3 children and 2 adults - Outnumbered!

Greetings from Mount Joy, PA! We are at my folks this weekend after a VERY short visit to Jason’s home area to return the twins to their parents, catch a bit of Ethan’s softball game and enjoy a whirlwind visit with Mom and Dad Benner and Christie. We are now in Mount Joy for Meryl Reist’s wedding (one of my other “sisters” from growing up on Longenecker Road). Right now, Kali is out with Grandpa Myers visiting Grandma who is at a Dream Ride fundraiser for Compeer (she didn’t want Mommy or Daddy to come with her…). I find myself every two minutes or so looking around to find where she is and what she might be getting into, only to then remind myself that it is just me at the computer and Jason lying on the couch reading a National Geographic. I don’t have anyone I need to be looking out for right now and I can relax. It’s an unusual feeling. You might be wondering why…

Last Friday (July 20^th), Ethan, Jenn, Joshua and Sabrina arrived for a much anticipated visit. Ethan, Jason’s brother, worked with Jason for a good part of the weekend laying the slate on our porches out front. Jenn and I hung out with Joshua and Sabrina (7 years old) and Kali and made sure everyone was happy, fed and entertained. It was a weekend full of activity and laughter. The fun was lessened for me mainly by the fact that Kali picked up some weird bug earlier in the week that decided to manifest itself on no other day that that of their arrival.

Friday afternoon she spiked her first fever and visibly wilted. I gave her medicine which took the fever down and she went to sleep without trouble around 9pm, only to wake soon after midnight crying and very hot. When I picked her up to take her to the potty she complained of her head. So a fever and a headache without many other presenting symptoms… We were concerned of course about one of the worst case scenarios (meningitis) so called our on-call doctor who recommended we take her in. So the 2^nd half of our night was spent in the ER. We got home around 5am tired but also relieved. We were impressed by all the nurses and doctors we came into contact with and were grateful for their thorough questioning and the time they took with us. We learned from friends later who work in the ER that there are some doctors who will go right away to do the most aggressive diagnostic testing (which in this case would have included a spinal tap). Instead Kali only had to endure giving a urine sample, a throat culture, and a suppository (to bring her fever down, since she had lost all of her stomach contents since we had left home including the oral fever reducer we tried to give her). She did quite well and we knew the medicine was working when she stopped cuddling and started jabbering about everything in the room.

She improved steadily over the next couple of days though she wilted more quickly and was completely worn out by evening trying to keep up with her big cousins. She did one face plant on the driveway when trying to keep up with their long legs tearing down the driveway to the mailbox, but that was the worst injury that occurred (for which we were very grateful).

Ethan and Jenn left Sunday afternoon and for the following four days Jason and I experienced being outnumbered by children in our household for the first time. We come away from that time very grateful for the quality time spent with one of our nephews and one of our nieces and for all the good memories created in our times together. I think we also realized a bit how our birth order in our families of origin may have contributed a bit to how we experienced the week. For Jason having more little ones running around with large amounts of energy to expend felt very natural (thanks Anna, Christie and Emily!). For me it was a bit more foreign being the baby in my family. Jason described it as energizing and exhausting. While I agree with that assessment I think he got a larger share of the energy and I the exhaustion. J I’m also a worrier and so Kali’s illness had me a bit more uptight than I would have otherwise been. And I’m sure the little one growing inside of me contributed some to my feeling of being drained of energy. I also tend to wake about every hour at night when I’m feeling responsible for other people.

Mealtimes were very entertaining for all. I have to admit that I think I would enjoy working in a restaurant. I like finding things that people enjoy and making them to order – which I did a fair amount of. And there was no lack of conversation around the dinner table J Joshua and Sabrina even discovered that their taste buds had grown up about a number of foods! Of course it didn’t hurt that all week our neighbor Charles continued to bless us with a bountiful amount of fresh fruits and veggies to enjoy. While we are enjoying some of the veggies from our garden, Charles has been keeping us very well stocked with string beans, cucumbers, yellow squash, tomatoes and recently cantaloupes that even Jason enjoyed!! As we got ready to leave this week he commented that he wasn’t sure what he’d do without us for a weekend. And Dad was probably right when he joked this morning that probably Charles will bring us a bunch of veggies upon our return because we let him take care of our chickens while we were gone. That is just how he is – one of the very most generous people I’ve ever met. I know he gets a kick out of Kali and enjoys having her around and us as neighbors – so maybe it is a win-win situation!

