No sleep

My children hate to sleep. 95% of the reason why I am so exhausted is that I haven't slept through the night in a very long time. The other 5% is that I am pregnant and breastfeeding. The number one thing I am nervous about with the new baby coming is my sleep.

Salem used to be a good sleeper. She seemed programmed to sleep a lot at night almost ever since she was born, and even better after she was a couple of months old. She wanted to sleep in until about 9 every morning. Unfortunately, Adora would wake up at about 7 and come into our room, and Salem would wake up. That wasn't that big of a deal in retrospect, at least compared to what we have gone through since then. The really big deal came when we moved. Being homeless for over three months, moving from place to place, sharing rooms with multiple people, etc. really killed her sleep habits. She started waking up several times at night and refusing to go back to sleep without being nursed. For the sake of the other people in the room, I had to give in and do that. Then, once we got to Minot, she just started waking up earlier and earlier. She now permanently shares a room with Salem. That's what living in an essentially 2-BR house will get you. It is impossible to sleep train her without waking up Adora. We have tried to put Adora in our room, but our walls are not insulated, we don't even have closet doors, and our room is RIGHT NEXT to Adora and Salem's. Salem now wakes up between 4:30 and 5:30 each morning and sometimes dozes for a little while before Adora wakes up around 6:30. Sometimes. We do keep wanting to try to sleep train again, putting Adora on the floor in our room for a week or so, but Salem has basically been sick and/or teething for the past 2 months, so we haven't even had a chance to do that.

Daylight savings time was a couple of days ago, right? I usually start prepping the kids about a week in advance to adjust to the time change. I will change their sleep times and mealtimes 10 minutes a day or so until they are more easily adjusted to the new time. It totally snuck up on me this time, though. I really thought it was the following weekend! So we had 0 days of prepping them to adjust to the new time. The silver lining in this was that we assumed that Salem would sleep 'til maybe 6:30 or so. She had been waking up at 5:30, so 6:30 seemed natural. Salem is apparently smarter than Daylight Savings, though. She had it all figured out. She woke up at 5:00 Sunday morning. That's right, 4:00 "real" time.

Thank goodness that I have a wonderful husband who, about 86% of the time, gets up with Salem when she wakes up in the morning, takes her to the couch to lay with her (because we have no other bed set up), and deals with her until Adora wakes up, sometimes even longer. Unfortunately, I still get woken up when she wakes up and sometimes can't go back to sleep because she is so noisy in the living room with him. Even when I can go back to sleep, I frequently wake up multiple times from her noises.

Tonight, she went to sleep at 7:10 and has woken up twice since then. It's 9:30. I had to put Adora to sleep in my bed because Salem was awake, and neither of them would've been able to go to sleep in the room together. Sometimes I feel like I am going to be one of those tortured people who dies from lack of sleep. What a horrible way to go.

5th tooth!

Salem got her 5th tooth today! Maybe that's why she woke up at 3:45 a. m. and didn't really want to go back to sleep. She has turned into such a poor sleeper. Sometimes, she will sleep through the night, but she will wake up very, very early. Think 4:15, for the day. She will be ready for a nap by 10:30, but I need a nap, too! So I have to put both girls down at the same time. So that is a struggle, since she will get very, very whiny.

I need to go wrap Adora's birthday presents!

Adora's names for the new baby

As I was putting Salem to bed tonight, Jake decided to type a list of Adora's name choices for the new baby. She sat and told him names and specified whether they were boy names, girl names, or neutral names. Here is her list:

BOY Names
Peanut
Shoop
Eich (this is pronounced "H", but she wouldn't allow it to be spelled that way)
Jay
Preston
Teeth
Towickio

Girl Names
Angel
Love Baby
Love Everyone
Olivia
Tastes like Chicken
Ice Cream
Peg
Sweet Baby

Neutral Names
Gabe
Epley
Twickly
Eeo

No Facebook

So, I gave up Facebook for Lent. Then I discovered I have to share my kids' cuteness somewhere. So I guess I should do it on the blog!

Adora wrote a prayer today. It goes something like this:

"Our Father,
Hail Mary,
Jesus loves me,
I love God.
I love Daddy."

It was really sweet. Salem still has only four teeth. She now has a black eye, too. She bumped her eyebrow into something in the kitchen, and it swelled up almost immediately.

I am pregnant! My official due date is 09/01/12, but I am estimating 09/10/12. Just because my babies like to come late.

We have been contacted by Lutheran Disaster Response. They are supposed to give us a list of the supplies we need to fix our house, then we buy the supplies, and then they fix it! That would be so awesome, and I hope it works out. We definitely need more room before this new baby comes.

Also, our house in WF almost sold, after almost 6 months on the market. The buyers backed out at the last minute. I guess you can do that almost scott-free in Texas. It was soooo disappointing. We are having another open house today, so we are praying for a miracle that someone will see it today and put an offer on it before our contract with our realtor expires toward the beginning of next month. If the contract expires, we are definitely not renewing it. We will either go with another realtor or put it up for lease or put it for sale or lease. If we do for sale or lease, then if it leases, we have to give the realtor $500, so that is one reason we may not do that.

