Ready for you!

Come on Baby Goose!  We're ready to meet you!!!  I'm sitting here on the couch, watching you move inside my belly like crazy and wondering when you're going to arrive.  Tomorrow is your due date (and Bepa's birthday).  It would mean a lot to me if you showed up right on time, but even if you don't I know your timing will be perfect.

Your room is all ready for you, which kind of makes me laugh because you will likely be sleeping in our room for the first 10-12 months of your life, but who knows, maybe you'll want your own space more than your brothers did and want to get settled in your little room sooner rather than later.  I can't wait to hold you and kiss you and love on you for the rest of your life.  See you soon, Little One!

Don't worry, we'll replace the pictures of Micah with precious little newborn pictures of you!  :)

 Soooo different than your brothers clothes! 

 We had to squeeze a twin bed in here for Daddy for the nights when all you want to do is stay awake with Mama and nurse.  Daddy needs to sleep a little bit so he can wake up with your brothers at 5:30 every morning and let us sleep in! 

We're ready Baby Goose!  Are you?!?!

Waiting

I've done a lot of waiting this year.  Waiting for good news.  Waiting for answered prayers.  Waiting for my belly to grow.  Waiting.  Trying to be patient and trusting.

I sat by my Dad's bedside as he slowly slipped from this world to the next.  For more than a week I watched, and I waited.  I waited for him to take his last breath.  Every moment wondering if this would be it.  Every night when I kissed him on the forehead and told him what an incredible Dad he was to me I wondered if I'd see him again.  Every night I fell asleep with my phone next to my bed, waiting for the dreaded phone call that was bound to come.  And then one night, about an hour after I had said yet another "final" goodbye to him, the phone did ring.  And it was it.  The waiting was over.  It had actually happened.  And I arrived at my parents' house just a couple minutes later and sat with him and loved him and cried.

And now I find myself waiting once again.  Though this time I'm not waiting for a final breath.  I'm waiting for a first breath.  A first cry.  I'm waiting for my heart to become whole instead of waiting for it to break.  

In just a few short days I'm going to give birth to our precious little girl.  Maybe on her due date, March 25th, which would have been my Dad's 59th birthday.  And when I'm in those horrible, painful moments of labor, I'm going to remember how brave my Dad was throughout his entire journey, but specifically during those final weeks.  I learned, as I held his hand, that dying isn't easy.  That it's physically exhausting and draining and challenging and heartbreaking and scary.  I learned that going from this life to the next takes courage and, if you believe in heaven and eternity with God, death is, in a way, being born into a new world.

I'm going to take what I learned from my Dad and tackle this labor with the same courage and strength that he showed me at the end of his life.  I dread labor.  I have had some pretty horrendous experiences in the past and I can already feel the pain of the back labor I've had with both of my previous births just thinking about it.  But I'm ready.  I'm ready for new life.  I'm ready for a little precious person to bring hope and joy and grace to our family.  I'm ready.  And so I will wait once again, but this time my heavy heart has been replaced with one of hope. 

Sugar Season

One thing we just love about March is that it is the season of sugaring.  Every spring we love to join our friends at Tucker Mountain Maple or our friend on Proctor's campus and help collect sap, watch the process of boiling it down and tasting the delicious, fresh maple syrup.  I love that our boys know where syrup comes from and that they are always so enthusiastic about this March ritual. 

My brother-in-law, Dave, flew back "home" from his 3-year home down in Durham, NC to help with the sugaring season and he was totally in his element!  We went to visit him a few days ago and checked out the operation and of course we had a blast.  We already have an entire gallon (yes, that is a lot of syrup) of this year's fresh maple syrup sitting on our counter waiting to be consumed by our little family in the coming months.  Yummy!

Here are some of my favorite pictures from the afternoon.  (Camden wanted to wear his "Sugar work pants" aka: Carhartt overalls - love him)!

Boston Adventure

We had such a great overnight trip to Boston over the weekend!  We got a great last-minute hotel deal and paid about 1/4 of the price for a room in the fancy Westin Waterfront hotel.  Scott and I are not city people at all.  We both grow up in rural areas and even though we went to college within a half an hour of downtown Boston, we rarely ventured into the city.  At one point in college we tried to have a hot date and go downtown.  We got all dressed up, and had a plan to find a restaurant in the North End like so many of our friends loved to do.  We got into the city, walked around aimlessly for a couple hours.  We found some restaurants, but they were either too expensive or busy and we ended up heading back to the North Shore and going out to eat at Sylvan Street Grill which is just a normal chain(ish) type of restaurant that we frequented.  Oh well.  Our best laid plans didn't quite turn out how we had hoped, but that was so typical of us.  We just weren't/aren't city people.  Needless to say, we don't make it to Boston very often, even though we're only about 90 minutes away, but we were feeling brave and spontaneous and wanting to do something fun with the boys before we turn into a family of five!  And so we got some advice from friends, made some tentative plans and took off.  Unfortunately, we had to delay our departure due to some serious snow, but we eventually made it.
The boys were very excited about our adventure!

 We pulled over for a little pit stop at Jordan's Furniture in Reading, MA for lunch at Fuddruckers, Richardson's ice cream, and letting the kids run around a bit.  They had a blast watching the acrobats, the light/fountain show and seeing all of the awesome things made out of jelly beans!  Definitely a great place to stop with kids (especially because you don't have to spend any money if you don't want to)!

  After getting settled into our hotel, and taking our first dip in the pool, we headed down the road to the Boston Children's Museum.  After doing a bit of research, I discovered that the museum admits people for $1 from 5:00-9:00pm on Friday nights.  This is a HUGE deal as it would have regularly cost us $56 to all go!  What a deal!  It was an awesome museum and the boys had an absolute blast!
In front of the museum... 

 Micah and Daddy making a movie!

 Shooting hoops...

 Micah LOVED this water table!

It's always interesting trying to get the boys to sleep in a hotel.  Micah cried, and kicked, and screamed for about an hour saying he wanted to go home and sleep in his own bed, but he finally settled down and since we didn't want to wake the boys up Scott and I ended up going to bed very early too.  We went for a swim bright and early in the morning...
Camden found some water wings and loved swimming on his own!  He hasn't quite mastered swimming yet, so this was really great practice for him.  

After packing up our room, we headed to the Museum of Science.  We have a reciprocal pass through the Children's Museum of New Hampshire that allows us to visit hundreds of other museums for free with our pass!  We realized just days before that our pass covers the Museum of Science so we got to go for free!  What an awesome place!  We all had a blast and were completely exhausted by the end of our adventure!

 The boys LOVED the dinosaur exhibit!

 We watched a little chick poking it's way out of it's shell.  Apparently it takes anywhere from 1-24 hours for a chick to fully hatch, so we didn't see the whole thing, but it was pretty amazing!

 Overall we had a wonderful time together as a family and were pretty proud of how much we squeezed in on a small budget! 

 I was TIRED from carrying this guy around the city along with Baby Goose!  We were all wiped out!

 Camden was too tired to smile...

We were all exhausted by noon and headed for home.  We had considered walking around Boston Common, but I'm not sure my legs could have done much more walking.  We'll come back in the summer to cover the things we missed on this trip!

Back at home we splashed around our little quiet dead end road and were once again reminded that this is where we belong.  The city is fun to visit, but this is home.