a lesson on faith

Our little family has been having a pretty tough year.  Sometimes, it has felt like nothing is going right, and as soon as we resolve one major problem, another hits us.  But through all of our trials in the past few months, we have been given so many blessings. I have been feeling so incredibly blessed lately, and I wanted to share a few of my experiences.

Back in December, I was having a really hard time dealing with stress. I'm a very high-stress person, and I've always had trouble dealing with anxiety. But it was really hitting me hard in December.  My biggest worry at the time was our housing situation.  We had been living in our townhouse almost a year, and our lease was going to be up at the end of January.  We were not renewing our contract mostly because we couldn't afford it, but also because we hated our landlord and he didn't ever take care of anything.  (Example:  Our living room ceiling leaked the entire year that we lived there, even though we told him about it and he promised to fix it on many different occasions.  And when I say it leaked, I mean it was bad enough that we had to put several big plastic tubs under all the leaks whenever it rained or snowed.)  So I had been on the lookout for cheaper housing for a few months.  I found a place in September and got us on their waiting list, but the average wait was 6 to 7 months, which wouldn't put us in a new place until mid-March or April.  Month-to-month leases & leases shorter than 6 months are pretty much non-existent around here, so we didn't know where we were going to live until the new place was available.  The only option we had found was splitting up our family--Jacob was going to have to find a room to rent in Columbia, and I was going to have to take the girls and move in with Jacob's parents, who live about an hour and a half away.  I hated the idea--every time we talked about it, I would burst into tears.  Even though I have amazing in-laws, I didn't want to be away from Jacob.  I didn't want to take my newborn baby and almost-2-year-old and live without my husband, only seeing him for 2 days on the weekend.  But we couldn't find any other solution, so we worked on finding Jacob a place to stay, and I tried not to think about it.

I remember having an especially hard time with my anxiety one night, so I sat down to re-read some of the talks from our church's October General Conference.  The talk I decided to read was Forget Me Not from Dieter F. Uchtdorf.  (The title is a link to his talk for anyone who wants to read it.)  One of the passages from his talk that really got to me was part of his fifth point, "Forget not that the Lord loves you" when he said, "Wherever you are, whatever your circumstances may be, you are not forgotten. No matter how dark your days may seem, no matter how insignificant you may feel, no matter how overshadowed you think you may be, your Heavenly Father has not forgotten you. In fact, He loves you with an infinite love."  After finishing the talk, I remember feeling so loved and so much at peace, and the incredible anxiety I had been feeling for weeks was gone.  A couple days later, I got a phone call.  The housing people had called to say that our name came up on the waiting list, and we would be able to move into our new place sometime in January... which was months before we should have been able to, with their normal wait.  I'd say that we were lucky, but I know that it wasn't simply luck.  There could not have been a more perfect answer to our problem.

I had another faith-strengthening experience this past month.  We have been having some extra stress lately due to finances.  I think finances & money stress most people out, and they've always been a problem for us, but this month we hit a new low.  We couldn't pay our bills.  We had enough money to pay maybe one-fifth of our bills for the month, and that was it.  We were having to choose which bills we were going to pay and which bills were going to go unpaid for a few months until Jacob's new student loans came in.  It was scary... we've never been in that situation before, and I didn't like it.

I have been working at the Sylvan Learning Center as a tutor in the evenings since we first moved to Columbia, but due to Jacob's clinical schedule, I basically had to quit.  It just doesn't work anymore with his schedule, and one of us has to be here with our girls.  I joined a website a little over a year ago where people post childcare/babysitting jobs to see if I could find something that would work with our situation, but there has never been anything that would work for us.  With only one car, and Jacob's class/clinical schedule being what it is, and with his clinical sites not all being in Columbia, and having two kids of my own, I just couldn't find any job that would work with everything else in our crazy lives.

I talked to my mom quite a bit about our situation, because she's my mom, and I love her, and she's one of my best friends, and I talk to her about almost everything.  My mom always gives me the same advice when I call her about my problems:  pray, ask the Lord for help, have faith, don't lose hope.  And I try, but I don't always have enough faith.  Sometimes, I lose hope.  When I look at our situation and I can't see any possible way that it can be resolved, I feel hopeless and I freak out.  And I cry.  But my mom was right about our housing problem back in December--despite the fact that there was no possible solution (that I could see), everything worked out!  And again, with our financial situation this month, my mom was right.

I already mentioned the website I joined to look for childcare jobs... well, after being on the website over a year and actively searching for jobs but never finding anything, a job fell into my lap.  The woman didn't even post a job--she and her husband just saw my profile, and they contacted me about watching their daughter a few days a week.  I started last week, and the job really is perfect.  They bring her here, and I watch her while still being able to watch my own children.  I will earn more watching her than I ever did in a month working at Sylvan, and I never even have to leave my house.