Salem says thank you all the time now. She is much more polite than most kids even older than her. She also says "thank you" while signing please, to mean please. She says excuse me when she burps or passes gas.

Adora is getting harder and harder to handle. She whines nearly nonstop and throws huge fits when she doesn't get her way. I am going to talk to her pediatrician about it, but I doubt she will have any miracle cure. Her fourth birthday is coming up 03/01, and I am taking her on the train to Williston, ND, about two hours away (we will go 03/03, Saturday). We will sit in the observation car and go to the dining car for a snack (hopefully it will be open). Jake and Salem will meet us in Williston and take us to lunch, and then, hopefully, we will all go see The Lorax. I think she'll love this trip--I hope so. She is expecting a party, but we don't really know a lot of kids here, so we thought we'd do this Williston thing instead. She will have a ton of presents to open, so hopefully that will take the sting out of not having a party. I am also thinking of inviting a friend over to play and have cake and ice cream on her actual birthday.

Jacob and Adora are outside shoveling snow right now. We got our first big snowstorm of the winter last night. There are several inches of snow out there. Jake got the snowblower working, but he still has to do a lot of shoveling, too. After about an hour of whining, Adora finally got dressed to go outside, so she is out there helping him and playing in the snow. It looks really beautiful. The snow covers up all the lawns that are scraped bare from people gutting their houses after the flood.

Speaking of the flood, the valley is still somewhat of a disaster zone. Lots of people have FEMA trailers in their yards. They are living in them because their houses aren't liveable yet. They have started demolishing homes. They demolished one that is just one block away from us and one that backed up to the river. That's all I've noticed so far, but I don't have very good awareness of where all the houses used to be. There are flood lines and untouched homes everywhere as you get closer to the river. People are waiting to see if the government will buy their homes from them, and they don't want to put a lot of effort and money into fixing it up if it is going to get turned into a greenway. I don't blame them. There aren't enough contractors around to do the work anyway. We contacted a contractor almost two months ago to give us an estimate on our basement, and they still haven't gotten it to us.

I need to upload some pictures, so maybe next time I will have some of those to post.

Burp

Adora: An angel came to Mary, and he said, "Don't be afraid! You will have a son, and you will name him Jesus."
Melanie: How do you know that?
Adora: I heard it at church.
Melanie: At children's church? At I Am Special at Our Lady of Grace?
Adora: No, at St. John's. No one told it to me. Jesus just put it in my heart, and then I burped it up to my head, and then I burped it into the air.

Then, I asked her to repeat it, but I couldn't help laughing, so we had a giggle fit together. It was a sweet moment :)

Sweet girls

Adora nursing Rhea, one of her dolls. She had me help her get the Boppy just right and wanted the nursing cover, too.

Salem isn't upset because her face is so incredibly messy--it's because I wouldn't let her touch the camera with her incredibly messy hands.

Jake is gone again to Minot, and I am having a hard time getting to sleep. I thought I'd get a couple of pics of the girls up here for my two readers and then try going to sleep again. Salem is 9-months-old now and crawling everywhere. I have been reading Charlotte's Web to Adora, and she loves it. I can't believe she is already into stuff like that. Amazing. Well, off to bed (again)!

Salem's a crawler!

Our Minot house

Jake is on the way to Minot to check out our house. According to neighbor two doors down who works with our tenant, our house got about 3" of water on the main floor and the basement is most likely full. His basement is full, and he got a foot of water on the first floor. He also had to get rid of all the sheetrock, even upstairs. At least people are ripping stuff out and rebuilding instead of just demolishing their homes. I have no idea what something like this costs, but I am really thankful that Jake will be there tomorrow to get started on some of the work himself. One of our friends from church is going with him, so they will have a few days of working together before Paul flies out. I'm thankful that Jake doesn't have to do the first few days work by himself, and I pray that someone else will be able to help him after Paul leaves.

Jake left this morning--and Salem learned to clap and took one crawl step today. Isn't it crazy how that works? I got a video of the clapping that I'm going to try to post, but Blogger hasn't been letting me post videos lately. I don't know if they are too big or what.

Recent pics

Strawberry picking in Charlie, TX in early May. Wow, those carrots sure are good!

Aunt Kelsey lived with us for awhile, and she became really special to Salem, her godchild.

Seth outside the Hostetler home in Buffalo.

Adora likes to sit like this and play with Salem.

This is what May in Wyoming looks like. We are in a tent in pouring rain to "watch" a soccer game.

Adora had been whining while we were searching for family but calmed down once she got in the tent and had a brownie.

Salem snuggled with Nana to take a nap.

Back at the Hostetler house, Salem met her Grammy Grammy.

Daddy was teaching Salem to play soccer.

Silas's birthday party

Here is a picture from Silas (the kid in the front)'s birthday party yesterday. It was at a martial arts studio, and Adora had fun even though she didn't really know what was going on. She also came home with a sword. . . . Prior to this party, she didn't know what a sword was. I had fun explaining that one!