SOLAR ECLIPSE

The event we've been planning for 7 years has finally arrived!! The Talbot-Lewis-Archibald Solar Eclipse extravaganza of 2017.  Amy sent out an email suggesting this idea after having had a fun experience with an Annular Eclipse shortly after Chris and I moved to Canada.  The original location was going to be at the Grand Teton camping grounds Yellowstone National Park. But when we couldn't secure a group reservation site when reservations opened up Jan. 1st, despite 4 of us calling over and over again for hours, we looked into other ideas.  Amanda and Peter discovered that flights were significantly cheaper for them to come down south, and it was really convenient for Chris and I to not have to fly anywhere so we jumped on board with that idea. So Amy and Justin found this house to rent right in the middle of the band of totality for a good price in Hiawassee, Georgia near Chattanooga, Tennessee. About two weeks before the trip there was some crazy rain and cloud cover all over the South and it wasn't expected to leave before the Eclipse so the trip almost got canceled, but we're so glad our friends were willing to risk the cost of travel and still make it!

The Lewis' traveled up from Baton Rouge via our house and spent the night with us on Friday. It was SO FUN to share with them a snapshot of our life in MS and it was awesome how after an awkward couple of minutes how easily the younger kids just fell into comfortable play-time mode and had a lot of fun playing.  Of course, there was no awkwardness with seeing our friends again. Gosh, we miss them!

Saturday morning we packed up and headed to meet the Talbots in Georgia!   Amanda and I rode with some of our kids and followed Chris and Peter with the other kids. It was so awesome to have some long interrupted talk time... even if Chris and Peter got distracted and made a few wrong turns! Ha. :)  Good friends will do that to you.

We made it to Georgia for a late-ish dinner with the Talbots at the house. Because everyone else had put so much money into traveling Chris and I felt it would be best for us to take care of all the food. So I made up a menu a few days before and we brought most of the food and cooking implements - not sure how much stuff the house would have on hand. The only thing we forgot was milk, (and pjs for Gwen) but luckily the nearby town wasn't quite so packed and congested as we had potentially feared and it wasn't a big deal to grab some at the nearby store. We had heard rumors of tens of thousands of people flocking to towns and areas completely unequipped for handling such and influx.  And definitely there were a LOT more people around by Monday morning (but not really any crazy amounts).  It was a good thing we brought everything we needed though, because the house did NOT have much in the way of cooking/serving equipment. It was kind of a funny house to be honest. It was only a 1 bedroom house but it said it slept 18 between the loft area and a basement area. It was super musty and kinda not the cleanest and had some interesting artwork in the private areas ;).  But it was all we needed for a good price. The owners did NOT know about its prime location within the band of totality when Amy reserved our time in early Spring and there was a last minute effort to ditch out on us and rent it for lots more money. (They were advertising camping space on the lot for $900 a night! and asked if we wouldn't mind sharing water and a bathroom with the campers.... um. No. A water hose and an electrical cord was fine, but letting random people into the house where we have so many kids to use the bathroom at anytime was disconcerting.) I'm so grateful Amy and Justin dealt with emotionally and financially all the house stuff. They are pretty wonderful people.

It was also completely un-awkward to see the Talbots after so long and the kids all got along great and us adults basically sat and chatted most of the days. :) So so fun. I really loved sitting on the porch with our old friends, slowly eating dinner/dessert while we talked about typical EV topics (fairly intellectual and academic..to the point where I don't have much to say but just love to listen in on). Its seriously felt just like it did 8 years ago as we sat around the courtyard talking while our kids played.

Sunday, Chris and I and the kids popped over to the nearest LDS chapel for the first 1/2 of a sacrament meeting. The branch there was pretty small and met in an unorthodox rented out building space downtown in one of the small towns. There were a lot of extra people there for the eclipse and it is always a testimony builder for me to experience church in different areas. I love the worldwide unity of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You can be anywhere and it feels like home.

I didn't want to take too much time away from seeing our friends since we had so little time together in the first place so we left after the first speaker and spent the rest of the morning playing Bing Bang BOING with the Lewis and Talbots. Then we explored the surrounding area and lake about 24 hours before the eclipse to get a good feel of sun exposure  and cloud cover (since the weather models for both days were SO similar). Due to a stream of partly cloudy activity we decided last minute (thanks to some awesome research and investigation on the part of the Lewis and Talbots and a guy the Lewis' knew who had access to government-level weather model programming) we decided to drive to another spot in the middle of the band of totality to increase our chances of having zero cloud interference during the eclipse time.

Monday morning we were up early and split up the kids to drive 2 hours way to be in another, more cloud-free area of the totality zone.  We worried about traffic and massive crowds again and planned to take very rural roads and watch it in a very small town, far away from any medium sized town.  Here are the boys in our car as we drove... all excited for the eclipse!