Joshua, Sabrina, Kali and I enjoyed making lots of gingerbread cookies on Wednesday which we consumed many of, but also took some to Charles and our other neighbors. Some of the other activities enjoyed during the week were: countless games of Mastermind, many Yahtzee games, playing with Kali’s toys and reading books together, stints outside swinging in the hammock and going for walks, doing some garden chores with Jason, picking and eating wineberries, collecting the eggs, an outing to the park, etc… By the end of each day, I think all of us had that good tired feeling and it didn’t take long for the little ones to fall asleep. Jason and I were both tired too but found ourselves staying up most nights for a good hour recounting the events of the day and laughing at the antics of the little ones under our care!

Well, I feel I could write on and on about the week but July has had other special moments. We also enjoyed an overnight visit from my nephew Jordon (10 years old). He was in VA for basketball camp at EMU being hosted mostly by Karen and Sue. However, they shared him for a evening/night with us!! He was so sweet with Kali and she was obviously thrilled to have him around. It was cute to see them play games together (despite the almost 7 year span in ages). She also seemed to want to imitate him – when he put crackers on his zucchini with cheese she soon was crumbling crackers on her cucumber salad J We also enjoyed picking some blueberries together and playing the Bean game as many times as Jordon could find time to squeeze a game in!

For those of you that haven’t gotten the most recent Drimpy update – we learned about 3 weeks ago that Kali will be joined by a little sister. All seems to be going well. Despite my not feeling as much movement as I would like, they struggled to get her feet still enough to get a picture of them for the ultrasound. She is on the tiny side right now but my uterus size is right on track and they aren’t concerned about her growth. She does have a small amount of urine retention in one of her kidneys which calls for a 3^rd trimester ultrasound to follow up on. While I would have hoped to have nothing that needed follow up the ultrasound technician was very reassuring in letting us know that she sees 3-4 babies a week with this and in most cases it is fine when they follow it up later on in the pregnancy. She also assured us that if you have to have something looked at a second time, have it be this. And my Mom’s saying of “there is no big loss without some small gain” applies in this situation since ultrasounds continue to fascinate me like nothing else and I’ve never had a 3^rd trimester ultrasound before…

So we are dreaming of another little girl in our home. On the way up to PA Jason and I were reading through a baby names book and still haven’t found much that we like more than the initial girl name we were working with. For now it looks like Nora Lynne is near the top of our list. We found one other one we really like in the book (Rhea or probably preferably spelled Ria). We are living with a few options, checking them out with Kali, and thankful we still have a few months left before needing to graduate officially from Drimpy.

There are a number of reasons we are glad to have a few months left. Probably at the top of the list is a still hopeful feeling that maybe, just maybe we can pull off getting the front room done. My projections would say it is unlikely, Jason’s optimism would say we can do it. I hope very much his optimism wins. We are trying to carve out as much time to free him up to work as we can, while also trying to continue to live and enjoy times together in the process. It is one reason weekends like this are good to be away from the project and have nothing to do other than to be together. I found I enjoyed the car ride north more than I normally do and it was partly just being in close proximity to each other (okay, it was also nice to have all 3 children in close proximity too with no possibility of running out of my sight before I could stop them).

Well, I am already on page three and my hands could keep flying over the keys. Life has felt full, tiring, exciting, bountiful, etc… I feel like sometimes it is hard for me to take it all in. I find that especially as I try to soak in the miracle of Kali’s almost 4 years of life with the miracle of the 5 month old little one growing inside of me. And I continue to wonder how our lives will be transformed by this new one in as many ways as Kali has transformed our lives and our home over the last 4 years. We will be celebrating her birthday in less than 3 weeks and a special part of that day will be that an incubator full of about 40 eggs in our home will have chicks hatching on that day! Samuel offered to let us keep the incubator at our home so that we could enjoy the process and since I have also never seen chicks hatch we quickly agreed. He brought it down Wednesday and told me to check my calendar for 3 weeks from that day to be sure we would be around. I couldn’t help feeling VERY excited to see that the day landed on a Wednesday when I don’t work AND on Kali’s 4^th birthday. So she’ll be sharing her birthday with lots of little fuzz balls!!

Enough rambling until next time, Janelle