And the opportunities didn't stop there.  Around the same time, I found out about a second website for childcare jobs, so I joined that one and applied to a few jobs.  I start an evening babysitting job next week, working on weeknights.  The schedule is perfect--Jacob will always be home & able to watch our kids so that I can leave, and the one night that I can never work due to Jacob's church responsibilities is the one night that the mother doesn't need someone.  

I also have a 3-day babysitting job at the end of the month, which I am able to do because it's during Jacob's break between his summer clinicals & his fall semester.  In the three days I work, I'll earn enough money to pay a fourth of our bills for August.

After a year of finding nothing, I got three jobs in one week.  Luck?  I think not!

My faith has been strengthened so much by these experiences.  Every time we have had a serious problem and it seems like there is no possible solution, Heavenly Father has given us one. Elder Uchtdorf definitely had it right... Heavenly Father has not forgotten us.

They Came, They Ate, They Left.

Today, two of my good friends from Utah came to visit!  Well, we were all friends when we lived in Provo, but they're actually both from Missouri.  Sarah now lives in California, and Liz is home for a visit before she and her family move to New York City.  It was so fun to see them and their kiddos!  It has been about a year since I've seen Liz, and I haven't seen Sarah since we moved from Provo 2 years ago.

We ate a little lunch and then spent a few hours catching up, chatting, and playing with our kiddos.  I loved having them visit, but it made me miss them more, too.  I miss the days in Provo where we all lived within a block of each other.

Here is a photo from when Naomi first met Brooklyn (Sarah's daughter)...

and here is when Naomi first met Elliot (Liz's son)...

and here are all of our kids today!

From left to right:  Elliot holding Penelope (Liz's kids), Naomi & Aleta (my kids), and Brooklyn (Sarah's daughter)

And here's a pic of the three of us today.  I looked, but I couldn't find a single photo of us together from before we all moved from Provo.  Sad!

Thanks for coming to visit, Liz & Sarah!  I miss you guys already.

Perfect Moments

Life is messy and hard and busy and extremely stressful... at least mine is, anyway.  But once in a while, I find myself living a perfect moment... one that I wish I could bottle up and save to re-live when life is not so perfect.

I had one of those perfect moments a few months ago.  I was holding Aleta, and she was at the age where she had recently started smiling.  As I held her, she was just staring at me and giving me the most beautiful little baby smile, and I started crying (happy tears).  It probably sounds silly (at least to anyone who isn't a mother), but I could see in those beautiful little eyes how much she loved me.  I felt adored, and at that moment, everything else in life seemed completely insignificant.

Tonight, I had another perfect moment.  Jacob & I were putting Naomi to bed, and for some reason she was really wired and hyper (but also in a really good, happy mood).  So Jacob and I climbed into bed with Naomi to try to get her to calm down and get sleepy.  Naomi was laying between us, leaning her head on mine, and I had my arm over her so that I could hold Jacob's hand.  I felt calm and so incredibly happy, just laying there with two of my favorite people in the world.

I love my little family so much!  :)

Our Night in Hell

Our air conditioning broke yesterday.  The high temperature here for the day was 106, and it didn't hit that high until almost 5:00.  At 6:30, it was still 103 degrees outside, and the temperature inside our house was over 80... on the first floor.  That is when I felt the barely-cool air coming out of the vents and realized our air conditioning was broken.  So we called the emergency maintenance number, and because our maintenance guys are awesome, they came immediately.  They were able to fix the problem, but the air conditioner had overheated and we weren't able to turn it back on until this morning.

I had planned a delicious dinner:  stuffed shells, garlicky cheesy Italian bread, and some yummy vegetables.  But it gets hot enough with the oven on when the air conditioner is working... there was no way I was going to leave the oven on for an hour at 350 degrees.  I didn't want to stand over a hot burner, either, so we had a smorgasbord of microwaveable foods & other various snacks for dinner.  Jacob found 6 taquitos left in the bag, so we ate those first.  Then we finished off the last 3 chicken fries.  Jacob completed his meal with some chips & salsa, and I finished my dinner with a couple Eggo pancakes.  We were originally going to just have root beer floats for dinner, but we were too hungry & needed something more substantial.  So we had the root beer floats for dessert, instead.

The rest of the night was rough.  No, it was the night from hell.  The temperature inside our house spiked somewhere around 87, and it was at least 5 degrees hotter upstairs, probably closer to 10.  We have ceiling fans upstairs in the bedrooms, but when they're just blowing around 95 degree air, they're not really helping.  So we had a family slumber party in the living room, which sounds a lot more fun than it was.

