up with an almost 6 year old at Memory.

Happy Birthday Mom

Today is mom's birthday. We met her, Dad, Pampa, Justin, Charity and Avery today after church for lunch. We all had a good time. We hadn't seen Avery since Christmas so that was fun. She finally feels like she's putting on some weight. I usually feel like I'm going to throw her through the ceiling each time I pick her up, but yesterday it didn't feel that way. Happy Birthday Mom, thank you for everything that you have done and continue to do for us over the years. We love you!
Love,
J, C & C

P.S. I thought I had a picture at work to add to the post and it won't copy right onto the blog. The only other one I have at work is of your rear end at Thanksgiving. I thought you might rather me not post that one!