In fact, the small town didn't even have a single park, so we found a public cemetery (basically amongst houses, it felt private... almost like a family cemetery) and planned to watch it there. We were glad Chris and I brought a bunch of camping chairs and sleeping bags (which doubled as picnic blankets) and had a portable lunch and dinner planned. Since we arrived at the cemetery 15 minutes prior to the start of the eclipse and stayed until an hour or so after totality.

 As the moon started to cover the sun, we all enjoyed watching it through the special glasses and then playing around, eating, talking, and repeat. It was pretty hot and buggy. I'm glad we had a big tree for some shade and bug repellent (something I've learned never to NOT have in the car here in the South). The partial eclipse was pretty cool. The crescent shadows were fun.

Even as the sun was just a sliver popping out from behind the moon, it was still SO LIGHT that without the special glasses you wouldn't really notice much.  I was extremely impressed with just how powerful the sun is... even as just a tiny sliver.

Then RIGHT before total eclipse (like a minute or something) it got SUPER hazy and sunset-feeling. Only it wasn't exactly like a sunset, it was hazier.. like I kept wanting to rub my eyes and make everything clearer. The 360 degree sunset thing was cool and the cicadas started going all loud being confused about it being dusk already.

Justin counted us down to the second for when we could look up at the sun/moon without glasses on. and SERIOUSLY. WOW. Words cannot express how exciting and amazing it was to look up at a big white-burning ring in a dark sky with a few stars around. It was so unreal, un-earthly, so impressive and heart thumping.  Everyone was talking all at once exclaiming this or that. I was trying to take pictures of it (because I didn't know that it would still be too bright to show up on my silly phone camera). I wish I would've just sat and stared up at it. It was...an incredible experience and to see how much everyone else was affected by it was pretty cool too. Justin counted down again for the time we needed to put our glasses back on (it was so awesome to watch this with these particular friends as they're so educated and on top of stuff like this)

I was so sad to have to put the glasses back on and separate the cool eclipse from the entire world I could see around me. We reveled together in the awesome-ness of it for a while, ate some more food, took a few group pictures, played in the dirt and wandered around the cemetery looking for the oldest gravestone (we found one from a guy who fought in the revolutionary war!).

 

  

Then Chris and I had to say goodbye to our friends since we needed to be back for classes and school the next day and headed straight home. We encountered a little bit of traffic crossing back into Alabama by the major cities but nothing too bad.  It was such an amazing experience, made even more amazing by the sweet company of dear old friends. I know those words are old fashioned but they're also kinda timeless, right? I can't think of better words to describe the Lewis and Talbots.

Unconventional Costumes

Random fun: Gwen and Alec were having fun creating costumes out of non traditional costume bits. They often are fighting but they also have good moments, its nice to remember the good moments. 

Expecting Baby #5!

In December of 2015, we felt good about trying to have another baby. Freddy had just turned 2 and we didn't want a huge gap between them, but we also didn't feel rushed.  Ever since Chris' stem cell transplant in 2013 Chris' body has been unable to produce viable sperm, rendering him sterile.  For 6 months, I kept sort of hoping for a miracle... knowing the God is a God of miracles...maybe it'll happen for us.  Month after month I was sad when it didn't happen, but not devastated since I knew it was a long shot and I knew we had some banked sperm samples we gave before the transplant. I guess I just didn't know how the process would work and was nervous about the unknown. By July, we finally got the courage (I don't know why it took me so long!) to call the hospital in Birmingham, AL (3 hours from us) where the sperm was banked to ask how to go about using it.  We had to wait a month and a half for an appointment with the doctor. That appointment was just a meet and greet, lay out the options, explain the process, check out Chris' frozen samples, see how many good vials we have (turns out we had 10 vials - 5 great ones and 5 decent ones) and do an ultra sound to make sure everything looked ok on my end of the deal.  I was told to track my cycle and use ovulation kits to determine when I ovulate, then once the tests detect a surge of ovulation I am supposed to call the doctors and set up an appointment for the next day for an IUI (Intrauterine Insemination). 

Well by now it was September and we bought a cheap ovulation kit and tested it once a day (which was sometimes tricky since I had to hold my bladder for 3-4 hours before testing it in the middle of the day) The cheap brand ended up being tricky to read and we accidentally missed the window.  I was pretty frustrated.  The next month we got the more expensive brand that had a digital reader so we wouldn't have to try and decide how what exact shade the test line is... all we had to do was wait for the non-flashing happy face. Also it came with lots of testers so I tested twice a day, first time in the morning and in the afternoon.  We finally detected a surge and went in for our first IUI try. 