Naomi doesn't sleep unless she is in her own bed.  She usually goes to bed around 8:30... it took us until 2 am to get her to sleep last night on the couch.  We also tried letting her sleep on the air mattress with us, but she wouldn't lay still for more than 30 seconds on the air mattress.  To her, it was a giant trampoline.

Aleta was only a little easier.  She slept in the pack 'n play, but because she was overtired and extremely hot and cranky, it took us a good hour or more to get her to fall asleep.  With the lights on and Jacob & I both in the room doing things and Naomi running around being a crazy 2-year-old, there was just too much going on for Aleta to sleep.  She's used to going to bed in her crib in her dark, quiet room.

I will say this:  Although the night completely sucked, and it was one of the top 3 worst nights of my life, there were a few things I was grateful for:

1.  Our awesome air mattress--it is seriously comfy.

2.  The thoughtful maintenance guy--when he came inside to tell us we had to wait to turn the a/c back on, he recommended that we get out our fans, if we had any.  I told him we didn't have any.  About 20 minutes later, he was standing at our front door with a box fan for us to borrow.  We set it up in the corner of the living room so it was blowing air on all 4 of us, and it made such a difference. 

Our Place-- the living room

When we moved into our current place here in Columbia, we lost quite a bit of room and a TON of storage space.  I didn't love our last place, and it was way too expensive, but it did have tons of storage, which was awesome.  It had a big coat & storage closet under the stairs, a large pantry, a large storage closet beside the pantry, cabinet space under the sink in the downstairs bathroom, double cabinet space under the sinks in the upstairs bathroom, a linen closet, a closet along an entire wall in our bedroom, and a decent-sized closet in Naomi's bedroom.  For a little townhouse, it had awesome storage.

Here, however, there is practically nothing.  We have a decent-sized closet in our room, and the girls' closets have a little space for some storage, and there is a small closet under the stairs, but that's it.  No pantry.  No linen closet.  No cabinets for storage in the bathrooms (the sinks are those pedestal sinks, so there aren't any cabinets under them).  No extra storage closets.  So I have had a really hard time unpacking our stuff.  We've been here for 7 months now, and until this week, our living room still had quite a few unpacked boxes & bins lining the walls & stacked in corners.  So you can get an idea of how bad the room looked before and how much stuff we had to move, here are two pictures (both were taken by Naomi... she likes to play with the camera):

You can see some of the storage I stacked under the computer table and some of the junk that was sitting on the treadmill. 

Another view of the stuff stacked on the treadmill.  There was probably the same amount of junk & bins & boxes stacked in the corner of the room, too, but I don't have a picture of that.

I finally decided I couldn't stand it anymore (and I needed our house to look nice because I am going to start doing a little babysitting here--more on that later), so I went on a cleaning frenzy.  I basically organized and tidied and deep cleaned for 3 days straight.  (I am exhausted!)  And when Jacob was off on Wednesday for the 4th, I made him help me move all the heavy stuff out of the room & rearrange a few pieces of furniture into a better arrangement.  I also made him put up the curtains that I bought way back in February.  I was so excited--this is the first time we've ever had curtains in our living room, and I love it!  I think curtains make any room look 10 times better.  Someday, we will have curtains in our bedroom, too.  Not any day soon, but someday!  :)

Before I decided I wanted to rearrange furniture, I made Jacob finally help me hang some pictures.  But then we moved the furniture around, and the pictures aren't in the right spots anymore.  So please ignore the off-center wall arrangements... I'll have to move them around a bit to get them where I want them.

Because of the lack of storage space here, I have had to get creative and utilize space that I wouldn't normally use... like under the computer table.  I used the space under the computer table to stack boxes of food storage and some file boxes.  Then, because I hated how trashy it looked with all the stacked boxes/bins underneath, I made a table skirt for it.  I used one of the same red sheets that I used to cover our couch & chair because I had a couple extras, so it even matches.  I used industrial strength Velcro to attach it to the edge of the table, and I cut a separate piece for the space in front of the computer screen so when we are sitting at the computer, we can just take that piece off.  That way, we can scoot the chair in without having the sheet in the way or in our lap.  The one thing I haven't done yet is hem the bottom & edges.  It doesn't look amazing, but it is definitely better than seeing all the boxes!

I also took a ton of toys & moved them to Naomi's room.  We used to not have very many toys, but through gifts from family & friends, we now have a good selection of toys!  We were keeping them all in the living room because Naomi spends most of her time playing there, but that meant the living room looked like a disaster area all the time.  It was impossible to keep the room clean.  Naomi would dump everything and get out every toy so that the floor was covered, and it would take me an hour to clean it up every night.  So I chose enough toys to cover the bottom two shelves of the bookcase and put everything else in a bin in Naomi's room.  She can still play with the rest of the toys in her room, and I can change up the toys that are downstairs every week or so, but I don't have a huge mess to clean up downstairs anymore!  I am loving it!