It was an all day affair - dropping off kids at a friends house around 6:30am since the schools didn't open that early and then driving 3 hours to the University of Birmingham hospital. They can't unthaw the sperm sample until they have written approval from Chris in person so we often had to wait an hour or more before they'd call us back into a regular room. Once there it went much like a normal peliv exam except for the slanted block under my lower back and the syringe with a long tiny tube they slip up inside me to my uterus.  It only took a few seconds to release the sample into me and then I'm supposed to wait on my back for 10 minutes or so then we would be free to go. We'd only have time to grab some fast food lunch on our 3 hour drive back to be home in time to get the kids from school at 3:00pm.  I remember having some uncomfortable cramps both on the drive out and back - I guess that's normal during ovulation, I just never noticed before.  (BTW, our insurance doesn't cover any of this, so we're paying out of pocket for everything. Not counting the first doctors visit and ultrasound each IUI costs around $400).

Then the waiting game to see if 'it took.' I can't stop myself from being optimistic and every single day I swore I was pregnant and got SO SO SAD when it didn't work.  We repeated the process in November - another ovulation kit, another 10 days of tracking levels, another surge detected, another trip out to Birmingham for an IUI, another 2 weeks of waiting and wondering - and it worked! I got a positive pregnancy test and was told to wait a few days and get blood work done at the local hospital to confirm the pregnancy. I did, and got a call the next day saying it was positive! They wanted me to repeat the lab work again in a few days which I did and the following day (Christmas Adam) they called to tell me the levels were dropping and I would miscarry soon.  The bleeding started that night.  A huge roller coaster of emotions and sadness.

We repeated the process again in January, - another ovulation kit, another 10 days of tracking levels, another surge detected, another trip out to Birmingham except here we had a major hiccup.  Since we had bad cell reception at our house, I missed a phone call telling me that because of a bad winter weather storm, the Reproduction lab would be closed. So we drove out to Birmingham to find an abandoned clinic. We didn't know what was going on and waited for a while, and eventually someone walked by who called somebody who then came to visit with us and talk and explain. I couldn't hold back the tears as we walked back to the car to drive back home.

We started the process again in February, - another ovulation kit, another 10 days of tacking levels and here we had another major hiccup. We were at a special once-in-a-life-time family reunion with all my siblings and their kids at Disneyland in California when we got a positive surge a little early. There would be no way to drive out to Birmingham AL the next day. I tried to enjoy our Disneyland trip still and not be so disappointed and I mostly succeeded.

We repeated the process again in March... and it didn't take. No baby.

We repeated the process again in April and the hiccup this time was that Chris had a special meeting for work that he couldn't cancel on the day we were supposed to have an IUI. The nurses assured us that he had signed approval enough in the past, it wouldn't be a problem, so I found a friend to watch Freddy for me and I went to Birmingham by myself to get pregnant. Once there, the lab technician still wanted approval from Chris. I worried I'd be turned away again and almost cried, but then they decided we could just call Chris and get verbal approval. Once we did the rest of the process was normal and I came home hoping for a baby.

A few weeks later we got a positive test!  After so many disappointments, I was trying to protect myself and was REALLY cautious to let myself fully believe it. Two rounds of blood work also showed a healthy pregnancy.  I had another appointment in Birmingham scheduled to do an ultrasound to check everything out and it still looked good! After that I started to believe for sure that we were expecting another baby.   I was super cautious and stopped running (but not exercising completely, I just stopped jumping around).  The doctors in Birmingham turned my prenatal care over to my regular OB doctor here in Starkville and the rest of the pregnancy is going normally.  Hurray for babies! Hurray for modern medicine that helped make this miracle happen.

My pregnancy symptoms have been much stronger with this one. I felt pretty nauseous in the afternoons/evenings and dry heaved alllll the time.  This pregnancy was reminding me so much of when I was pregnant with Gwen: I craved salty things like chips and cheese and meat... not necessarily sweets like I usually do and was SO TIRED (my thyroid levels were extra extra low so increasing my cynthroid dose helped a bit with that), I had an increased desire for Chris and I had some acne flare up.  Plus it just made so much sense that this baby would be a girl. Its probably our last, I really wanted Gwen to experience the joys of having a sister, and girls (in my experience) are just slightly more sweet, helpful, clean, and a little less rambunctious than boys.  I really wanted another girl. I knew I didn't know for sure it was a girl, so I tried to prepare myself to have another boy.

When we went in for the ultra sound, I thought I had neutralized my emotions. The technician shows us a healthy heart, brain, etc. and it didn't take more than a split second of looking for the gender that we all saw the distinctive shape of a little penis.  I tried to keep it together during the ultrasound and doctors appointment. but basically cried for the next day or two. (Sheesh... in re-reading this post I can see that I'm crying A LOT... not all of which can be blamed on pregnancy hormones...sorry).

(To my future baby boy: don't get me wrong... I LOVE YOU! I know I'll love you! I know you'll be just the perfect fit in our family. I wanted a girl when I was pregnant with Freddy too, and I KNOW that I'll love you just as much as I love him. )

But I felt like I lost a daughter. All my dreams about having daughterS and Gwen getting to experience girl time with a sister.. and having my boys and our house atmosphere refined a bit more with some feminine touch were lost.   If we had had a girl, I would've felt quite sure that we were done and complete, but now I'm not positive and yet with how complicated it is to get pregnant and already having 5 kids... I don't really want to do that all again. 

I probably should've just ended this post with the happy news that we got pregnant, because now it just sounds all whiny and ungrateful, but I guess its how I feel so I'm writing it.

Preschool Week 1

Preschool! Freddy was SO excited about preschool! I was super nervous. I hosted an Open House where the families could come see the classroom and meet the other kids the Friday before so I got to know the kids a little better and that helped settle my mind a little about how it was going to go and I was mostly excited too for the first day!

Our first day was rainy and one of our friends wasn't able to come so it was just the 5 kids and me. It was ..... kinda super crazy.  I wasn't planning on going out in the rain for recess time, but we all needed it so I was able to scrounge up last minute a bunch of umbrellas and some extra boots.  I'm glad I told parents to bring extra clothes for emergency changes because a few of the kids got soaked (and I knew it was ok with their parents). I had been a little off in my planning as I was thinking back to my student teaching experience at the BYU preschool... which as I really thought about it after the first week...was a POST-Kindergarten class.... and my current class has two 2 year olds, two 3 year olds and two 4 year olds.   Some of the kids cried for their mom a few times, and sharing was often a problem and I felt like I was putting out fires and having to talk CONSTANTLY.  Like no joke, I was saying something every second whether it be breaking up a fight, encouraging a sad kid to get engaged with something, explaining a rule about only playing with the toys that are out, or some other thing. Whew. I was exhausted and shocked at how difficult it was and SOOO worried about what the next preschool day would be like when our youngest friend was able to join us.

The next preschool day was even crazier! I feel like I managed to keep my crazy emotions hidden from the kids and I hope they had a good time. Everyone certainly had a good moment, with most kids having lots of good moments. But our youngest friend had a really hard time. His first 20 minutes were great! No problem leaving mom, and loved building with the straws and pokie balls. But as soon as another kid had a sad moment and cried for mom for a split second, its like he realized for the first time that his mom wasn't there and he basically cried the rest of the time - like a scream/cry.  After getting him to calm down for short periods of time but by his 4th long crying/screaming spell where he wouldn't let me touch him or comfort him or distract him I texted his mom and asked her to come get him.  I could tell it was wearing on the other kids and I was totally unable to lead any of the activities.  This mom was so sweet and understanding and came right away. But once the other kids saw one mom come, 2 of them started crying for their moms and pretty much cried for 30 minutes longer till they came.  I was sweating like crazy and feeling a pretty stressed about this all just falling apart. WHAT WAS I THINKING starting a preschool while I was 6 months pregnant?!  I thought I was a talented teacher and it was humbling to have the first week be so difficult.

First Days of School!

School started on August 7th this year. The kids all visited their classrooms and met their teachers at the end of last week and so weren't nervous to go on the first day. Alec and Gwen have new schools, and Alec's is entirely new to all of us. He's at the 5th grade school called Overstreet Elementary. Gwen (2nd grade) moved up to Henderson Ward Stewart Elementary (grades 2-4) with Charlie (3rd grade).  

Both Chris and I took them through carpool drop off because some of them still wanted me to come with them and walk them to their class. But when we got in the carpool line, everyone said they knew where to go and they didn't want me to come in! We got off early enough that there wasn't too long of lines and Chris and Freddy and I were home pretty quick.

We would've loved to go eat breakfast somewhere (especially since it was our anniversary) but Chris had a big paper deadline that night and I was stressing over getting everything ready at home for preschool to start the next day so we both got to work! This is the first year that my Hillbrook Preschool idea has completely panned out. I have a full class of 6 kids (including Freddy) and despite the first kid who signed up last February dropping out 5 days before school started, I was able to fill the spot right away.  We have class twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 8:30-11:30.  I had gone crazy the past few weeks of summer trying to set up the classroom, update the playground equipment, get all the documents in order etc. This was a beast of a mental weight on me and I was excited to hopefully find a groove where it wouldn't be so all consuming.